Ceenoa

So, I’ve been pondering buying a new camera for many months now, I had even selected the one that I was most interested in via online research, visited to look at it 3 or 4 times in a real shop, but never actually committed to buying it.  That all changed last week.

Last week I started thinking about another idea I have had for a while, maybe adding some prints to my Etsy Shop, but again I hadn’t done anything.  Anyway, the result of this thinking was that I thought I should print some photos out to see what they looked like – and that was not a reassuring thing!  They looked nothing like they did on the screen!

Now, being a little pixel savvy, I knew that I had to have the same colour profiles for my Monitor and Printer (ICC Profiles) so I determined that, yes, they matched.  Still, not good printing when they came out of the printer, so deep clean the nozzles, check the alignment etc, etc.  That got rid of some issues, but still, the colours were not at all like my screen, just very washed out versions.  Perhaps it is because I broke the Golden Rule and used “generic inks” – however, I was forced to do so as the shops just don’t seem to stock my printer cartridge type anymore (who knew it was that old – seems like I only bought it yesterday)!

This made me think I needed a new printer, and preferably one that can print up to A3, in case I want to do some that size.  Lots of research later, I decided on my preference (a major brand – in fact the same brand that I already own) and went off to see if I could buy it in town.  Nope, nope, nope!

While I was in town not buying a printer, I took the chance to print some test photos at the local Print centre ( I was surprised how cheap it was to print, only 35c for 4 photos), and whilst initially they looked good at the printers, once I got home and compared them to my originals I could see that they were way over-saturated with colour, and of a slightly different hue. (Now of course, looking at them on the screen here, they look better than in reality -e.g.  the top left flower is bluer in print, and the bottom right daisy is greener in the light areas near the centre on the print.)  If only I could combine the two prints they might be “just right”.

The effect of not being able to buy the printer led me directly into the Camera store, where I made the on-the-spot decision to just get my procrastination out of the way and buy The Camera.  Now, it’s just learning a new camera again – and I have gotten interested in RAW, and my head is full of what to actually do about that, how to convert them to jpeg after you have made them look all pretty, and gosh, wasn’t it so much easier just to NOT print photos in the first place!

So, all up I am now wondering whether to persist in the whole idea.  I have ordered the printer online, so maybe I will wait till it arrives and see what it prints like.  I suppose that in the meantime I could try to explore the whole subject of RAW conversion without imploding my head.  Wish me luck.