Long format printing with the Epson Driver
The Epson driver is capable of producing prints longer than the 90.5 inch limit you hit when printing from Photoshop. You can print hundreds of feet long, as long as you have Adobe InDesign and enough paper and ink. Here's how:

1. Make your picture in Photoshop. There is no longer a 30,000 pixel limit in CS2. Your image can even span multiple files. As you stitch from left to right, you can copy a small part of the last "frame" to the next file, and continue on from there. Use the Difference blending option to make sure the images are aligned. Your files don't even have to be the same resolution, but their dimensions need to match from file to file. If your photo is all in one file, cut it up into smaller "panels" of, say, 40 inch widths; they just have to be smaller than you printer's largest page size.

2. Mac users with Ultrachrome printers should add a new printer using the "Roll Paper - Banner No Margins" Page Setup option. When added correctly, your printer will be listed as something like "Stylus Photo 9600 - Roll Paper - Banner No Margins." Users of non-Ultrachrome Epson printers (like K3 ink printers) can skip this step, but will need to select the "Roll Paper - Banner No Margins" options under Page Setup prior to printing. Unfortunately, Epson is not consistent in how this banner option is selected across their different printers. Experiment as needed to find this feature for your printer. 

3. Make an InDesign document with page HEIGHT EXACTLY as big as your photoshop panels are WIDE, or 40 inches to continue with our example from #1 above. Make the page width the size of your paper, like 24 inches for an Epson 7600. Create as many pages as you need to print your panorama. Place one image or "panel" per page, and turn each -90 degrees (clockwise). Use the numbers to align each panel, with their edges touching the top and bottom edges of each page. Start with the LEFT EDGE of your panorama on Page 1, and work your way to the end.

4. When setting up to print, choose your "Roll Paper - Banner No Margins" Ultrachrome printer or your "Roll Paper - Banner No Margins" Page Setup for other printers. Configure the print dialog the way you normally would, but under the Roll Paper option, deselect "Auto Cut" and check "Save Paper" instead. This leaves absolutely no paper between one page and the next without cutting them. The printer hardware can still be set on Auto Cut, as it will be overridden by your software selection.

5. Be sure to deselect the "Collate" or "Reverse order" options, to ensure that the pages emerge in regular numerical order.

6. Make sure that you have PLENTY of ink and paper loaded.

Thanks to my good friend, photographer Ansen Seale www.ansenseale.com for this tip. He has an exhibition at the main Blue Star Arts space in San Antonio, TX, this month, with a 56-foot-long panoramic print made with this technique.

Thoughts and speculation on RAW development software

Aperture's smart workflow prompted Adobe to take the wraps off its redesigned-from-scratch RAW workflow software, called Lightroom. The Lightroom Mac beta (now version 2) is available as a free download from http://labs.macromedia.com/technologies/lightroom/  George Jardine at Adobe has a good Lightroom training video you can watch here: http://av.adobe.com/russellbrown/LightroomSM.mov

Lightroom looks great and harnesses the powerful and reliable Adobe Camera Raw engine for RAW development. It creates great contact sheets (finally, Adobe!) and does just about everything else you might want it to do. It's a little funny intermingling RAW files that have been used with Bridge/ACR, so professional users should be careful about adopting Lightroom before the final version is released. If Apple has accomplished something noteworthy with Aperture, it has been to motivate Adobe to release the right RAW workflow software, and Lightroom will fit the bill nicely in its finished form.  Right now, the Lightroom beta is available exclusively for Macintosh. Updates have been frequent and beta 2 now natively supports Mactel machines.

Capture One is looking more and more antiquated with time, and I think it's only a matter of time until it fades away. C1's main attraction is its excellent support for tethered shooting, which is sorely lacking from other applications. Adobe Bridge can be used in a make-shift tethered workflow (see the Tethered Shooting Tip below) with only some cameras, so many C1 users should hang on to C1 until Adobe adds robust tethered shooting capability. With a few small exceptions, Adobe's RAW development is superior to C1's.

DxO Optics Pro offers great moire and highlight handling and performs optical corrections, which are must-have features for many architectural shooters. Of course, DxO Optics Pro can be used on tone-mapped files (TIFF, JPG, etc.) as well as RAW files. There are many other programs that handle RAW workflows as well, though they have yet to prove themselves to be major contenders. 

I'm normally not one for speculation, and prefer to talk only about real solutions for hard-core professionals. But, the incredible instability of the RAW software market right now presents the need for an educated and unbiased analysis of the options. Photographers need to think near- and long-term about which solutions best fit their needs. 

In the near term, I think the answer for most is Adobe Bridge with ACR (or Capture One, for those with tethered workflows that demand it). In the long term, I suspect that Adobe Lightroom will become the major RAW workflow jaggernaught because it will offer the right features to a broader audience that trusts Adobe. Lightroom will probably ship with Creative Suite 3 around January 2007, and support Windows, PPC and Intel-based Macs. It will be fun to see if Apple listens to users and releases a much-improved Aperture 2.0 soon to compete with Lightroom. I absolutely love the *feel* of Aperture and suspect that it will overcome it's current shortcomings and become a savvy solution for a smaller percentage of the market.

Thoughts and speculation on Intel based Macs

It looks like dual booting both Windows and MacOS won't happen anytime soon but Microsoft will probably release a new version of Virtual PC that will allow a Mac user to run Windows within a window. I'd love to run both operating systems natively with no performance hit on the same box. In the meantime, VirtualPC does not run on Mactel machines under Rosetta at all.

The transition to Intel based Macs appears to be easier than expected with my clients. UB applications are being released daily and most apps do work under Rosetta. Those who are considering a new iMac should feel go ahead and do so as Photoshop runs on average the same as on a G5 and will get better when a UB version is released. Powerhungry Powerbook users dying for a faster laptop (like myself) might be disappointed with a similar performing MacBook Pro that could be obsolete by the time the UB version of the Creative Suite is available. Early 2007 will bring a Universal Binary CS3, larger laptop hard drives and 64-bit, dual core laptop Pentium M chips at greater speeds than today's 32-bit Yonah chips. These faster laptops might allow for greater than 2 gigs RAM, the return of Firewire 800 ports and could be out as early as this fall making that a great time to get a new laptop, if you can hold out till then. Even G5 towers will be replaced later this year when the new 64bit chips arrive and PowerPC macs will be history.

What's my advice? Those who absolutely need to buy a new iMac or Powerbook now should go ahead and do realizing that their applications won't run much faster (or at all) until universal binary versions of their applications are released. Power hungry Powerbook users might consider waiting until the Universal Binary Creative Suite 3 comes out early 2007 and get a more capable MacBook Pro then.

Expect 64-bit 3+GHz *quad core* desktop Intel chips in 2008. Dual, quad core towers? Yeah! So, this is a welcome change and will be an exciting few years... and even as Apple is touting dramatic new hardware improvements, you can still feel good about owning the G5 you just bought, because it's likely the best solution for you right now with the software you already own, and will work great for years to come.

For more information about Rosetta and Intel based macs visit http://www.macintouch.com/imacintel/review.html and http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/imac-coreduo.ars/4

Scott Martin
scott@on-sight.com
www.on-sight.com