Jack Leustig Imaging
Tenacious grass, Rio Grande near Taos Junction - there has been too much brown in recent posts so here's a change
At the back of my mind when we were planning our return to the Taos area this summer was the presence of a master digital printer in Arroyo Seco. As it turned out, the house we rented is just three blocks from his worksop and gallery. Almost the first thing that I did when we arrived in town was to call in and see if it might be possible to get some advice on digital workflows and print preparation. To my surprise and great pleasure, Jack Leustig was more than willing and this morning he was kind enough to allow me to sit with him for an hour or more in what amounted to a one-on-one Photoshop master class.
A long time photographer and filmmaker himself, Jack has been using Photoshop since its first release and was developing images digitally many years before the term “Photoshopped” entered popular vocabulary as a verb. In the mid 90s he worked with and learned ink jet printing at Nash Editions, the pioneer of fine art ink jet printing founded by the musician Graham Nash. As soon as Epson released the Stylus Pro 9600 printer in 2002, making archival quality fine art printing truly economic and practical, Jack Leustig Imaging (JLI) was open for business.
I have long known that I have not been getting everything that I could from Photoshop. I had a workflow that was adequate for this web site and for a handful of 12×18 prints on my Epson Stylus Photo 2200 printer. But “adequate” is not “exceptional” and I want my prints to be exceptional. My Photoshop knowledge gained more in 10 minutes, watching over Jack Leustig’s shoulder as he worked an an image for another client, than it had in years. The longer session this morning added a whole new bag of tips and techniques. One lesson won’t turn me into a master printer but I am certain it will help to raise the level of my work; I am itching to get back to Austin and put it into practice.
Of course I won’t be buying a 44″ Epson 9900 for my personal use. When I need to print something larger than 13×19 you can be sure that I will be uploading the files that I have prepared to Jack Leustig Imaging for output on their suite of printers, safe in the knowledge that they won’t let me do something stupid and will be able fix my mistakes. If you need any kind of high quality fine art printing work done, I can heartily recommend JLI; I have seen their work up close.
A big thank you to Jack and Liz for their welcome, patience and instruction.
