But if you were never into the hidden mysteries and aromas of the traditional photographer’s inner-
most sanctum, fair warning: Photo printers can easily make a trip to the photo counter at the drug
store seem like a privilege you will never again take for granted. The cruelest trick of the printer gods
is that after you spend so much time with Photoshop trying to correct a shot of your daughter to ban-
ish the blue cast that’s invaded her red hair, the picture churns out of your printer with the blue gone,
only to be replaced by green. The more minor mischiefs the gods rain on us include paper too thick
to feed through the printer, the need to keep track of eight or more ink cartridges, and the “Pyramid
Paradox.” The latter problem is this: Now that you have absolute control over every aspect of your
prints, from tone to gloss to saturation, you will never be satisfied—you will tweak endlessly until all
the discarded prints create a paper pyramid on the floor. A corollary of the Paradox is that after you
shoot 300 pictures at the family picnic, you spend so much time on retouching one shot you’re par-
ticularly fond of that you never get around to printing the other 299 despite the pleas of cousins and
sisters-in-law.
It’s such entanglements as these that have given hope to traditional photo processors, who are mak-
ing it as cheap and easy as possible for you to give them your digital pictures. For the serious
photographer who also is recruited regularly for his own family’s picnics and parties, the best set
up is a fast plug ’n’ printer for churning out copies of every picture for everyone, and on the side a
high-end, large format printer suitable for photographic masterpieces. After all, Ansel Adams was
happy with only 12 really good prints a year.
OVERVIEW^183