Recently I purchased a new photo printer, an HP
photosmart 7550, and my kids have been having a great time printing out
photos they’ve taken with my digital camera. In fact, the kids have taken
my digital camera period :-). The software that came with the printer has a
feature that lets you select a photo and then generate a 4×6 print with one
mouse-click. Even my six-year-old can handle that. The software enlarges and
crops as needed in order to get a 4×6 image out of whatever photo was selected.
This is fine for my son, but my daughter is 13 and she wants a bit more creative
control over her prints, and that is what brings me to write this weblog entry.

I can’t for the life of me find any decent photo manipulation software that
makes it easy to generate a print from a digital photo. I’ve used Macromedia’s
Fireworks, the software that came with my camera, some software that came with
my scanner, some more software that was bundled with some Kodak photo paper,
and, of course, the software that came bundled with the printer I just bought.
All of these programs suffer from a fatal, in my opinion, flaw: they treat cropping
and zooming as two separate steps. What I want is a program that gives me the
functionality of a standard darkroom easel, something photographers have been
using for decades.

Think about how you approach the task of taking a photo in the first place.
You put the camera to your eye and look through the viewfinder. You probably
won’t like the first thing you see, so you pan the camera and zoom the lens
back and forth until you are happy with the image in the viewfinder; then you
press the button to capture the photo. You don’t treat panning and zooming as
two separate steps. Once you’re familiar with your camera, you’ll find yourself
panning and zooming in one fluid sequence. You hardly even think about it.

Generating a print represents the same exact problem as taking a picture in
the first place. Think about it! A print is nothing more than a photo of the
original image. In fact, this is literally true with film-based photography.
In a darkroom you put a negative in an enlarger and project the image onto an
enlarger table. You then take an easel representing the print size you want
and place that on the table. Some part of the total image will fall within the
easel, which is analogous to the viewfinder in your camera. You then raise and
lower the enlarger to zoom the image, and move the easel back and forth on the
table (panning), until you are happy with the image in the easel. And then you
make your print. It’s that simple.

If you don’t know what an enlarger easel looks like, you can see one at
the Pieces of Science page titled : Life
in the Dark Room. It’s a very informative page, actually. There’s a good
set of easel images about halfway down it.

With digital photography, we’ve separated the two closely related steps of
panning and zooming, and as a result what should be a fluid and intuitive process
becomes an error-prone, iterative pain-in-the-neck. The biggest problem I see
with cropping tools, at least on the software that I’ve used, is that they don’t
help you crop to a specific proportion. When making a 4×6 print, I need to crop
in such a way that the resulting width is 150% of the resulting height. No other
proportion matters, but I’ve yet to see a cropping tool that will let me constrain
the proportions of the result.

Here’s what I want: I want a zoom & crop tool that lets me pan and zoom
in one fluid sequence. I want to view my image through an easel on the screen,
and I want that easel to represent the proportions of my final print. Then I’d
like to use the mouse (or the arrow keys) to pan my image left, right, up, and
down behind the easel. At the same time, I’d like the scroll-wheel to enable
me to zoom the image in and out. Then, when I like what I see through the digital
easel, I want to hit a key and capture that image. Is that so hard?

Is there a decent software package that will do what I want? Why don’t other people have problems printing digital photos? Is there some aspect of digital photography that I’m missing? It sure seems to me like old ways are best.