Printing and mounting followup

As I mentioned on the FACzen Image blog, I have some more research information and I've received some sample prints on 3 different media. Here's an update.

Watercolour Paper

I ordered a 12 x 18 inch watercolour print from Posterjack of this image:

The Trent-Severn waterway, with Balsam Lake in the background.  

It is outstanding. When I pick it up, it feels like something you would find in a museum. The matte finish and smooth tonality give an entirely professional feel to the image and I would have no hesitation about asking $200 for this unframed, unmatted print. It is archival quality, with 100-year inks, and the finish is unblemished. Of course it is printed without the watermark in the corner.

If you are reading this here and want a print, contact me and we'll talk. The price is negotiable for my readers.

Acrylic Mount

This medium is also outstanding. I made a 12 x 36" pano of my bicycle shot, and here's an iPhone picture of the print, together with a slightly smaller lustre-finish print that I'll talk about below.

Bicycles for Rent, the Old Brickworks in Toronto. The bottom print is acrylic, the top one lustre-finish 

When I first ripped open the shipping box with the acrylic print in it, I was initially dumbfounded.  It was blue. You couldn't see the image unless you held it up to the light. I thought for a second that I had made a huge error! Then I realized that it had a protective coating on it! I peeled it off and saw the print underneath!

My initial reaction was a little disappointed. I expected it to glow radioactively. It doesn't: until you shine a spotlight on it! The brighter the light, the more it jumps out at you! But it's interesting that it doesn't look very much different than the regular lustre-paper print above it. In the iPhone picture, I had two spotlights from my ceiling track lighting pointing at them from about 10' away. They are standard 50w halogen spots, and because they were off to the left, the lighting was stronger on that side of the image.

I realize now that acrylic is a wonderful mounting medium. The ones from Posterjack come with four brushed aluminium standoff posts and hardware, and the image is pre-drilled to accept them. It will hang on the wall with a gap of about 1/2", perfect for a 3-dimensional look. It's a different, and entirely professional alternative to matting and framing a print behind glass. The manufacturing cost of a frame, especially in a custom size, would be at least as much as the cost of the acrylic print.

This print is available for purchase. It is $300 for my readers and will be listed for sale at the Haliburton Home and Cottage Show for $450. Contact me if you're interested.

Lustre-Finish Giclée Print

The word "Giclée" is a fancy term for "ink-jet". It implies that it's a better quality than your average desktop inkjet printer, and I would only use it to describe prints done on quality paper, with multiple pigment-based inks. The one in the picture above was done on Jim's Epson 7900 printer, on Epson Premium Lustre 260 paper. The paper comes from a 24" wide roll, and the print is just short of that width, so it's practically an 8" x 24" image.

Now Jim is a master at printing. If I hadn't already given Ron the nickname "Yoda", I'd give it to Jim. He walked me through every step of preparing that image for print and didn't miss a trick. I'll be doing many more prints with him, and hopefully I have learned enough to prepare my images for him, but I know he'll tweak them anyway. For I am but a grasshopper...

But I digress. This print is almost indistinguishable from the acrylic one. In fact it seems to have richer blacks but that could be the lighting. It is crisp and brilliant and would be a $150 image if I put it up for sale (let's talk...). Certainly it's worthy of display and I would be framing it if I didn't have the acrylic one.

All three of these are viable, exhibition and art-print quality media. You can't do the acrylic version on a home or small shop printer, it needs huge equipment to produce it. The watercolour and the lustre-finish papers can be run with Epson machines. I might be interested in doing some printing myself: Jim made me understand that the Epson 4900 is the better machine to buy than the 3800 but I probably can't afford one right now. If someone has either of those for sale in good shape, I'd be interested. Please contact me.

In the meantime, I have a lot of work ahead of me to prepare images for the Haliburton Show. I'll be doing some canvas as well, and some smaller card-sized pictures.

More to come when I learn more!

— 30 —

Printing and Mounting options

This blog post is about exploring some print media and mounting options. It's preliminary; the thought process I'm going through right now in anticipation of doing some exhibition quality printing.

This is an open-ended post. I'm continuing to research the topic and I'd value input, either by email directly or by comment to this post. I am giving some thought to starting to do my own printing, but I'm not there yet (if anyone has a 13x19 printer that uses pigment inks like the Epson 3800 that they want to get rid of, let's talk!).

I don't presently do my own printing. I never have, in 50 years, except for black and white way back when. Not that I wasn't interested, it was just that I didn't have the expertise or flair for it back then, and it was important to "do it right" or not at all. I used to go out to photo labs in Montreal (the names escape me), but in the digital era I've done a few prints at MPix and Bay Photo, but not much else.

Yes, I've used Costco for some run-of-the-mill lower end stuff and will continue to do so when quality isn't a high priority (and cost is!). Lately a friend has offered to print for me (not sure if he wants his name out there so I won't publish it). He has a large scale Epson printer, TONS of expertise and great attention to detail. He told me he needs to keep his printer busy or the ink dries out.

That said, I am now at a stage where I want to have some high quality prints, both for my own display and for art images for sale. So I've been looking into some options. I've discovered that there are quite a number of national and international sources of quality printing but they're not cheap. There's also mounting considerations.

I want to comment of a few of the options.

Metallic Prints

There seems to be two schools: printing on "metallic looking paper" and printing on metal itself.

I saw some real metal prints at a gallery in the distillery district a couple of weeks ago. Also at the Artist's Project show. Rosa loved them, I didn't particularly. There are no whites: white is replaced by the colour of the substrate. Just not my cuppa tea. There are shops around who will print on metal, including PosterJack in Toronto.

This is the kind of image that I think might work well on metal.  

I had one print made on metallic paper at Bay Photo (this is the outfit in San Francisco, I ordered it through Smugmug). I ordered their "Thin Wrap". The print I got was quite good, The only thing I didn't like was the way the edges didn't wrap really tightly around the backing so it doesn't appear perfectly flat.

This is the actual print I had made on metallic paper and thin wrap mounted. It's hanging in my bathroom so it gets all kinds of moisture issues but hasn't degraded at all, as far as I can tell. I made a mistake on the actual print, I didn't allow enough room at the bottom for the wrap so the cropping isn't correct.

Acrylic Mount

The acrylics are astounding. When I first saw one, I think at the One-of-a-Kind show last fall, at first I thought I was looking at a backlit transparency. Blew my mind. Investigating further, I discovered there are a few places that do that, but it's not cheap. There are a couple of different processes out there. Colourgenics does an "acrylic face mount" where the actual print is sandwiched between two sheets of acrylic. It's very expensive: just the mounting for a 360 square inch image was quoted at $300.

Posterjack quotes somewhat less, but they say that they print directly on the back of an acrylic sheet. I'm planning to run a test with them, with this image:

The original file is 4100 pixels wide, I've upsized it to 5400 pixels and plan to print a 12x36 pano.  

The best images for acrylic mounting are highly saturated or brilliantly coloured ones, the kind of thing you would print on ultraglossy paper.

Canvas Wrap

A lot of places — including Costco — do canvas wraps. I don't know enough yet to know the difference. I am planning to do the following image, but I think my friend is going to produce it for me:

It's one image, cut into 3 pieces, a "Triptych". Each piece will be 9" x 18", with the edges mirrored. This original picture was taken quite some time ago, the first week after I got my D300. I used Photoshop CS6 to do the "oil painting" effect. 

Another picture I'm considering for canvas is the following:

Again it's a Photoshop oil painting. The difficulty here is that it was drastically cropped from a D600 image and it's only about 1600 px wide. I think I can take it to a 12x18 because the oil painting effect will negate any pixillation or artifacts, but we'll have to see.

Watercolour Paper

there are inkjet papers out there called "watercolour papers". Again, I first saw this at the Artist's Project show. The matte finish, subtle toning and wide dynamic range makes it ideal for pastel images. It is museum quality and availabe quite heavyweight.

Some candidates for watercolour paper printing:

The primary manufacturer seems to be Hahnemuhle. I saw samples at Colourgenics. It's spectacular for pastels, and has a phenomenal matte finish. I'm not sure where to buy it (I can't find the right one directly at Hahnemuhle, but Vistek lists a 50-sheet package (13x19) for $285) but if I were printing myself (and the thought is percolating in my mind), this would likely be my go-to paper.

Mounting

As mentioned above, any prints that I have mounted now were bought that way or sent out. I do have a handheld mat cutter that has not been out of the box yet, and some sheets of mat paper and some 18x24" frames. I'd like to be able to mount prints on foam core if I can find an easy way to do so. I have the space to work in, but no equipment. Again, I'm open for suggestion.

By the way, if you are interested in purchasing any of the above images, please contact me! Until I'm fully established in the printing game, expect introductory pricing. Now is the time!