Quote of the day: “When you hold your print, hopefully it will be an amazing feeling, and the hairs on the back of your neck will stand up, as mine usually do. Once the excitement has subsided, you’ll want to check that there is detail where you expect there to be, and the colours are accurate, looking similar to what you see on your screen.” — Martin Bailey, Making the Print: Printing Techniques for the Digital Photographer
Freshly printed 12×12 print
I love making photographs!
And I really, really love printing my photos, LARGE, on beautiful paper.
And I love it that my Etsy customers make it possible for me to do this and they even pay me to have all this fun!
Yesterday I had a message from a customer wondering whether I could create a set of either 12×12 or 11×14 prints she had selected from my Etsy shop and my online portfolio gallery.
Measuring and marking borders before trimming to final size
After a little bit of back and forth with proof sheets of the different crops, she decided on the square 12×12 inch prints.
I love the creative combination of photos she chose. One is from the Minnesota north woods, one from the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, one from a remnant of the Big Woods called Wolsfeld woods, and one is a photo I made on the Big Island of Hawaii.
I would have never picked this combo, because my preconceptions about the different photo shoots would have gotten in my way. But I love the colors and contrasts together and I’d love to see these prints matted, framed and hung together on the wall. Beautiful!
Trimmed 12×12 print
Here is a little primer on my printing process:
1. Turn down your monitor brightness to about 25% of the total brightness possible. Otherwise your prints will look too dark. Always sharpen prints for printing, even if they look tack sharp on your monitor. The ink spreads out on the paper (especially matte paper) so additional sharpness is needed.
2. If your final product is going to be a large print, try one or more test prints on smaller paper that uses the same color profile as your final print paper. I like to make my test prints, 8×10 prints on Epson Enhanced Matte Paper. For the final paper, I use Epson Velvet Fine Art Paper. You may need to adjust colors, lighten shadows, add contrast, etc. if your test print doesn’t look the way you want. I often end up printing 2-4 test prints before I am totally satisfied with the look of a print. Once I have a look I like, I place the photo in a production folder so that if someone else wants the same print, I can print the final without making test prints.
3. It’s nice to leave borders around the print to assist with framing. I have not yet started signing my prints on the front of the print. I sign on the back. But if you choose to sign on the front, and have the signature visible when the print is matted, be sure to include enough white space around the photo to account for this.
Signing the back of the print
4. Let the prints dry for several hours or overnight before packaging and handle them with thin white cotton gloves to avoid oils from your hands getting on the print.
Four prints ready to package and ship
There is something so satisfying in holding a photograph I made and printed. Every time I do so, it feels like a bit of magic just happened. If you are a photographer and you are not printing your work, find a way to print some, even if you cannot print it yourself. It’s magic holding that finished print in your hands and feeling in your heart, “I made this.”
If you want to learn more about printing, Martin Bailey has written a very good ebook on the process. It’s called Making the Print and it is available from Craft and Vision for only $5.
Once you have some experience printing you may want to read Fine Art Printing for Photographers by Uwe Steinmueller. This is an in-depth look at printing, color space, and more but I don’t recommend it until you’ve done a year or so of printing. The first time I checked this out of the library, it was over my head. I didn’t have the experience or sufficient background knowledge to understand it. I checked it out again recently and now the light bulbs are going off left and right—”Oh that’s why…” kind of light bulbs.
I’m guessing that for most of you printing your own photos doesn’t light you up like it lights me up. Great! Because we are all different and your something that lights you up is what makes you unique.
“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.”
— Martha Graham
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