Printing & Copying

Hi everyone - I've begun my first few drafts for the project and so far it's been a difficult but very educational process.

For tree references I used a lot of banyan tree photos since they have a great viney texture. To impose it onto the model, courtesy of some tasteful porn site, I used layers and tuned down the opacity. Even though I spent a long time trying to figure out how to use masks, it turned down I didn't even need them. I also went to the Digital Output Centre for help with printing my proof - the lab tech being is indeed very knowledgeable. I will be going back, for sure.

After struggling with the texture I'm gonna have to work on lighting. Gah. So much work.

In other news, I fell off my bike yesterday. I was going down Broadway whilst trying to talk on my cellphone at the same time.

"Isn't that kind of dangerous?" asked the person I was talking to.

"Yeah," I said. "So if you hear a crash and it cuts off, that means I've fallen over."

And BAM. Within 5 seconds, I was sprawled on the sidewalk, and my cellphone was strewn in pieces next to me. This is a photo of the raw skin peeled off my left hand:

After realizing what had happened, the first thing I did was sit up and burst into laughter. I didn't really expect to fall off.

Some longish time ago, when I first started doing B&W printing via inkjet, I stumbled around trying to replicate the look of gelatin silver based B&W papers. The inkjet materials available then were nowhere as good as what's available now, and in frustration, I turned to matte surface papers - particularly to Epson Ultrasmooth. When I switched to an HP z3100, I switched papers again, to (primarily) Crane Museo Portfolio, which I still think is one of the most beautiful printing papers available.

At the time I switched to matte papers, I thought that because the current crop of glossy papers (things like Epson Premium Luster) were so nasty, and had such icky appearance, that it was the way to go. And, in the end, switching to matte papers freed me from a lot of misconceptions about printing. I wrote about that in an article on my static website titled (going off) The Silver Standard, in which I argued that matching silver prints was not the way to digital printing nirvana.

These past few weeks, I've been doing a lot of printing on Harman Gloss FB Al, and on Ilford Gold Fibre Silk, two beautiful papers of the new baryta surface sort. I've been doing quite a lot of print evaluations, and I've printed multiple variations of the same image on different papers and with different printers, so I've really gotten to know my test images (one of which is above).

As a result, I've become more and more impressed with those two particular papers. The surface finish of both is just incredibly good. The 'look' and 'feel' of the prints is excellent. I'm sure that in the future, there will be papers which are better, but let me tell you right now that any paper which beats these two is going to be so good you get short of breath and your heart races when you look at the prints.

Anyway, out of curiosity, I finally dug through the cabinet and pulled out a box of gelatin silver prints, and compared them head to head against the inkjet prints I've made over the past few weeks. I'm a big fan of the control you get with digital printing, and I pretty much expected that the digital prints would make the silver prints look sad and shabby. What I didn't expect, and what I found, is that the digital prints REALLY make the silver prints look sorry. I won't claim I was the best silver printer on the planet, but I did have some idea of what I was up to and what controls were available. I've written (and gotten published in magazines) articles on using VC papers. So I like to think that I have something of a clue.

And there's just no comparison. The digital prints win on expressiveness, they win on tonal range, they win on rendering of subtle tonal stuff. They win on overall appearance, they win on every metric you might apply. They're so much better than the gelatin silver prints (and than the inkjet prints I was making just a few years ago) that I think that in some way, all this adds up and they're different in kind, not just in quality.

It was not so very long ago that I got email from people telling me that I was delusional, that inkjet printing would never rival gelatin silver or platinum, that inkjet prints would always look 'fake', that inkjet prints were real but were instead 'fauxtographs'.

But inkjet printing was pretty good then, and it's come a long way since, and although all those criticisms linger on in the world of the internet, where they're destined to float around in the Google cache forever, I just don't think there's any longer even a comparison to be made.

Megapixels (million pixels) is the way people measure digital cameras' potential photo size. When choosing a digital camera, the key question is really how large do you want to be able to pint and still maintain quality. Since my company FinerWorks, focuses on large photo prints, we have a chart for our customers so they can see what their "new" digital camera is able to accomplish. The size (in inches) it shows is based upon the standard 3:2 aspect ratio which is the default dimensions of most digital photographs. This chart does not take into consideration any resizing you might do to a photograph once the image is taken and assumes you are taking your photo at its highest resolution. The great thing about digital cameras today is that you can usually make very big prints.

Note: As you can see, it is rare even for the highest end digital cameras to achieve the larger print size and still be rated in the excellent column. Do not worry since most photo enlargements, even from professionals that do such things as bridal portraits or prints for galleries, rarely are seen at the "Excellent" level. Most of your largest prints will tend to hover in the Fair to Good level unless you have a super expensive digital camera. To help with matters, when printing on canvas or the fine art paper, you have more room to work with since the textured surface of the media helps hide any deficiencies.

Making copies of images is sometimes a concern for artists or photographers wanting to display their work online. If you are one of these people, protecting your intellectual property rights is very important but do not let this fear prevent you from promoting your work on the Internet. The simple fact is the only way for you to get the exposure you want, is to be willing to show your work. I say this because there are literally artists and photographers that are so protective of their work they only reluctantly display their work.

People should not be afraid to do this. The images displayed on most web sites are too small and low a resolution to yield a decent print. Based upon this premise, most of the artists or photographers using our Members Gallery at FinerWorks dismiss the fear of people trying to make "bootleg" copies.

Sure, people can copy your work if they are determined to, resize in a program like Photoshop, and send it to a printer. The end results is a print will be very grainy or pixilated. If the intent is to sell the bootleg copy then to that person, I cynically say "good luck". If their intent is too savea pixelated image for just themselves, it just shows they do not have good taste.

As a web site consultant and someone that has helped photo studios build online proofing and ordering systems for their client's prints, I have researched a handful of technical safeguards that can be put in place. Some of them work okay for a person with little technical skills but none are totally without fault or are without a work around. Many times photographers are not as concerned because they know the images are not going to be good quality anyway if printed from the web page displaying them. If someone is determines to get the image then my previous comments of "good luck" and "they do not have good taste" still applies.

The bottom line is anyone can download any image off the internet, resize it and then order. The key is just make sure that if you have a web site and display your work, do not provide access to your high resolution copies.

With practical applications from political rallies to informational pamphlets, brochure printing can be a realistic idea for just about anyone. With a limitless range of possibilities, colors, styles, and ideas, an eye-catching and attractive brochure for your company will certainly increase your sales. From printing tri-fold brochures to pamphlets, you can make any sort of brochure you want.  Once captivated by the brochure, the target audience will listen to your information, thus giving you the chance to turn a few heads, maybe change a few opinions, draw a few new clients, or spread awareness of your products.

Hillview Printing are printers in San Jose CA and they are offer a variety of commercial printing services including 4 color brochure printing, bindery, apparel printing, printing party favors, invitations and announcements, flyer printing, envelope printing, copying services, graphic design services, postcard printing, and many others. Hillview Printing works with both offset printing and digital printing. You can place your printing order online, ask for an estimate, and the whole project will be done and delivered to you at the click of a mouse!

Possibilities to raise awareness for your cause or draw a newer, fresher client base, increase exponentially with a well-written and designed brochure. Brochures are a great way to gain exposure for a cause or business, while still remaining cost effective. Hillview Printing will be a one-stop answer to all your printing requirements. Contact them at 408-779-6960 or mail@hillviewprinting.com today!

One afternoon while doodling around with a wacom stylus tablet and my laptop I created this image. I saw a similar image in a old Bob Ross Book (you know, the white guy with the afro that painted "happy trees" on Saturdays on PBS). I saw this image in the book and tried to follow the same techniques, but with Corel Painter. For those of you who are artists and have not experienced Corel Painter, be careful, you might never go back to traditional paints again.

Ok, maybe it's not on the scale of the Punic wars. And God knows, I'm not Cato.

But my darkroom (built when I moved, at considerable expense) has been idle for a long time now. By 'long time', I mean a very very long time. And I simply cannot foresee a day when I might go back to doing traditional gelatin-silver darkroom printing.

From a usage point of view, the darkroom is already gone. Heck, half the space in there is being used to store bits of various decommissioned computers (all powered down and in kit form) and two Mac Minis currently acting as servers. Oh, and a bunch of uninterruptible power supply units.

And the reason is that over the past few weeks, I've been printing up a storm, and among other things I've made best effort toned B&W prints on the HP z3100 on matte surface papers like Crane Museo Portfolio, and on the current crop of baryta papers like Harman Gloss FB Al and Ilford Gold Fibre Silk. And, to be honest, the range and quality of the prints is better, by a considerable margin, than anything I got in the darkroom. I think that the baryta papers have finally closed the gap between gelatin silver prints (if your aim is the 'air dried glossy' look) and inkjet prints.

So, from a print quality point of view, there doesn't seem to be much reason to keep all that darkroom stuff hanging around.

Furthermore, although I recognize that there are a lot of photographers who would sooner gouge out their own eyes than work at a computer more than necessary, I'm not one of them. I'm having more fun than I ever had in the darkroom, and that's really saying something because I found working in the darkroom to be a lot of fun. I spent a lot of time in the darkroom. I remember, particularly, that November and December of 1996 were particularly dim and red, and there are quite a few other months which were very similar to those two.

So I think that means the darkroom is getting taken out of mothballs and parted out. Better to sell it all off, and get the money where I can use it and get the equipment where someone else can use it.

Brochures have become vital in today’s workplace, serving a wide variety of purposes. A brochure printing project is basically easy to create if you know what your needs are and the budget that you are working on. The layout should be such that all the elements should point to one significant item in your brochure – your message. Your brochure layout should allow your prospective clients to see and understand what you want to convey in your message.

Hillview Printing at Morgan Hill offer brochure printing services. They understand that you need to grab the attention of your target audience, and that you will get better response from color brochures where colors emphasize their message, as in the cases of flyer printing, postcard printing, and even business card printing projects. More and more business owners go for full color brochure printing as they are affordable and cost effective.

There are basically two choices for your brochure printing project – offset printing or digital printing (also known as laser printing). Hillview Printing will print whichever brochure you need, be it simple black and white brochure printing or an elaborate full color 100 lb gloss book brochure printing.  Hillview Printing is involved in printing projects for all sorts of advertising and marketing purposes, and offers you the luxury of sitting at your computer at home or at office and ordering the entire printing project online. Their Customer Service Center allows clients with 24-hour access to their services.

Anyone that has found the right market and knows how to market themselves can sell their prints for a fortune and even make some decent spending money if not a living off of their prints.

The key to easy print selling is to know your customer. If you know what sort of customer you are targeting and have studies their tastes, likes and dislikes then you have a better chance of getting them to purchase a print. One part of reality is that most buyers of prints are not collectors but consumers and even impulse buyers. Of course there are those that are collectors but usually those artists or photographers whose work is being collected have landed themselves in the status of “known”. If you are a relatively newcomer or not known then you have to follow some basic principles to get known and still sell your prints in the process of getting known.

Find a niche and perfect it. Stay away from the temptation to paint whatever floats your boat. Find a theme to your work and stay consistent with that theme. This does not mean one day you can’t paint portraits if you are spending time painting landscapes but consumers will more likely remember you and your work if it is focused on a particular type of theme which is consistent across your work. The same goes true with photographers. Ansel Adams work is known for its breathtaking landscapes in black and white. He likely photographed other things but it was the landscapes photos that really made him a household name.

If you work in abstract, remember that people will have a more difficult time grasping it. With that said there is a definite market but study how abstract is displayed. One thing with abstract is it usually is used by the consumer to color a room and take up empty wall space. Keep this in mind until you become known at which time your abstract will be collected. Also people looking to abstract art for collecting are going to want to buy and original versus a print so the prints, even if you are known may still only be used to cover up that wall.

One last thing I probably should mention. If your prints look bad, like the image files were not first processed well (too low a resolution and poor color saturation), take a course or read up about Photoshop and how to work with digital images. Because the last part of this is to make sure that when you have prints created you are having them made from high quality digital files. The systems that print digital files are not very smart and will only do what you tell them so make sure you alleviate as much guesswork by the software by providing good quality files to print from. Otherwise the image which gets printed will reflect any poor processing efforts on your part. You do not have to get too hung up on precise color because unless you go through a much more advanced process than can be outlined in a few short sentences and as long as you are not selling an original with the print, the customer will not know if the shade of sky blue is one level lighter or darker. But if your image is reflecting a flash (called a hotspot) or looks too pixilated then that means it is time to go back and re-shoot and process the image file again.

Be an active participant in the theme you are trying to follow. It might be more difficult as an abstract type of artist but if you are a photographer or painting elements from your environment which is easy for the average consumer to comprehend, then consider following those particular niches and subjects in many ways. If possible, get to know key players, attend and participate in shows that might be oriented toward the subject. For instance, I know of one lady that paints people portraits but primarily focuses on poodles since she owns and loves poodles. I guess there is some sort of “poodle lovers’ society” or something which she belongs to because she usually has a ton of prints made to sell at the meetings and shows.

Finally, unless you are a known artist, try not to sell at high-end prices to low-end consumers. This goes back to my first point about knowing your target customer. But keep in mind you may find it difficult to find the buyer with the disposable income therefore getting those buyers is more difficult at first. Most of those buyers are probably going to be purchasing from a gallery anyway versus online so keep this possibility in the back of your mind when you are trying to set your prices. Also see my article on getting your work in galleries for more information on this topic.

These are just a few tips to keep in the back of your mind when trying to create prints that sell. It may not happen overnight but with some good solid marketing of yourself and your work, you should find it start to pay off.