Make Your Own Prints Part 2

So why are some digital photographers outsourcing their print making? At the professional level it isn't to save money. A high-end service bureau will be more expensive than the artist using their own equipment and purchasing their fine art papers in large rolls. Just how hard can it be to make a high quality digital print anyway? You just hit the print button in Photoshop or whatever photo management software you're using, right? Wrong. For those inexperienced with trying to make professional-grade digital prints I suggest the following experiments. Take any two dissimilar computers you have- this will probably be easiest with two laptops or a desktop and laptop. Open the exact same picture on each computer with their screens side by side. Compare the two pictures. How different are their colors? How about contrast? How about color saturation? Lightness/darkness? Are you surprised at the differences? If you have a desktop photo printer take any print you've made with it and hold it right beside the picture as it appears on your screen. Try this with a number of pictures of different subjects under different lighting conditions. What's happening?

Computers, monitors, printers, inks, and papers all have their own unique color handling behavior and none of them are as sophisticated as the human eye. Computers from different manufacturers have different color displaying abilities and the same is true for different monitors, printers etc. There is even variance within the same model of monitors from the same manufacturer. Digital cameras lie. Computers lie. Monitors lie. Printers and inks and papers lie. And by "lie" I mean they introduce distortions and deviations from the ideal print that portrays the original subject matter the way you want it to. Achieving mastery of digital printing means conducting a long, painful battle with technology. You have to learn the hardware and the software. You have to learn about papers and research the ones that perform best for your work. Then you have to get it all to work together to achieve the results you're seeking. Eventually you can get the better of the technology and make it do what you want it to do. Until then it's getting the better of you. It's hard to master it. It's frustrating. It takes time and experience and wasting a lot of paper and ink. And just about all naive users of digital printing don't understand this. But those starting at the professional level come into this awareness very quickly. And they are then faced with a choice- spending the time, effort, and money to master digital printing or pay someone else to do it for them. Digital print making at the professional level is hard- no question. But if a photographer takes their art seriously and really cares about their work they will learn what is required to do it right.

The photographers who come through my booth ask me how I make my prints. Non-photographers always want to know about Photoshop. Potential patrons of digital art should ask the artist how they make their prints- and what papers they use. After all the print is what the patron pays money for. This is ultimately a more meaningful question than asking the photographer whether they manipulate things in Photoshop and you will be the more sophisticated patron for asking it. This will give you a good feel for how seriously the artist takes their print-making without needing a lot of technical knowledge yourself. Cruise around an arts festival with that question and see how many photographers you spook.

I don't know what the future holds for the photographers who aren't making their own prints. I'm not sure if their work will ever be considered collectable or not. My guess is that time will sort out the wheat from the chaff.