Photo Printing
The printers used for giclee printing may also be used
to print photographs from digital cameras or, if the
image is treated like an artists picture and put through
the setup
process.
If the image is in the form of a slide J Framing and Pictures has the facility to scan them at extremely high resolution as part of the setup process.
The printing software is extremely powerful when increasing the size of the image and remarkably small images may be printed
Printing On Fine Art Paper
Many of the fine art papers may be used for printing photographs. This gives the possibility of printing to width of 44" wide in fact J Framing and Pictures have printed images up to 66" x 44" onto papers of this type.
Printing On Photographic Paper
Photographic papers require a different black ink therefore J Framing and Pictures have dedicated an Epson 7600 printer specifically for this purpose.
With a 24" printing width images up to A1 may be printed.
A range of specific photographic papers are available.
Printing On Canvas
A popular medium for photographic prints is an
artist canvas.
The image is printed onto a canvas and then stretched over a wooden frame in the same way that artists have done for many years. The stretched canvas may then be fitted into a frame or hung on its own.
When hung without a frame it is usual to wrap the image
around the sides of the wooden frame to create a mock 3D
effect. Because the image loss not all images are
suitable for this technique in which case a coloured
border is printed around the image and this border
appears down the sides of the frame. The colour is
chosen from the image.
The wooden frames are supplied in several depths - 20 mm (minimum), 25mm 30mm and 44mm. The deeper the frame the more image is required to wrap down the sides.
Image File Types
A number of file formats may be used to supply photographs for printing.
The best is the TIFF (file extension .tiff) as that contains colour profile information which may be different from the standard. The compression types available with the TIFF file are also lossless so that the images are of the best quality.
The JPEG (file extension .jpg) is a popular format as it is frequently used for internet images. This is not so good as, particularly at high compression ratios, image information is lost. Repeated loading, modifying and saving of JPEG images gradually reduces image quality to the point where the degradation is noticeable.
Other formats such as bitmap (.bmp) and RAW (.raw) can also be handled.