First, something I’ve been thinking about lately, which I had designs to write an entire post about but that now strikes me as somewhat too unfinished a thought to deserve such treatment. It has to do with a growing trend among digital photographers that the quality of your work and of your prints can be judged if not exclusively at least primarily by some group of statistics.

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First of all art has never been judged based on numbers. The moment that art is judged not for its certain craft, its inspiration, content, execution, and the ways in which it moves you is when it ceases to be art and takes on a new life as the subject of technical research. I grant that technical research has made possible many of the great innovations in the craft of photography that have opened doors for artists and made possible wonderful works. Those works, however, were to be judged on their own merits, divorced from the particulars of their creation.

I see this jaded math-lust happen the most in the process of printing digital images. Not only do you have to be a board-certified chemist to understand what inks are actually made out of these days, but debates rage among the upper echelons of fine art print makers regarding whether 9^12 bits per million in 17.2 square decileters of molar protein creates a quantization effect of 9.8383-repeating magnitude using 4-picoliter ink spots on granite tile. Or some such nonsense.

As important as some measurements, such as resolution, may be in print making, the fact remains that very well printed photographs can still suck, and very poorly printed photographs can change your life. The trick is to understand all of this mumbo-jumbo only to the degree necessary to achieve the results that make you happy, that satisfy your needs as an artist.

That may have sounded like a bit of a rant…

Edit: Perhaps it wasn’t as much of a rant as I thought at first. Here is a really cool article by Mike Johnston at The Online Photographer about over-reliance on measurements when evaluating the performance (specifically) of equipment. He also goes on to criticize people who use charts and graphs to make meaningless, subjective data appear meaningful and objective. If only it wasn’t true! Good stuff, Mike.

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Ranting notwithstanding, it’s still true that I’m teaching a digital printing workshop in February. If you want to learn how to soft-proof, color manage, and output your own images at a high-end digital lab, this is your big chance. I’ll be teaching alongside Chris Blake, back at Calypso Imaging in Santa Cruz, CA; read about the workshop and sign up here. You will get to print proof images and then make final prints during the workshop, so everyone gets stuff to take home with them. It’s only $599; you won’t find a better deal than that anywhere.

There are some other exciting learning opportunities right around the corner, too, including our workshop in Cape Cod in September, a fall foliage workshop in cooperation with Dan Heller in Vermont in October, and then later on that same month, our City on the Hill Boston workshop. That should be enough to keep you busy before the holidays, right? It’s sure going to keep me busy, I can tell you that much.

Of course if you have any ideas for workshops, questions, comments, rude gestures… Leave a comment!

Whether you believe printing to be the absolute culmination of your photographic efforts or not, you will undoubtedly have an ongoing need to print your images nonetheless, whether it be for presentation; to give as gifts; to make cards, calendars, or other products; or to wallpaper your bathroom (snap a quick photo of that if you do!)

Here are some services that may come to your aid.

Pro Printing

When I print my images for serious presentation, to frame and hang in my own home, or to show elsewhere, I always turn to White House Custom Color. Their prices are competitive and their service is second-to-none. Once you’ve signed up for a free account, they will do two things:

1. They will send you samples of their papers and finishes (of which they have several traditional and a few eclectic choices), and
2. They will allow you to upload a few images to make free test prints, which they will send to you completely free of charge.

If there is anyone else out there who is more eager to have your business, I don’t know who they are. On top of all that, they also offer ICC color profiles to download so you can “soft proof” your images for their specific equipment, making it even easier to achieve the results you need.

Consumer Printing

If you are less concerned with quality and more concerned with value, there is a neat site that will allow you to compare price points and user reviews of more photo printing sites than you can shake a stick at (nearly 50 when I looked). It’s called printRates, and according to their site, they aim to let you:

Save money on digital photo printing by comparing digital photo printing prices and reading reviews. compare dozens of digital photo printing sites read and write reviews choose the right one for you.

Okay, so their grammar isn’t perfect… Nevertheless, chances are they have reviews of photo printing sites you’ve never heard of; who knows, you might find the diamond in the rough.

Though my question has little to do with your most recent article, I find that the expertise you’ve shared since I began following your site to be compelling and hope that you can provide me an answer that will serve my needs. I have seen many digital photos over the years, some pretty dismal and some pretty spectacular. My question was born out of seeing, for the first time, an exhibition comprised of 150 works by Ansel Adams, which were nearly all “Silver Gelatin” prints. My question is (setting aside for the moment the composition, line, form and majestic beauty of many of the locations) can any digital print be made in such a way that a knowledgeable observer would not be able to distinguish it from a print made using the silver gelatin method?

In the interest of full disclosure, I should probably mention that the comment was posted by my father, who, having a degree in fine art and a gallery of his own, takes a vested interest in some of the topics I discuss. That said, I thought it was a very relevant question and one that many of you might have thought about, too, so here’s what I think.

First, it would depend on how knowledgeable the viewer was and how close they could get to their subject. Second, there are many technologies available, so the short answer is “probably,” but the long answer is more interesting.

So-called “lightjet,” which combines a digital (laser-based) exposure of photographic paper with traditional (chemical) development methods, produces very fine results, especially of full-color images. Upon very close inspection, however, it would be clear that there are many colorful dots making up the print. Still, these prints have fantastic longevity, are often quite lustrous, and are available for a lot less money, comparatively, than other methods. An added benefit is the ability to print on any brand and type of photographic paper available to photographers, from Kodak Endura to Fuji Crystal Archive. There is a certain je ne sais quoi surrounding real photographic papers that may be the strongest argument for lightjet.

Inkjet prints boast a longevity nearly comparable to traditional development and are capable of a much broader range of color than lightjet. The highest-end inkjet printers now deliver between seven and twelve physical inks in picoliter droplets that mix on the paper to create a continuous tone image. The ink droplets are dispensed by a piezoelectric system and can be either dye-based or pigment-based, each having their own archival and color properties. Inkjet printers, however, are much more expensive to run than ordering your prints from a third-party photofinisher (who probably uses lightjet), and if you need the highest quality available, you will have to buy, configure, and operate the setup yourself, which is no small task!

Giclee (zhee-clay or gee-clay) has also held its own against the influx of lower-cost inkjet solutions, boasting the ability to print on materials such as canvas and at resolutions beyond what inkjet or lightjet typically can achieve. Giclee (sometimes called Iris printing because one of the original models was called Iris) is essentially a CMYK inkjet system, meaning that only cyan, magenta, yellow, and black inks are used, though I have heard of giclee printers that use six inks. The ink is fired from glass nozzles at one million droplets per second and each drop is electrically charged so it can be directed toward or away from the paper by electromagnetism. The paper itself is affixed to a drum that spins at about 180 inches per second. Giclee is probably one of the most mechanically impressive printing methods around.

Artists have chosen giclee for years because of its faithful color reproduction and ability to print on “artistic” substrates such as canvas. A single giclee print, however, can cost $50, $100, or $200 to produce, not including the calibration and other services required to achieve the results you need. Giclee is more favored by painters than photographers.

Four-color offset lithography, which is how all print publications are produced nowadays, is actually capable of near-giclee quality, however American print shops tend to be too traditionalist to adopt the color management methods necessary to produce fine art prints to an exacting standard. Bill Atkinson, a man absolutely fanatical about color accuracy, collaborated with a Japanese print shop to implement color management methodologies for their four-color presses. In return, they printed his book of rock photographs. That book may be the only example of accurate color reproduction through offset lithography on any American bookshelf. The difference between the capabilities of high-end offset lithography and giclee is entirely due to the willingness of the technical staff involved to use modern digital color management methods.

At the end of the day, can any of these digital solutions deliver a result as austere and striking as a pure black and white gelatin silver print? Probably not, but they can come very close. I am convinced that Ansel Adams himself would be a dedicated and outspoken advocate of digital photography and all of its methods were he still alive today.