Now that you have paint on your walls, it’s time to put down a third layer--in the form of dazzling art photography. Fine-art photo printing is within the reach of most consumer-grade inkjet photo printers, and it becomes absolutely spectacular when done by those printers’ professional-grade cousins.
The key to art photography is, of course, your photo’s contents. Your shot of the Brooklyn Bridge in twilight is artsy; the photo of cousin Jerry holding his Budweiser up to the camera is not. In a previous Maclife.com article, we delved into the secrets to great shooting and photo editing, but here we’ll focus on print media, which can unlock a photo’s final degree of finesse. For this article, I used Epson media, but Canon offers a comparable lineup in the prosumer desktop space.
Image A - Printed on canvas, this 3-foot giclée print of a Mark
Madeo photograph has tricked a lot of people into thinking it's a
photorealistic painting in the style of Richard Estes and Ralph Goings.
First off, throw glossy paper out the door. For most images, you’ll want to be printing on softer, nonreflective matte paper and even stretchable canvas. Lately, I’ve been using the Epson R2880 printer, which supports the full range of Epson’s fine art media in sheets up to 13 by 19 inches and rolls sized 13 inches by 20 feet. On the “low” end of Epson’s lineup, I like Ultra Premium Presentation Paper Matte and Watercolor Paper Radiant White. The first one is bright white with a flat matte finish, providing great highlight and shadow detail without any reflections. I love it for black-and-white prints produced in the R2880’s special Advanced B&W Photo mode. The second option (despite its name) isn’t quite as radiantly white, but it has a textured surface that imbues your photo with a more artistic, painterly appearance.
On the ultra high end, you can opt for Epson’s Velvet Fine Art Paper, which is 100 percent cotton rag, features a luxurious textured grain, and purports to offer the densest blacks of any cotton-based inkjet paper around. This is beautiful media, and I have found its blacks to be superior as advertised, so don’t hide it behind a piece of glass unless longevity is a big concern. Finally, you might consider Premium Canvas Matte, a polyester/cotton blend with a pronounced woven texture. Because it can be stretched on wooden frames and has exactly the same canvas grain you’d see on hand-brushed paintings, this material is ideal for not just photos but also giclée prints of digital illustrations and painting reproductions (“giclée” is just a fancy term for inkjet-based fine-art printing).
Image B - These three prints represent just a fraction of the wonderful (and insanely high-res) images I've downloaded from the Library of Congress. Once you start sifting through the archives, you won't be able to stop.
The R2880 supports Premium Canvas Matte, but with a maximum roll width of 13 inches, you can’t output anything of breathtaking size. You can, however, send your digital files to a production house that has one of Epson’s (or Canon’s) wide-format inkjet printers. The photo you see in Image A (a piece by Mac|Life staff photographer Mark Madeo) was printed on the Epson Stylus Pro 9880, which supports media of widths up to 44 inches. Mark’s photo is 36x24 inches wide, and a piece this size--printed and stretched on a wooden frame--would run you about $220. This isn’t inexpensive, but the results are spectacular and elevate your photography hobby--and home decor--to a new level. For more info on pricing and how to prepare your digital files, check out www.photoworkssf.com.
Image C - Unlike photographic images, vector-based art files are very, very small. The 54x36-inch print you see here was generated from a 1MB file--and could have been blown up to the size of a building if I had the printer to do that.
If 13x19-inch prints suit you fine, a printer like the Epson R2880 or Canon Pro9500 Mark II is all you need to create wall-ready, museum-quality artwork at home. There are various ways to mount and display your prints, but one of the easiest (and most durable) methods is to use preassembled, UV-protected glass frames. All the photos shown in Image B were downloaded from the Library of Congress website (see page 3) and mounted in Artcare “archival protection systems” (www.nielsen-bainbridge.com). These framing kits include 4-ply, precut beveled mats and UV-protected glass and come in a wide variety of sizes supporting print areas up to 10.5 by 13.5 inches. If you can’t find prefab frames in the right sizes or don’t want frames at all, you can mount your images on acid-free foam core with 3M Photo Mount spray, which is also acid free. Finish off these projects (especially canvas prints) with a protective spray like PremierArt Print Shield to protect against UV rays and scuffs.
Image D - For a thorough explanation of using Illustrator's Pen tool, go to Youtube.com/watch?v=5DzpT8POAME.
If you want to take your photography into another dimension entirely, you can use it as the source material for digital illustration. The Roy Lichtenstein–style pieces shown on page 32 and in Image C were created by tracing over photos of my living room using the Pen tool in Adobe Illustrator. After outlining all key elements using Bézier curves (Image D), finishing the drawing is a simple matter of filling objects with solid colors, slanted lines, and Ben-Day dots, which can be found in Illustrator’s Swatch library under Patterns > Basic Graphics. I went the pop art Lichtenstein route, but remember that any digital illustration can be printed on fine-art media, and vector-based line art reproduces particularly well. And if you use Premium Canvas Matte, you can even paint directly on top of your inkjet prints with acrylics to create a mixed-media masterpiece (Image E).
Image E - If you want to paint in colors yourself, make sure to use Canvas Matte, not Canvas Satin. (NOTE: That's Flo's hand--not Jon's!)
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