Adam Monk is travelling, but never far from a computer keyboard - he's taken time from the journey to let us know a little about digital printing. He knows a lot more too, so when you get a chance to talk to him, or attend one of his classes or tours, you can be sure to advance your own printing/photographic skills.
Here's his words:
Seeing your hard won photographic images on a lovely bright computer screen is great, but there is nothing quite like a hard copy paper print of your masterpiece, it simply feels more substantial. If you have reached the point where you would like to see your images on paper then a little information to dispel the mystique of digital printing might help you on your way.
Basically the process is sending the digital file from camera to computer to printer, right? What’s so hard about that? Well, besides a couple of easily manageable technical points, nothing at all. Colour management is the key. Get the images to appear accurately on your computer monitor, understand a bit about basic print profiles and you are away.
Then the fun stuff begins. Watching your own images come out on some of the new range of
Epson or Canon digital desktop printers is a very satisfying and exciting experience. It feels like the cycle is complete, the vision is realised. But the best bit is the whole range of amazing paper options that open up to you once you start printing for yourself. The basic gloss, matt or pearl options are no longer the limit, if that was all that was available I don’t think it would be worth the effort. But once you get into the beautiful textured watercolored papers, or the gorgeous gloss baryta papers then the whole thing becomes outrageous fun. There are even handmade Japanese papers that range from thick card like weights to semi transparent rice paper with the texture of leaves and flowers embedded in the base. Imagine the possibilities for your images!
So how do you get to this fun part? Colour Management is the critical concept to grasp for first time digital printers, those printed colours just won’t come out the way they look on the monitor. Usually this is because the monitor isn’t showing the correct colours to begin with. The Monitor is always the first vital part of the colour management chain to get right, so you need to deal with that first. A great starting point is to buy yourself a colorimeter of some description, like a
Spyder or an X-Rite, load the software that comes with it onto your computer and profile the monitor you already have. That won’t produce perfect results, as most monitors (including laptops and iMacs) are limited in their profiling capabilities, but it will get you on track to seeing the real colours of your images. Later on if you find you enjoy it you may like to look at a
dedicated graphics monitor.
The other component to Colour Management to get right is to understand that every different paper you use in your printer has it’s own dedicated profile that you need to download from the manufacturer’s website, and then select each time you use that particular paper. The profile is a digital map that describes how that specific paper soaks up ink and reproduces colours. That way Photoshop or Lightroom (whichever you are printing from) can send the right signals to the printer to match the colours of your image as closely as possible.
Once you have a basic understanding of these two technical details you are away, the rest is fun and creativity.
https://www.adammonk.com/
