You all know the joke about the job not being finished until the paper work is completed. Laugh it up, but then go back to your desk and start making an Excel spreadsheet of 500 items. We need it in half an hour...
Okay, wake up. That was just a bad toasted cheese dream. If you are a photographer you can take some comfort in the fact that printing your images is a lot simpler and easier than accountancy. But you are still going to have to get comfortable with numbers. Your computer, monitor, and printer are going to have to be on the same page as each other to take what you think you see on the screen to what you think you see on paper. If there are other people involved in the process - workers, clients, family experts - you'll have to calibrate them, too.
Near the end of the technical and artistic process you'll have to decide what paper to use for your prints. a number of choices will present themselves:
a. Do you shop at a proper photographic store with organised shelves of printing paper or a chain warehouse with a random rack of mixed papers - mixed in size, texture, weight, etc. Depends on whether you also want to buy an office chair and a big bag of caramels at the same place, doesn't it...
b. Do want big boxes of little paper or little boxes of big paper? Sometimes you can get by with the former and sometimes you need to steel yourself and pay for the later. It'll teach you to respect your choices.
c. Is your image one that looks good on paper that is infinitely smooth or infinitely rough? Because the range of textures and reflectivity can range almost from glass to gravel. Some images with precise small detail can never look good on anything but the smoothest surface. Vice versa for the roughest sketches and abstracts. You have to decide the point of the spectrum that suits your pictures.
d. Is the size you want to print good for the image? You can make things too big - compelling the viewer to stand so far back that they leave the room. You can print too small and lose all the effort you put into the file.
You can also do this with your mountings and matte boards - I saw an exhibition of an extremely famous photographer in Melbourne one year and ooh'ed and ahh'ed the big prints until I came to a 6 x 9 contact print of a locomotive matted on a 24" x 36" board and then framed. The entire experience collapsed into that one piece of silliness and unfortunately that's all I remember from that exhibition.
Okay. Decided how to go? Go look at the Hahnemühle catalog and website and be prepared to start over again. I just did and counted 38 separate papers with different surface treatments or structures. And that is not sorting into the different sizes in which these papers may be supplied. As I wrote - a full spectrum upon which to place yourself.
The best thing you can do is actually read what they have to say about their papers. That and advice from professional printers - sometimes they can be quite forthcoming if your work is not going to be a rival to theirs. Most pro printers have made the same mistakes that you can make, but if they've made them before you and are willing to warn you, take their advice.
Of course we get back to those numbers. You need to tell the printer you use the characteristics of the paper it will encounter. This is the function of the profiles - and Hahnemühle play the game straight like all the other good paper makers and provide the correct profiles for you.
On the occasions I have used their products - both sample packs and full boxes of art paper - they have done what it says on the tin. Sometimes you can print something that is so nice you really don't want to let it go out of your own hands. Clients and critics may not appreciate how good it can be.
But Hahnemühle does.
