Prints That Win: Prepare There’s Trouble

Award-winning master photographer Terry Blain was not always telling her story from behind the camera. She spent the past two decades traveling all over the country looking for interesting people to capture; however, in her early days as a model, she was the one who was captured on film. One day, after a particularly uninspired photo shoot, she realized that she would have set up the shots differently, had she been the one taking the pictures.

Utilizing her experiences on both sides of the camera, she has a self-awareness that helps her envision the best way to optimize the lighting, the setting and the model to strike the right tone and properly tell her story. “Putting the models at ease and making them comfortable is the best way for me to get the most flattering shot,” Blain says. “Often, I want to accentuate and flatter the highlights of the scene while downplaying the low-lights. I’m lucky enough to have experiences on both sides of the lens to help me clearly communicate this to my clients.”

Step 2 in Color Management: Printer and Media Color Gamut

In Step 1 of the color management to-do list we discussed how the quality of your monitor impacts the precision of your output. Step 2 of 3 focuses on understanding how your printer and the inkjet media choices affect color.

Print accuracy doesn’t rely solely on your use of a custom profile and an accurate monitor, though these two components guide you toward the closest possible result. There are two additional variables that can have a big impact on the types of colors you can hit with any printer…

The first is the gamut of the printer. How an ink is formulated in order to print a Coca-Cola red or a Pepsi blue, for example, may differ slightly from technology to technology.

These days I field a lot of questions about choosing between an 8-color system and a 12-color system.  Or, should I use the 9-color or the 11-color printer? Is there a noticeable difference between them?

The answer is yes, there is a noticeable difference any time you add colors. However, the next question I usually follow up with is, “What are you using the printer to print?”

When considering printing technology, there are printers made for higher-speed production (HP Z5200, Canon S Series, Epson T Series, to name a few) that can print a sellable photographic image, but would not be the ideal to use for an artist, photographer or fine art reproduction house. These printers have fewer inks, which cuts down on gamut but improves on speed in most cases.

If you’re in the market for a printer, talk to a LexJet customer specialist and explain the market you are in. We will make sure that you are using the right equipment for the job.

If you are seeing a color that is in your photograph or art piece that you just can’t nail with your printer, it may be out of gamut for the printer or out of gamut for the media you chose to print to.

If you’ve calibrated the monitor, make sure your printer is running at 100 percent capacity, that you’ve soft-proofed the image with the chosen rendering intent, and used a specific printer profile to print. If it still doesn’t portray what’s on your screen, then either of the above mentioned may be at fault.

Now I just spit out a bunch of jargon that may be foreign to you, so click on the links to the tutorials here to find out more…

Download and install ICC Profiles:

PC: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8W-F-k8z5io

MAC: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuOhztAqoyY

How to Softproof before Printing using Photoshop:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahf9yEPO4zA

How to print using ICC Profiles (find your printer and computer combination):

http://www.youtube.com/user/LexJet/search?query=Printing+Through

Color gamut difference between a gloss and matte photo paper.
Figure 1 shows the difference in gamut between a gloss and a matte paper in the high, mid and low range of color (top to bottom). The gloss paper is our Sunset Gloss Photo Paper (red line) and the matte our Premium Archival Matte Paper (green line) as profiled on the Canon IPF8400 with the X-Rite DTP70. Click on the image for a larger version.

You can’t do anything to increase the gamut of the printer, but you can make the right decision based on your needs at the time you purchase the equipment. Making sure you use the right equipment for the type of work you are doing will dramatically increase the quality of your print.

Our second extremely important variable to understand is the media with which you choose to print. The less reflective the media, the less light that reflects back into your eyes, and therefore, the lower the gamut and detail your print will realize (see Figure 1).

Artists have come to love matte watercolor papers and canvas, yet always demand the best color on those surfaces. This is where the owner or production manager at a fine art reproduction house runs into the biggest conflict.

The reflectivity of your media is not the only aspect of the printable supplies that affects color outcome.  White point can change your gamut as well. The brighter the white point, the more gamut you’ll pick up, not to mention an increase in that lovely term the experts like to use, Dmax, which is the darkest measurable value your printer-media combination can hit.

For canvas, Sunset Select Gloss Canvas has the highest dynamic range and color gamut of the canvas offerings LexJet produces. The highest-gamut matte canvas is our Sunset Select Matte Canvas, which has a very punchy white base. Partnering the Sunset Coating line with Sunset Select Matte Canvas has been a very popular choice amongst artists and photographers.

If you are trying to appease the artist crowd who prefer fine art papers, the highest-range matte paper is Sunset Fibre Matte (a very smooth bright-white fiber cellulose paper). If you need 100% cotton with a smooth finish, Sunset Hot Press Rag will be close behind.

If they would like texture on their cotton paper our latest addition to the line is Sunset Bright Velvet Rag.  This paper has the highest Dmax of our cotton line and prints very elegant-looking velvet-textured prints.

On the photographic side of media options, all of our bright white glossy and semi-glossy fibre-based papers put out a phenomenal range. They are all meant to emulate different versions of old-style air dried chemical bath papers that film photographers were used to exposing in the darkroom. These papers include Sunset Fibre Gloss, Sunset Fibre Elite and Sunset Fibre Satin.

Our newest paper in this category is Sunset Fibre Rag, which is 100% cotton and has a warm tone to the base. Even though it is warm in tone, the range is very large and the texture is very fitting to that style of paper.

For RC photo-based paper replicas, nothing tops the gamut of the Sunset Photo Gloss Paper. It reflects the most light, has a high-gloss wet-looking surface like one you would receive from a photo lab providing chemical-style glossy prints.

Also ever so popular for printers looking for a beautiful thick luster paper (e-surface) is our Sunset Photo eSatin Paper. This paper has a very cool white point and the surface is the most popular amongst the RC-emulating class of papers.

LexJet will provide you with the ICC profiles for every media above mentioned. If we do not list one here for your technology we will happily make one for you free of charge! Next time, we’ll tackle Step 3 in the color management to-do list: understanding ICC Profiles and settings. In the meantime, feel free to call us any time at 800-453-9538 with questions.

The Soles of Breckenridge Photography and Printing

Photography gallery with inkjet prints
The Gary Soles Gallery: Wilderness Exposed, in Breckenridge, Colo. The gallery obviously features Gary Soles' photography, but some of the work of renowned Colorado photographer John Fielder as well (one of Fielder's Colorado winter photos is shown here in the foreground, rendered in large format by Gary Soles on LexJet Sunset photo paper).

Sure, the title is a terrible pun, but in many respects it’s true. Gary Soles captures the soul of Breckenridge, Colo., and America’s West through amazing large-format photography displayed at his gallery: The Gary Soles Gallery, Wilderness Exposed. And, his soles took him from Wisconsin to Breckenridge as he exchanged his Midwestern footwear for (arguably) the best footwear of all: ski boots.

Resort community photographySoles admits to being a ski bum when he first moved to Breckenridge in the late ’70s, but something larger tugged at him as he plowed through the divine Colorado powder in those early years. Drawn to art in college, Soles found his way into photography by first working at a Breckenridge photo lab in the early ’80s, eventually owning it a few years later.

“In college I gravitated toward the art department; it was the only thing that really did it for me. I wouldn’t dare tell my dad that I wanted to be an art major, but it was that background that helped with color and composition in photography,” says Soles. “It was an almost brutally slow process, and in hindsight I wish I had gotten more formal training because it would have taken me to a higher level sooner. I tend to be so critical of my own work, which motivated me to get better because I would see everything that was wrong with my work, rather than what was right.”

Mountain and landscape photography and printingAs he developed his photography skills, photo technology was also developing, to use another bad pun. The unusual aspect of his business’s evolution was that he retained much of the earlier processes while moving to the latest processes, like large-format inkjet printing. His photography, meanwhile, evolved from mainly commercial photography for magazines, brochures and ads, plus studio work, to the Colorado and Western landscape photography for which he’s become well known.

“I still use all large-format film cameras for my original transparencies. Those are then drum scanned and printed with a large format inkjet printer. We’re still a full service lab, so we’re still doing C-41 and E-6 film processes. We still process black-and-white and have the old-school stuff, but at the same time we have digital imaging kiosks for customers who want to print from their digital cameras, and offer all the digital imaging, enlarging and custom framing for other photographers as well. We kept going with everything we’ve always done, but it also evolved into a place for my own work.”

Shooting landscapes and wildlifeHis own work, featuring the spectacular scenery of the Western states, needs the space necessary for equally spectacular prints that go up to 4′ x 12′. A small home on Breckenridge’s Main Street housed Sole’s operation for years, but as his photography went large, the historical barn built in the late 1800s attached to the home was remodeled to accommodate his gallery.

“I always enjoyed landscape and wildlife photography and the venue finally opened up to display this work; you need a lot of space to display the large images we’re producing,” says Soles.

Everything for the gallery is produced in-house, from the photography and film processing to the printing, mounting, laminating and chopping and joining the molding for the picture frames. Doing so, says Soles, has been a real boon to his business.

“Our costs are kept very low by doing everything here; the profit margins in the gallery are huge by keeping everything in-house. We’re able to control quality, minimize turnaround times and offer customers a lot of size and frame options,” explains Soles. “Customers can order anything from 4″ x 12″ to a 4′ x 12′ print and everything in between. I also do a lot of work consulting with people as far as measuring for wall space, frame options that would look great with both the image and their décor, and the installation. People really appreciate that personalized service. They can get a custom-fit piece for their home.”

Outdoor photography and inkjet printingLiving in a resort community also helps as customers come from far and wide and stop at his gallery on Main Street. The big, beautiful prints are hard to resist and Soles reports that he not only ships prints across the U.S., but worldwide, mainly to the UK, Australia and Europe, with a smattering of customers in South America and Canada.

“Even in a down economy, photography is still affordable if you compare it to an oil painting. Clients will often find a certain connection to a particular photographic piece: a place they have been or a season or moment they have experienced. They can get a good sized, framed panoramic piece for $2,000-$3,000, whereas something from a fine art gallery can cost $20,000-$30,000 for that same size. You get a lot of area covered with photography for a better price,” says Soles.

Outdoor and landscape photographyThough he’ll ship the print frame and all, and some just buy it off the wall and take it with them, most prints are rolled up for shipping. “What’s been great is shipping the un-framed print, which can be rolled and shipped very inexpensively. We looked at the way LexJet boxes its materials, and basically ship it out the same way. I guess you could say we snaked the idea from LexJet,” he says. “We’ve been batting a thousand since converting to that method. They can have their own framers do it when they get back to their hometown.”

Part of the appeal that drives sales, aside from the stunning images themselves, is in the materials he uses for printing. All of Soles’ printing is done on LexJet Sunset photo and fine art media: Sunset Photo eSatin Paper, Sunset Photo Gloss Paper, Sunset Photo Metallic Paper, Sunset Fibre Matte and Sunset Select Matte Canvas.

Soles adds that LexJet Elite Luster UV Vinyl Laminate (3.2 Mil) is used on almost 90 percent of the pieces in the gallery, providing a subtle boost that can turn someone who’s just looking into a sale.

Black and white photography and printing“The laminate is a huge selling point. They’re blown away with the luster UV laminate we use: there’s no glare or reflection from it and you really see the image. It’s optically clear and the colors in the image really come out through the laminate. In some ways it enhances the image,” explains Soles. “People are used to seeing glass or plexi over the images, and those will have some type of glare. And, with the six- and ten-footers we’re doing as panoramics, it keeps the piece relatively lightweight. There are a whole lot of people shooting digital and offering smaller prints, but I’m offering these giant panoramics, and they’re easier to deal with because they don’t have an extra 30 pounds or so of glass with all the potential problems you can have transporting, moving and installing the pieces.”

Soles adds that he’s also been using a gloss laminate over Sunset Photo Metallic, which he uses based on the image and where it will hang. “It’s just amazing because it’s almost three-dimensional; that combination looks so cool,” says Soles.

Printing the History of Golf from Scotland to the U.S.

Printing historical golf photography

Photography and the modern game of golf developed around the same time. Coincidence? Probably, but it was a fortuitous coincidence since we’ve been left with at least some photographic history of those early years.

Preserving and printing historical golf photography
From the Masterworks Golf Collection: Old Tom Morris and S. Muir Ferguson, St. Andrews, 1891.

It’s likely that the largest and highest-quality collection of early golf photography is in the hands of Howard Schickler of Sarasota, Fla., who has been slowly building the collection for the past ten years.

An avid golfer since he was a teenager in New York City and later a collector and exhibitor of historical fine art photography, the two avocations will culminate in the launch of a website dedicated to golf’s history and the sale of museum-quality prints. The website’s launch is set to coincide with the British Open in late July.

Currently, you can see part of the collection at www.masterworksofgolf.com. We’ll update you here at the LexJet Blog when the new site, which will have a slightly different URL, is up and running.

“I started buying historical golf photography with a museum curator’s eye of building a collection that was museum quality and meaningful. What I decided to do from the beginning was only collect photos related to the major champions of golf. I also added golf courses of extraordinary quality by great photographers,” says Schickler. “I’m always in pursuit of the very earliest pieces which date mostly from the 1850s, but they’re extremely difficult to find. I’m able to count on one hand how many photos I have from the 1850s.”

Prints of historical golf photographySchickler was recently invited to exhibit some of his collection at a festival at St. Andrews in Scotland, the birthplace of modern golf. He chose 13 images to print for the festival, which were exhibited in two different venues. Schickler brought 26 prints (13 for each venue) to the festival. The images were printed by Schickler and his son, who’s studying digital photography at the Ringling College of Art and Design, at 13″ x 19″ on LexJet Sunset Hot Press Rag on Schickler’s Canon iPF8300.

“We originally tried five different papers, all of which we had experience with before. We weren’t sure if we wanted to go with fine art paper, fiber paper or a matte or gloss finish, so we would take one image and print it on the five different papers,” explains Schickler. “We found we were getting the best results from Sunset Hot Press Rag and Sunset Fibre Matte. We chose Hot Press Rag as our main paper because it really brings out the details of the images and provides the same feel as if they were printed in the 19th Century.”

The goal of each print is to stay as true to the original image as possible. Very little is done to the images, other than cleaning up a blemish here and there.

Prints of historical golf photos
From the Masterworks Golf collection: Walter Hagen and Gene Sarazen at the US Open in 1922.

“For us, the important thing was to bring out the exact tones of the originals, which have some sort of sepia tone to various degrees,” says Schickler. “The new printers are great because they make it a lot easier to be faithful to the original tone of the image.”

Schickler left goodwill behind him after the event at St. Andrews, donating the prints to the festival organizers, all the while building relationships with venerable St. Andrews institutions, such as St. Andrews University, which houses more than 700,000 photographs in its library, many of which are from the early development of photography and modern golf.

The collection has been the proverbial (but literal) labor of love, and the website being developed right now will reflect that. In addition to an eCommerce component, which will feature a portfolio of about 60 historical images from a collection of over 1,000,  there will be blogs that focus on blending historical and contemporary golf (golf fashion then and now, golf courses then and now, and so forth), and a documentary video section.

“We plan to produce 18-24 video vignettes. Each one will tell the story of great golfer from the 1850s to the 1930s. Collectively, the videos will become an important documentary film on the history of golf, which has never been done before. And, we’ll go beyond Scottish golf to ladies golf in the UK and U.S., and American golf, which post-dates Scottish and UK golf by about 40 years,” explains Schickler. “We’re also planning to create an iPhone app that reproduces a historical golf timeline with content links to images and videos from our collection. I want the site to be an aggregation of interesting, high-quality, intellectually stimulating information about golf and its history.”

A Decorative Art Original: Soicher Marin

Soicher Marin, based in Sarasota, Fla., is the classic American success story. Ed Marin, who is the second-generation owner of Soicher Marin, has maintained the original vision, aesthetic and point of view of the company when it was conceived in the Los Angeles area in 1959 by Harry Soicher.

Inkjet printing decorative artworkEd’s father joined Soicher in 1960, coming to America from Argentina with $125 in his pocket he had borrowed to make his way in the land of opportunity.

Marin was a framer by trade, and the pair took their individual talents into the decorative art market, serving the interior design, home furnishings and home fashion trades. By 1972 Soicher Marin was national with showrooms in every major market. Harry Soicher passed away in 1974 and Ed Marin eventually took over operations in the early ‘90s.

“At that time a lot of us were showing up at trade shows with the same types of products, because the universe of printed art was supplied by a handful of people out of New York and London,” says Ed Marin. “My dad was buying antiques and other artwork that was in the public domain, or he would find an artist he wanted to publish, and we would go to offset printing and do limited runs. It was great because it gave us our own identity and point of view, and we were able to do things exclusive to us. The problem was that you had to be right all the time; if you made a mistake you were sitting on a lot of wasted paper, so we were very cautious about the images we put out and how we put them out.”

Art reproductions for home furnishing and decorWhen inkjet printing became a viable method of art reproduction, Soicher Marin outsourced it at first, but when it became more affordable to purchase the equipment it was brought in-house with an Epson printer and an Onyx RIP.

“We were 100 percent exclusive with our art within a year; we didn’t have anything we were buying from anyone else. We were and are very much a content-driven company and it’s been allowed to happen because of this breakthrough in technology,” says Marin.

All of Soicher Marin’s artwork is produced in-house. Marin acts as the “chief art director,” as he puts it, to ensure that a consistent look is achieved. The Soicher Marin “look” is drawn from both natural history and contemporary art. Either way, it has what Marin calls “a historical perspective” unique to Soicher Marin, which you can see in the accompanying photos.

“If we have a point of view in the industry it’s driven by the aesthetic I want to put out in the market. I have catalogs from our company that date back to the mid-‘60s and ‘70s. Obviously, the artwork and colors are different, but the aesthetic and point of view is not. There’s a common thread that runs through the product line. It’s not a conscious effort; it’s just how we think and the people who come to work here and have become involved in our design process come to see it that way as well.”

The Soicher Marin aesthetic is not forced; rather, it’s a natural extension of a corporate culture that encourages creativity, independence, leadership and customer service. Moreover, the emphasis is on the art, not the technology used to create or reproduce it.

Producing decorative artwork in-house“We don’t over-embellish, over-layer or over-digitize the artwork. We let great art speak for itself. Our biggest responsibility is to reproduce it with the highest fidelity. And the same goes for our framing; we’re very careful about the materials we pick and how we treat the art. We have a less-is-more approach to our design,” says Marin. “Although we have densitometers and other devices that help us reach the optimal, our employees have it down to an art – it’s less science and more art.”

The young artists who work at Soicher Marin are intimately involved in the design process. Marin says they’re given a lot of leeway to “go off the reservation,” and it’s encouraged. By immersing them both in the Soicher Marin aesthetic and independent creativity, the Soicher Marin brand is enhanced.

“There’s another component that’s less obvious and it’s that there’s a certain rightness to our design and point of view. In the biography of Steve Jobs I found that there was a lot of discussion about his obsession with design. There’s a design thread that runs through Apple’s products, and you can see that someone put a lot of thought into each product. There’s a certain organic nature to it,” explains Marin. “We can’t say why it is exactly that the iPhone and all the other products are so pleasing to the eye, but they just are. We look at it the same way. We obsess over small details that change something very slightly, then people stand back and say it looks right, whether it’s scale or color, and that’s the part of organic design that people have a hard time describing, but they know it when they see it. It’s something I think we accomplish here as a team.”

Designing decorative artwork for residential and commercial applications
Soicher Marin designer Thom Filicia (left) and Ed Marin.

This is an integral part of the culture, but most important are the elements of customer service and leadership. For Soicher Marin, customer service begins within the company itself. If that element is lacking, serving the end-use customer will surely lag.

Therefore, great emphasis is placed on interpersonal and interdepartmental customer service. The art department is the digital department’s customer, for instance, so the digital department must please its internal customer first. “That’s the service culture we want,” says Marin.

To foster leadership, Marin explains, “Everyone is a leader and has a responsibility to someone else. My responsibility is to mentor them, teach them, give them my time, listen to their concerns, bring them into the general conversation of the company and work on their leadership skills. Then, their job is to do the same thing with everyone under them. Even if they leave our company, we may hate to lose them, but if they lead somewhere else because of something we taught them, we look at it as a service to the community.”

Like Soicher Marin’s design aesthetic, it’s the little things that make the difference in customer service. In other words, it goes far beyond providing a great product on time. It means answering the phone, showing courtesy and giving customers all the time they need.

Framing decorative art
Ed Marin, second-generation owner of Soicher Marin, Sarasota, Fla.

“Our customer service people have the best job because they get to talk to the customer, even when that means fielding a complaint, since a complaint is often an opportunity to not only make it right, but to solidify that relationship. My dad used to say that it costs so little to keep a customer; it’s much more costly to find them than it is to keep them,” says Marin.

Marin adds that the recession has made things difficult for the entire decorative art market. Soicher Marin made because of a brand that’s more than 50 years old. “The power of the brand is almost infinite when times are tough,” says Marin.

The Soicher Marin brand is strong because the company takes a collaborative approach to branding. Soicher Marin chooses partners wisely; partners that have the same dedication to quality and detail. For instance, Soicher Marin designs artwork for Lillian August’s furniture collection for furniture maker Hickory White.

“Lillian August has a beautiful furniture collection with Hickory White and she will collaborate with us on the design of all the pictures that are supposed to go with her furniture, so it’s a de facto collaboration with an important brand like Hickory White. Our customers know that the licensing relationships we have are really strong and collaborative, which makes our company still relevant after all these years.”

For its art reproduction, Soicher Marin’s choice of giclee materials is purely subjective and vary from LexJet Sunset Photo eSatin Paper to LexJet Sunset Fibre Matte and Sunset Hot Press Rag, as well as canvas reproductions with LexJet Sunset Select Gloss Canvas and Sunset Select Matte Canvas.

Soicher Marin releases four sets of collections per year. Its two “major” seasons are spring and fall, and its two “minor” seasons are summer and winter.

“The type of art we bring to the table will determine the medium we put it on. If it’s photography, for instance, it could end up on an eSatin, a fibre-based or rag paper, based on what the image is,” says Marin.

Again, it’s the seemingly minor and subtle choices that make Soicher Marin so unique and successful in its offering. As Marin puts it, “We don’t just sell prints.”

For more information about Soicher Marin and its collections, go to www.soicher-marin.com.