Important Decisions in Digital Printing

From Online Printing

Digital Decisions Photographers and artists tend to fall into a couple of large groups when it comes to digital printing. Knowing what these are up front and matching your interests to them can help you better navigate through the digital landscape. Doing It Yourself v Sending It Out If you want to get involved with digital printing, you must soon make an important decision: do the printing yourself or send it out to a printmaking studio or print-service provider, atelier, or even an online printing service. There are advantages, disadvantages, and consequences to each route. Doing Your Own Printing Some artists love the thought of working with their own printing equipment. Photographers especially, with their tradition of working in a darkroom full of enlargers, timers, and other technical equipment, are a driving force in the growth of self-printing. (Note: The following applies more to serious artists, but anyone at any level can learn from this discussion.) Advantages of Photographer-Artists Printing Their Own Work Personal involvement, flexibility, and full control of the entire process. It’s your printer, your paper, your inks, your everything. You can test, and re-test, and test again. You can change settings, paper, anything you want, when you want. You are in control. Doing it yourself, once you’ve figured out the system, gets you on the road to making prints very quickly. You can also fine-tune and output your prints on your schedule, one at a time, or in small quantities. Once a break even point on your initial capital investment is reached,print costs can be less. After you’ve locked down your work flow settings and procedures, the extra cost of making additional prints is marginal only the cost of paper, ink, and overhead. A DO-IT-YOURSELF WARNING! What tends to happen with a lot of self-printing artists is that they start off printing for themselves, then doing a favour for an artist friend, then buying some more equipment, then taking in a couple more print clients to pay for the equipment, and before you know it, they are in the printmaking business, not the art making business. That is exactly how many of today’s printmakers started. Disadvantages of Self-Printing Potentially steep learning curve and time commitment to acquire the printmaking craft. Digital printing is both an art and a craft, and just having the equipment does not guarantee you will know what to do with it. Learning how to work with a new technology orgy takes time
, and lots of it. This is time that could be spent doing other things or re sting more art. Do you also do your own auto body work or your own roof repairs? Sometimes significant upfront investment in hardware, software, and consumables (especially for the larger formats). Add to that the perpetual, ongoing costs of self printing that include: overhead (rent, utilities), your time or lobar (your time is worth something, isn’t it?), consumables (paper, inks), maintenance, software/hardware upgrades, and continuing education and training. If you’re in the business of art, an accountant would call all of this your cost of goods sold. Of course, if you are doing this as a hobby or in your off-time, then these obstacles are less of a consideration. Using an Outside Printmaker or Printing Service An old saying in the art world goes, The artist is the eye, the printmaker is the hand. Because printing techniques can be complicated, and considering the traditionally col elaborative nature of fine-art printmaking, many photographers and artists use a print for-pay service to create their final work. Advantages of Using a Print-Service Provider You work with seasoned printing professionals and take advantage of top-of-the-line technology that is more quickly updated. An experienced printmaker brings to the a vast knowledge of materials and artistic approaches that have been tried and tested many times before you walk in the door. Besides helping to guarantee a higher-quality result, a printmaker can act as an aesthetic guide and be a valuable art advisor. Up-front investment to test the et or your expectations is low. Depending on the size and the process, an investment of anywhere from $50 to $500 is all that’s needed to produce a trial print (unframed). This is a good way for an emerging artist to see if their work is going to sell. Or for a photographer to try out a new or exotic printing process. A corollary to this is that since your investment is low, you are free to drop a printmaker or service at any point and move on. You haven’t lost much. If you’re a professional artist, prints may be more accep to galleries or art buyers if produced by a well-known printmaker. The best printing studios apply a chop to every print going out the door. Typically an embossed logo in the prints lower left or right cir nee, this is a seal of approval indicating that the work has met the printmaker’s quality standards. A well-respected printmaker’s chop is a ting tool for the artist; know edge able art eyers and buyers will recognize it instantly. The downside is that some not all of the more famous printmakers charge accordingly. Disadvantages of Using an Outside Printing Service Loss of some control and flexibility. The print is in the printmaker’s hands, not yours. The final result will depend, in part, on their skill level and your ability to communicate what you want to their craftspeople. If they think it’s good enough, but you don’t, you have a problem. Time delays going back and forth. No matter how good or how fast an outside print maker is, there is still a lot of back-and-forth downtime between artist and printer. Getting to the final approved proof and to that first finished print sometimes can take weeks. Ongoing, per-print costs are higher. Using a printing service may not be worth it co nominally if you are creating large prints for sale and your prints sell for much less than $500. Run the numbers an d see how much profit is left over after the costs for initial set-up, prints, coating, curating, shipping, and framing have been added up. Of course, if your prints are selling for four-amounts, this is not a problem! It is also possible to take both paths down the print road. Some artists and photographers using print-for-pay services will make internal proofs on their own equipment to fine-tune their work in progress. This also comes in handy since most printmakers prefer to have a hard-copy proof (sometimes called a match or guide print) to look at and work from. On the flip side, some self-printers do the majority of the work themselves, but save the largest or most complicated pieces for a professional printmaker. Reproductions or Original Prints?