High Quality Printing Techniques
From Online Printing
Digital Prints Announcing a new, major, high-quality printing category digital prints! Claiming that this is an official classification in a rapidly evolving field is a risky, even foolish, endeavour, but you have to start somewhere, and this is a place to draw a line in the sand. At the very least, we can consider digital printing to be a new tool for photographers and artists who want to expand their artistic options. While there is no end to the inventiveness of rival terminology gillies, IRIS prints, ink jets, virtual paintings, digraphs, limited editions on canvas, digital pigment prints, pigmented inks on archival paper, (do I need to go on?), let’s keep it to one overall term for the moment digital prints, which I define as prints resulting from a digital master or matrix. Whether they are originals or reproductions is another issue, which I discuss below. Of course, artists being artists, all these nice and neat categories are frequently violated. For example, wedding and portrait photographers are famous for coating and embellishing their prints. Kolonia Art Studio, a leading serigraph atelier in Torrance, California, offers both serigraph and digital printing to artists who will sometimes start with a digital reproduction and add serigraph embossing, texturing, or gold-leafing on top. New York City’s Pample mousse Press creates digital editions that combine IRIS printing with Printing Cousins: Offset and Digital Offset
Offset Lithography: While technically not a fine-art printing process, offset lithography is frequently used in printing art reproductions, usually only in large editions where economy of scale brings the unit cost down. This is how everyday art posters (as well as brochures, magazines, and newspapers) are printed. The offset part of the name comes from the principle of transferring the image from the revolving plate to a rubber blanket before final transfer to the paper (see 1.1). Because of the similarity of terms, and because they both fall under the oceanographic category, fine-art lithographs are sometimes called original lithographs to distinguish them from commercial offset prints. Digital Offset/Indigo: Here’s a new printing technology that’s mainly commercial but with an artistic edge: digital offset colour Indigo, orig ally an Israeli/Dutch conpant but now a division of HP, is an example (see 1.2).
Indigo uses a laser image, special liquid ink (Electro Ink), and a thermal offset system to print the image. It’s fully digital from creation to print in, which means that there is no film, no image setters, no plates, no photo-chemicals, and no press make-ready. You’re mostly likely to find an HP Indigo Press at a normal print shop, but the output is anything but normal! It produces offset lithe-like quality but in short-run jobs (100–500 is a good average range) and in full colour And, because it’s all-digital, each piece can be unique. What that means is that you could customize a print run so that names, languages, or even images could change per print . This is a great new way to print art exhibition catalogues, calendars, and invitations. The construction and relief techniques. Members of the Digital Atelier printmaking studio love to use digital prints as the base or ground and then add painting, collage, en caustic, and emu lion transfer techniques.
