Intro to Digital Printing
From Online Printing
Just what is digital printing anyway? The way I like to describe it is by being more specific and using the words high-quality digital printing. This phrase defines the boundaries of a complex topic and helps us focus on the subject of this book. So, let’s break down high-quality digital printing into its components. This may seem like an elementary exercise, but it’s important to understand the territory we’re about to enter. High Quality High quality means better than normal or above average. This is not ordinary printing but something at a higher level. Something more akin to art. (Photo quality is another term often used for this in relation to ink jet printing.) Of course, talking about art gets tricky. People have been debating its definition for thousands of years, and it certainly won’t end here. However, I equate high quality with art, so for our purposes, art (and I use the term very broadly) is created by individual photographers and/or artists they can be the same or not, and I’ll sometimes call the combination photographer-artist seven if it’s only as a hobby or sideline. Whether it’s destined for the walls of the Louvre or the walls of a living room or corporate boardroom, art is meant to be displayed, to be admired and yes, even bought and sold, and to provide inspiration and an emotional connection with the artist or the viewer’s own thoughts and feelings. The world of commercial art, which includes the fields of graphic design, advertising, and ting communications commercial image making are on the edges of this universe, and I’ll cover them in a limited way. But, we won’t spend much time with the digital printing technologies that produce signs and banners, brochures, billboards, event graphics, building wraps, and vehicle sign age While photographers and artists can and frequently do use commercial technologies to create their high-quality work, that world is not the primary focus of this book. Digital Here’s the basic concept: Digital means sing numbers to represent something, and that’s exactly what a computer does. A normal image is converted into numerical data (a long string of ones and zeros) that describe or quantify each sample point or pixel (short for picture element, the basic unit of image information) in terms of certain attributes such as colour and intensity. This data can be stored, manipulated, and ultimately transformed with digital printing technologies back into a normally viewed image (see for an in-depth look at this). Printing Traditional (analogue) printing is a mechanical process that uses a physical master or matrix for making repea prints. Commercial and even traditional fine-art printing presses use pressure or impact to transfer the image from a carrier, plate, or blanket the matrix to the receiving paper. Similarly, with old-style photography, the negative or a transparency is the matrix through which light travels to expose the print. Digital printing is different, however. There is no pressure or impact, and there is no physical matrix. The matrix now sits in the computer in the form of digital data that can be converted repeatedly, with or without any variation, into a print by any photographer-artist who either does his own printing (self-printing) or who uses an outside printing service. (I’m intentionally avoiding all the permutations and variations of computer-to-plate and other forms of commercial digital printing, although there’s no reason they can’t be used.) Digital printing work flow: from digital matrix to hard copy print.
