I'm a new pro just starting out and looking at options for getting prints printed. I went to one of the better pro printers in my hometown and they told me that they print using lightjet machines. They told me that's what pros are using now. I don't have the money to purchase a high end printer to print my own but this may be an option in a couple years.
I was just wondering what others are doing. Are you printing your own? or what type of medium do you use?
Relatively few professionals outside the fine art genre are printing their own, but some do. It depends much on your volume and what you do. Printing is a craft unto itself, and can be quite consuming. Moreover, at this point printers are evolving as fast as cameras, and aren't likely to plateau as soon as cameras do.
In my case, I prefer to let someone else worry about that, as long as he can produce a print that looks like my monitor on the paper I want. I use WHCC and Burrell.
The Durst Lambda and the Cymbolic Sciences Lightjet are high end laser printers that print on sensitized paper or trans material (real photographic media).
While I think it can be argued that inkjet can not yet produce a transparency of as high a quality as a photographic transparency, I think it can be argued that the newest inkjet printers from Epson, HP and Canon can probably do as well or better.
I will put my Epson 3800 up against any printer anywhere. However, I tend to use it only for my own Art Prints or for proofs. For commercial work that needs to be printed and where money needs to be made I upload to Printroom for online ordering or sent the files to Costco or a high end lab in my town. It is just too much time and money to do all of my own printing.
Getting the print to look like what is on my monitor is just what I'm struggling with right now. I purchased a Spyder2Pro to help with calibration but I'm still not getting the correct output from a pro lab. Don't know what to do at this point.
Yes it sure would be nice to have something similar in Canada. I have to spend either $9 for shipping or take over 90 minutes driving into town to pick up my prints. My time is worth more than $9 an hour so I go with the shipping.
Jodi Nelson wrote:
Getting the print to look like what is on my monitor is just what I'm struggling with right now. I purchased a Spyder2Pro to help with calibration but I'm still not getting the correct output from a pro lab. Don't know what to do at this point.
You need more information from your print lab. They need to tell you what gamma and white point to set on your colorimeter software. Your calibration system will give you a monitor profile to set into your operating system (in windows, Color Management is under monitor Settings> Advanced when you right-click on the desktop).
Then you must get a printer profile from your print lab. You set the print profile in your editing software "soft proofing" controls (in Photoshop CS, it's under the View menu).
Adjust your color when your softproofing is turned on. But be sure to do this under subdued room lighting. Bright room lighting will still throw off your perception of the image on the screen.
Most professional labs can accept several different color spaces (aRGB, sRGB, Prophoto, et cetera), as long as you "embed" the color space in the image file. There isn't any benefit in sending them anything other than sRGB if they're going to print it on Kodak or Fuji paper.
However, some inkjet and art paper combinations can make use of the wider aRGB and Prophoto gamuts.
