SteelOrchid Photography

Tag: fineart

  • More on the new store

    The new Magento based store is now fully working (except for the PayPal account, of course) and we will have enough fine art prints available in the new range of sizes to open the store on the 8th March  2009.

    Getting the store (B.T.W. which term do people prefer: store or shop?)  up and running was relatively straightforward but far from simple. The documentation is not the most comprehensive I have seen but in its favour it has an active forum where you are very likely to find a solution to most any common problems and the software is pretty much “feature complete” “right-out-of-the-box”.  So for basic use it is simply a matter of choosing a theme and away you go! That is assuming you are running it on your own server. If, like us, you are running on a shared host you need a provider who is either very understanding, like ours, or one that is optimised for Magento. It is rather demanding of the server. We think we have ours configured for our use.

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  • Fine Art Printing

    Fine Art photographic printing took a major leap forward in the last few years with the introduction of high quality pigment ink printing. We upgraded to the HPB9180 printer last year and, hey, is it brilliant?! Low metamerism, low bronzing on gloss/lustre papers and bright saturated colour on matte and textured fine art papers make this a very desirable piece of kit. After several months of making prints with this beast, I have come up with a series of papers that work well with it. There’s a growing list of icc profiles available at HP here and it’s a simple process to load them – just follow the instructions in the HP Digital Imaging Monitor.

    All of the following papers produced very good results:

    HP Advanced Photo Paper Glossy
    As you would expect with a paper made for HP pigment inks, this paper gives an excellent result with good detail, low metamerism and only a little gloss differential. It’s a good all round gloss paper and, at 250g/m² it’s a good weight and feels like a wet process photo. Be careful only to choose “advanced” papers from HP and not the more readily available “premium” papers, which are made for dye inks and do not produce as good a result. Unfortunately, in the UK, it’s quite difficult to obtain HP’s own paper in anything above A4 size.

    Epson Premium Semigloss Photo Paper
    This paper gives an excellent result with the HP inks. There is just a little gloss differential (which you can see if you tilt the print so that the light hits it at an angle). It’s best used with the icc profile downloadable from HP, who seem to have realised that people will make prints with other manufacturer’s papers and cater for it. Thanks HP!

    Epson Archival Matte
    A good everyday paper with a smooth white finish which takes the ink well. A minor crit is that the paper is rather thin and so the resulting print doesn’t feel too much like a high quality piece of art. It’s great for sending away to competitions though, where it’s light weight (192gm/sq m) is an advantage and it’s the cheapest of the bunch to buy too. (more…)