Thursday, February 24, 2011

Making prints of your own photographs

I bought a print from the Cramer sale organized by TOP, after which there arose some discussion of making prints of one's own photographs. I got interested in this, and ordered some prints (family portraits and landscape photographs) from the Finnish company Fotonetti, using their "pro" version of the service.

The paper used in the prints is Fujicolor DP II Professional, which proved to be good for my purposes - also the landscape photographs - even though the paper is actually intended for professional portrait prints.

I selected half a dozen landscape photographs taken during the last two months, some of which were very light and some dark. Some were taken in daytime using ISO 100, and some at night using ISO 400. The biggest size of the prints were 30 x 30 cm; some were 15 x 15 cm; a couple were non-square.

I was quite pleased with the results, and will probably hang one or two on the wall, maybe in my office at work. What was remarkable was how little (none, in fact) of noise was visible even in the 30 x 30 cm prints of the ISO 400 photographs. And I didn't do any tricks at all, all images were jpegs straight from the camera.

Next time I may experiment a bit with different settings of the color profiles etc., but even this "automatic" workflow worked well for me. I'm not sure how much of the results was due to the "pro" version of the service, which was a bit more expensive, but still, the price was reasonable given the good results.

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