Fine Art Printing

Printing is the final part of our journey with landscape photography, and choosing the right paper is by far the most important part. By choosing a quality paper, you're making your image look the best it can. Hi, I'm professional photographer Paul Thomson, and I'm here with Outdoor Photography Guide. And I want to talk to you about printing, and more specifically fine art paper printing. Now, currently I'm using Fotospeed paper, but this would apply to any paper on the market, really. The difference I'm finding with these papers when printing is I would normally use what's called a pearl or a luster paper, which is something like this. And what I find with this paper, I really, really like it. It has that sort of sheen across it, which is really nice and it still holds the ink relatively well. But I find on the fine art papers, they've got a rougher texture to them. There's more texture to the paper, they're a thicker paper as well, and they hold the ink far, far better to me anyway. So what you tend to get is especially for woodland scenes, for my woodland scenes specifically, is where you have leaves and foliage, it really draws out the detail in that sort of image and gives the image a more artistic feel. I've got two different types of papers I use. One is called a platinum etching paper, and that's got quite a rough texture. And the other one that I have that I've been using lately is called NST Bright White, and that's got a flatter sort of feel to it. It hasn't got quite as much texture. And that paper I use a lot more for general landscape work, wider scenes, whereas the platinum etching, which has got more of a texture I use for more Woodland images or forest scenes, it just works so much better. Now the main thing you have to bear in mind when printing is, I took a long time to get everything right. When you first start printing your work, you'll find you spend a lot of time trying to get how it looks on the monitor onto paper form. And I went through ink and different papers like you wouldn't believe. So once you've got all that together and you're getting results where you're getting the prints are coming out how you are seeing them on the screen, then you can kind of concentrate on which papers you're using. And for me, for a lot of my landscape work, as I say, I prefer to use a more textured paper for woodland scenes. So something like this, for example. This Woodland scene that I took at the beginning of spring with the wild garlic works really well because you get the texture coming through on the image. And that helps to give that more arty feel about it. Now along with the printing paper, you can also get card pack versions of the same papers. And these are fantastic for doing art fairs or anything like that, and you can get both versions. And a lot of the companies do this. So you can get the textured version for anything where you've got foliage or things like that on, and you can get the flatter more bright white version for your larger landscapes, and they look fantastic. So you might be wondering after all that, why fine art paper? Well for me, it gives a much better feel and it's got a much better quality to it. And when you are trying to produce a product for art fairs and things like that, it just oozes quality compared to a standard paper. So that's why I go down the road of fine art. It's just, I think it looks so much better on the wall, the details pop out of it a lot better, it holds the colors a lot better, and I think it's just got a lot more of that sort of artistic feel to it.