The Fine Art of Digital Printing, Part 1

By David Em

June 28, 2004

(The Fine Art of Digital Printing, Part 1 :  Page 1 of 1 )

The most impressive picture I saw at last March's Photography Marketing Association (PMA) conference in Las Vegas wasn't a photograph. It was a digital print of a Claude Monet painting made by Epson's internal printing group. The print was exhibited at the Bellagio hotel's art gallery, side by side with the original painting, which was on loan from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The two were nearly indistinguishable, down to the digitally simulated brushstrokes.

Outfits like Epson, Canon, and HP have worked hard to create digital printers that are equal or superior to traditional commercial chemistry-based photographic printing processes. As far as I'm concerned, they've won that battle. But recently, these and other printing companies have identified a more challenging arena they call Digital Fine Art, or DFA.

Based on my recent success with printing my own photographs, and inspired by Epson's Monet print, I decided to see how close I could get to producing "museum quality" DFA prints using currently available digital tools and materials. In Part 1 of this story I'll examine what constitutes DFA printing, and in Part 2 I'll evaluate the efforts of its two most aggressive proponents, Epson and Hewlett-Packard, to bring no-compromise print quality to a desktop near you.

Setting the Bar High

Digital images are virtual—they have no inherent material substance. But DFA prints do, and the process of creating good ones can be complicated. Technically, a print consists of an image applied to a surface by mechanical means. The end result can be anything from a mass-produced 19th century woodcut to Robert Rauschenberg's 1953 tire print on a long roll of paper. The medium (ink, paint, etc.) might be glossy or matte, smooth or textured, and the same's true for the media (paper, plastic, etc.) the image is printed on.

Inks, paints, pastels, dyes, canvases, and papers all have their own color, texture, and specular reflectivity (shininess). For example, a pastel drawing on rag paper by Degas has completely different surface properties than a varnished painting on board by the 15th century Flemish painter Van Eyck.

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