DSLR captured RAW file to 3 pass litho print!

This little guitar holding, wine bottle Hombre was originally captured with a Nikon D80 a while back while I was visiting Spain. The original file was cleaned up in Photoshop, cropped, and corrected for exposure. The colors are quite punchy and vivid, which I think helps add to the simple graphic like quality of the photo. This guy looked like a great candidate for a litho print.

The file was re-sized and the color channels were separated into three separate layers (black, red and blue) as this would be a three pass litho print. From there, three polyester pronto plates were printed, one for each of the colors with the help of a laser printer. From there the plates were printed using a printing press. The ink is mixed, rolled on to the plate, and then the plate run through the press with your choice of paper. The processes is repeated once for each plate, taking care with regard to the registration of the plates. I chose to print on a fairly thin, beige-ish Eastern paper with a semi loose grain.



Give the print time to dry, and viola! The litho printing process is quite fun, but requires a bit of practice to get things just right. I really enjoy this print, it has a cool vintage vibe, maybe like a poster from the old West. The colors are much more muted then it's digital cousin, but again I think helps give it an old-timey feel. If you ever get a chance to give litho printing a try, I highly recommend it! It's a blast to get your hands dirty and try out older and alternative processes. Litho can also be printed using a four pass method utilizing a CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) method, which makes printing full color prints fairly easy. Lithography is a fascinating processes, and has strong artistic roots. It has been used (and perfected) by many masters, including Picasso, Matisse, Escher and Hockney.

More on Lithographic Process

Offset Printing

Photographic Printing Possibilities

What comes to mind when you think about printing a photograph? The question is deceivingly simple. The context in which the question is asked is paramount to your answer. Older folks might think of taking 35mm film to the local drugstore to get 4x6 color prints (some younger folks might not even remember this!), those with some photographic experience might include printing 35mm black and white film with an enlarger. More recently ink jet technology has allowed for a whole new level of flexibility and choices. Most people can plug a digicam into a home inkjet printer and make lovely prints up to around 8.5x11. Fine art printers today can make delicious large format inkjet prints on large format printers with ease, and printers are getting faster every generation.

So whats the best path for outputting your images? It all depends!




The print below is a great example of the vast options available. The finished print is a series of 9, 8x8 lithographic prints on fine art silk printing paper using a monochrome ink. The semi-transparent silk tissue paper is adhered over top of an identical black and white inkjet print, printed on Epson matte paper. The 9 prints are arranged together and viewed as one image.





This print took quite a path to get to this point! It's an older image that I had taken during a black and white film photo class, so it started off as a good old 35mm negative on Ilford Delta 100 film. From that point it was printed in the dark room via enlarger onto an 8x10 piece of Ilford silver gelatin photo paper, and was put through standard development.

The print at this point was lovely, and I decided it would be a good candidate image for a lithography project. The 8x10 silver print was scanned at a high resolution and divided up into 9 even sections to make it more fit on the lithography pronto plates. Each of the 9 pronto plates was printed on a lazer printer. From this point, each of the plates was printed onto the silk tissue paper using the lithography process, and a printing press. Then each litho print was carefully cut to size so that no border remained. The same files used to printing the litho plates were used to print a black and white inkjet print which was also trimmed to size. At this point I had 9 blue litho prints, and 9 matching black and white inkjet prints. The silk paper was carefully glued on top of the inkjet print and hung together to form a single print.

Whew! Why go through all the trouble? The final piece has some beautiful and very unique characteristics that make it hard to achieve with any other method. The fine art silk tissue paper is a super thin, very lightweight semi transparent paper. The lithographic printing process is done by hand and ads a tactile characteristic to the print. The silk tissue is so light and glued in such a way that just the ambient movement of the air from the air conditioner is enough to make it sway just a bit, and give a superb shimmering effect to the print. Litho inks are also quite beautiful and have a different richness to them vs inkjet inks.

So there! There are so many different ways to approach the printing of a photograph!