The Print Space

Last year I attended the Nikon Expo in London. While I was there, I came across a company called The Print Space.
I was offered the chance to have a 40x30 inch C-Type print done for free (worth £40). A free print? Why not! Their offices were located in London, so I planned to do the print when I was next travelling through London.

The first problem I had was choosing an image that I'd like to get printed. I had many an image in my collection taken by me, but I'd never really sat down and said "would this look good when printed at 40x30?". I sifted through my images, and finally settled on an image I shot on my D50:


I get down to the print space. It's a nice place, very open, very calm. There's a distinct change of feeling as you walk into the place from the London streets. The walls have various images from various artists on them, but not in a coarse way. Since it was my first visit, I was taken down to the retouching booth where my image was modified to be ready for print.

Since I had never printed my images at a professional print place or indeed never actually used colour profiles or large image sizes, I didn't know the workflow needed. For those that need to know, this is the basic workflow:

• Take original image (preferably RAW)
• Resize the image by 10% each time until you're at the correct printing size. So if you're printing a 40x30 inch print at 300dpi, you need to resize the image to 12000 x 9000 pixels.
• Apply the colour profile of the paper you wish to use (The Print Space provide their profiles for you)
• Make alterations as you require to the contrast, etc, until you're happy with the image
• Get it printed

You can do this on the Mac's that the print space has, or you can do it locally if you've got a calibrated setup and just bring it in for print right away.

Their prices are decent (and listed on their website). More interestingly, you're only limited to the size of a paper roll. For C-Type prints, that is a massive 30 by 1,968.5 inches. Imagine the panoramic you could print on that!

In short, if you want decent prints, these people are it. They have a customer for sure here!

NeoThermic
Posted by NeoThermic on 26th January 2008 4:58pm »» 0 Comments »» Trackback this post »» Permalink

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