I recently decided that I wanted to print and hang some of my best photos in my office on campus. Since I’ll be looking at them often, I wanted them to be large and to look really nice. For a variety of reasons, I chose a collection of six seascapes shot either here in San Diego, or in southern Italy where I do my fieldwork. I thought the pastel colors of these images and the smooth textures of sky and sea would look nicest printed on thick semi-textured watercolor paper. After some research, I found a printing company called “giclee today” that had great prices and a good reputation. Each 12x16" print cost about $12 US, and combine shipping of only about $15 (very well protected in tripled flat cardboard). I don’t use any sort of monitor profiling or calibration, nor do I ever worry about gamut and color space, so I was a bit nervous, having never printed this large before, if the images would turn out the way I wanted. Well, I was blown away by how nice they came out! I selected a paper called “Somerset Velvet” that I had read good things about. This paper is really fantastic, and I’ve never seen such vibrant colors on a matte finish like that before. They really look better in person than in the phone snapshots I’ll paste below. I was able to find some nice aluminum frames with the right sized matting at IKEA of all places, and I think they came together really nicely! Certainly makes the office a lot nicer to be in!
By the way, I variably used GIMP, Darktable, and Snapseed to process these images. Two were shot on my Olympus E-M10ii, three with my E-M1ii, and one was even shot with my Nexus 5x smartphone! I used GIMP to scale them to the final print size at 300 DPI. If you are curious about what the digital version look like, you can see them in this Flickr album: https://flic.kr/s/aHsm3EHkj8
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