Finally printed some of my work as "fine art" giclee prints.

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!

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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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Awesome prints! Nice office phone! I haven’t done prints before, save Walmart and drug store ones :blush:.

Looks good!

Do you knownif there is anEpson equivalent of the paper you used?

@afre Thanks! It’s definitely twenty steps above Walgreens prints. Or a hundred steps, really!
And that office phone sure is a classic! It was there when I inherited the office. It even works sometimes!

@paperdigits Thanks! Looks like it is indeed an Epson paper in the first place! Epson Somerset Velvet Matte Fine Art Paper (24"x50' Roll) SP91203

Well silly me, thanks.

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Nice!
Did Giclee Today print exactly what you sent them, or did they adjust the brightness? I only ask because when I had prints done some time back, I found sorting out blacks, white and colours was relatively straightforward, but getting the overall brightness to be what I wanted was not so easy. Like adjusting the middle slider of a Levels tool - getting that right for the print.

@RawConvert They print exactly what you send them ( Giclee Today - Giclee Today File Setup details for the best possible fine art and canvas prints ), so I was indeed a little nervous. I probably should have ordered a proof print first, which they will reprint for free if the colors aren’t initially what you wanted (I assume it’s still on you to make the adjustments and send a new file though). But I decided to just take the risk and go for it. Luckily it worked out very well in this case. The colors, brightness, etc. in the resulting prints are remarkably similar to what I see in the digital images.