We built realPhotoPrint to put the power of digital photography directly into your hands.
Ink jet? Dye sublimination?
In This Day and Age - What is a Real
Photographic Print?
The word photograph comes from the Greek words phot, or light and graphia, or writing. A true photographic print is light sprayed on light sensitive paper. That's right - light. Photons. Some of the smallest particles in the universe.
In the case of digital photography, the "light" is formed by Light Emitting
Diodes contained in a LED head that "floats" over a light sensitive paper
on a bed of warm air. The LED excites chemicals on the photographic paper
by spraying tiny diamond-shaped patterns on the emulsion. These infinitesimally
small diamonds overlap five-fold which, mathematically, results in 425
diamond shapes per square inch. It is this concentration of diamonds
created from tiny photons that gives a photograph its unique look,
color and depth. Ink doesn't come close.
The rest is just science. After "exciting" the chemicals in the paper's
emulsion the paper moves through a warm chemical bath which activates and
seals the colors. Because the LED head floats over the paper there is no
machine vibration to degrade the image.
Thus, we call a print a photographic print because it is print
made by spraying light on light sensitive paper.
Who says this is a snapshot business?
There is no limit to the size of a photographic print save the length and
width of the paper. We routinely make prints that are eight -feet wide
and four-feet tall.
Is a 1MB file too big to send over the internet?
Not at all! We routinely receive 300 or 400 images per order or about
1 Gig of digital data. A fraction of what we can handle and a faction of
what photographers sent over the Inernet to have prints made. Her are some
data. Last year more than 3 billion prints were processed online so, lets
say, 500 kilobytes a photo -- that means digital camera owners pushed at
least 1,500,000,000,000,000 bytes (1.5 quadrillion bytes) of photos across
the Internet. At about $2 for an 8"X10" print, these bytes may
be the most valuable data in e-commerce (well, at least versus a 99-cent
music download or a TV show) so, yes, send one, send 10, send 100 megabytes.
The oddest misconception.
Beware! Prints made from a digital photo will only last 15 years. This
came in from a college campuses. The truth is -- professional photographic
papers last more than a100 years before noticeable fading. Our prints
are made using Fuji Crystal Archive paper - the very best.
Don't try this at home.
Photo prints still involve chemicals and light sensitive papers so, believe it or not, we still go into a darkroom to load the paper we use to make your prints. Not only that but every time we change a roll of paper we recalibrate the machines so the blue in a photograph today will match the blue in a photograph a year from today.
Links and Resources:
For excellent video tutorials on color management and other photography
issues we recommend ePhotoPros.com:
http://ephotopros.com
We love the prints our Canadian friends make up in Victoria. You'll find
them here:
www.digitalartrepros.com
Most of you know this pro lab but if you don't, here's where to get the
very best photographic prints. As they like to say - No mugs. No t-shirts.
Just great prints.:
www.myphotopipe.com