Photo Blocks

The Traditional Photographic Process

The key to this process is the paper itself, which is treated with a mixture of light-sensitive silver crystals (pretty cool, right). Our printers project your image onto the treated paper causing the silver halide mixture to form your image. For color images, three layers of cyan, magenta, and yellow combine to form a brilliant, full-color print.

This process is extremely accurate and reliable, which is why it’s often associated with higher-end professional printing services. Chromogenic Prints should hold their original quality for 60 years in normal lighting conditions. As a bonus, because the image is essentially baked into the paper itself, these prints are both scratch and water resistant.

The Fine Art Inkjet Process

The defining characteristic of Fine Art Printing is the ink and the application process. We use Aqueous Pigment Inks, which is a fancy way of saying water-based inks. Our high-end Inkjet printers utilize up to 10 base colors: the typical Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black, with additional Light Cyan and Light Magenta, and a series of Grey tones. With so many base colors to play with, Inkjet Printing can achieve a wider color gamut. In other words, Inkjet Printing can reproduce a larger number of tones on the color spectrum.

As the paper runs through the printer, an ultra accurate head moves across the sheet and lays the Aqueous Inks to create your image. Pigments adhere to the paper and the excess water is evaporated, leaving a higher chroma, or color purity. The Pigment Inks that we use are more durable than alternative dye-based inks. The resulting Fine Art Print has more resilient color and is resistant to UV light. In addition, these water-based inks are more environmentally friendly than petroleum-based inks in other formats.