MAKING AN IMPRESSION
Like silver halide crystals in days of yore, pixels have become a photographer’s creative stock-in-trade. Even photographers who still shoot film usually scan their negatives or slides to create a digital file. Then, image files are either printed at home or sent to a lab.
The great majority of photographers who print at home do so with inkjet technology, using printers that recreate the image with inks sprayed onto paper. The digital darkroom, as it has become known, dispenses with the wet darkroom’s smelly solutions and backbreaking processing, though some photographers argue that this comes at a price in quality.
The irony is that commercial printing—prints made by the many photo labs offering a wide range of output services—are almost entirely produced on light-sensitive chromogenic paper using a chemical process. Yet they still start with the digital files that you supply them, right from your digital camera or cell phone.
These days, whether you print at home or hand off your files to a photofinisher, the payoff is
