How are these printed?

[Ralf]

A gallery of autographed cards covering half a dozen decades. Most of them mass made by regular offset printing. What's the point in asking about tonality, print quality, digital and analog, transparency or neg film?!?

I'm pretty sure this one is entirely analog. "Forbidden Planet" was released in 1956

[apetrovich35]

OK...just to be sure of this...did you mean to post a link to a site selling signed gawd-awful 8x10 publicity shots, or did you mean to post a link to another site?

APUG is normally a pretty friendly place, where any and all who share an interest in analogue photographic processes are accepted...spammers are not.

Murray

I posted a link to another site (which is not mine) with photos and I want to know if anyone knows how the photos are printed!

[apetrovich35]

A gallery of autographed cards covering half a dozen decades. Most of them mass made by regular offset printing. What's the point in asking about tonality, print quality, digital and analog, transparency or neg film?!?

I'm pretty sure this one is entirely analog. "Forbidden Planet" was released in 1956

Are you sure? I doubt they're offset, when they give out these sort of prints (as the person is signing them) they have a glossy finish, and are real paper. Also look at the scans, they don't look offset to me, do they?

What's the point in asking? The point is I'm curious. Is there any professionals here that have done this kind of work (and know what they're talking about).

[apetrovich35]

Hmmm...those are some stunning images alright. I can't make my mind up which I'd like my prints to look like...soot & chalk, pasty grey, or comic book colour.

Are you for real, or for $$ ?

Murray

You can't differentiate between bad scans and good photos, these are obviously scanned horribly bad. You can even see the scan lines. The colors are way off in the scans but they're obvious they're great prints.

[Mateo]

Hey apetrovich,

Why don't you give us very specific details about your current printing technique and then we'll be able to tell you what exactly needs to be changed.

[apetrovich35]

Hey apetrovich,

Why don't you give us very specific details about your current printing technique and then we'll be able to tell you what exactly needs to be changed.

I drum scan all my negatives and print them on a chromira to fuji crystal archive paper.

[didjiman]

Apetrovich35, pardon our skepticism. Your first post have a link to a commercial page and that you asked about how to print "like them" when the pictures on the site in question are fairly mandate, photographically speaking. May be if you post some of your pictures or other non commercial photographs on the web, people will be less skeptical.

[Bob F.]

Bottom line is that these are mass-produced studio stills. They will have probably been digitally manipulated and printed by the thousand on a lightjet, or output to a normal printing press if the quantities warranted the setup expense. None of which is within the remit of the APUG forums, as we are about hand printing from film.

If you want to discuss your film use, you are very welcome to do so, but scanning for digital output is not something we discuss in the main forums on APUG.

Cheers, Bob.

[Jarred McCaffrey]

A good approach is to link or post a single photo and discussions can happen from there. There are several different techniques and materials used in what you posted. Try picking just one and we can talk about it from there.

It shouldn't matter that X company is making offset ink postcards or whatever from the image. That's simply the reproduction of a finished work. I seem to remember that more than one photographer has reproduced their work in book form without sacrificing his analog soul. If the reproduction is reasonably accurate, we should be able to have a good discussion about tonal relationnships and techniques/materials that could be used to achieve the desired effects.

[jd callow]

Wow this thread is still going.
The prints are mostly crap.

From what I can tell by looking at the crap scans and having had some experience in this type of crap:
Some are made from dup's (dup's of the neg), others offset, some may be made from copy's (negs shot of the print). I don't think any are photocopied or inkjets -- although it is hard to say. Some may have been made from a fotoprint (early low res digital printer), but i doubt it, rhe newer ones were probably done on a frontier or similar, and some may actually be made from the original neg -- None are printed on anything nicer than RC or by anyone who cared about anything more than printing a ton of them.

Did I mention they are crap?