| The Craft and Art of the Fine Digital Print

Realize your artistic vision by mastering the secrets of creating digital fine prints.

In this course, students learn a workflow for creating fine digital prints. The workflow includes digital capture, digital processing in Adobe Photoshop and/or Lightroom, printing on an inkjet printer, and handling the finished print. Digital processing and printing topics include maximizing image quality at capture, color management, sharpening and noise reduction, black & white printing, proofing, matching screen and print, and making local and global edits to color and tonality.

You will also discuss the qualities and characteristics of a fine print, many of the plethora of options for inks and papers available to today’s printers, and how best to produce a print to realize an artistic vision, including choosing the best paper for a particular project. As the week progresses, we will focus on assessing prints, judging how best to improve them, and then demonstrating how to make those improvements.

Particular consideration is given to making large prints. Students have the opportunity to examine the challenges of printing on a large scale and to learn a wide range of techniques for maximizing overall print quality and for creating and handling large prints.

Students will work with Epson printers and will be printing primarily with Epson, Canson, and Hahnemuhle papers. We will also discuss printing on non-traditional substrates such as rice papers. Additional papers may be purchased from the Digital Service Department on campus.

Course requirements

This course requires that students use the school (Mac) computers. Students should bring files on a portable hard drive.

All images copyright Jim Nickelson.

Past student work

Charles Leverett, Penny Linn, Edward McCranie, Sherwood Samet