Guide to
Print

It is not difficult to achieve professional quality prints with the imaging assets you purchase. In fact, it’s easy. Some buyers print their posters at home, while many take advantage of low-cost large-format printing available in their local communities. In any case, you can get the poster you want with a minimum of hassle if you follow these helpful tips.

Where to print?

We represent a collective of artists and not printmakers, and this is by choice. Making art is one thing, printing it is another art in itself. That said, there are literally hundreds of great sites to print your images on the Internet and probably a large number of capable printers near you right now, in your own city or town. We suggest you support the economy of your region: buy locally! (Hint: to enable location on your browser and device, click on this Google link, and scroll down to the Business results section to find many more options than you probably expect.) The main thing you want from your printer is a good quality, heavyweight poster paper and the ability to print up to 24 inches per side. And that is all. Order these two things and you’ll be halfway to printing the art of your dreams. If you want to know more, read this page, below, where you will find all kinds of information.

Color space (Huh?)

The acquired images are downloaded in RGB color space. In the old days of printing, CMYK was the de facto color space for commercial four-color printing. CMYK works by adding pigment to white paper to create a color. It uses three colors (cyan, yellow and magenta) and pure black to represent an image. It is not interchangeable with RGB (which is mainly used in digital media and can represent a much wider range of vivid colors using red, green and blue pixels) due to the reduced gamut of CMYK and the subtractive four-color model. An RGB image printed on a CMYK-only printer will appear washed out (or even quite strange in terms of color reproduction if a particular RGB color is outside the CMYK gamut). Nowadays, most printers accept RGB color space documents and some only print RGB color space documents. If you need CMYK for your printing, no problem. Write to us after purchase and we will send it to you (with a generic color profile SWOP2006). More information about color spaces below:

TL;DR…RGB color spaces vs. CMYK

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General size considerations

All acquired images are downloaded in uncompressed 300 dpi RGB PDF format (without embedded color profiles) and in one of the three available sizes and resolutions. For 3:2 posters, the size is 10,800 x 7,200 pixels, with a native paper size of 36 x 24 inches. For 2:3 posters, the size is 7,200 x 10,800 pixels, with a native paper size of 24 x 36 inches. For 1:2 posters, the size is 7,200 x 7,200 pixels, with a native paper size of 24 x 24 inches. The native paper size is ideal, but images can be printed larger (with loss of quality) or smaller (with no appreciable loss of quality). The basic rule is that you can go somewhat larger, and you may not notice any loss of quality at all; and you can always go smaller and get no appreciable loss of quality.

Large format printer hardware may have difficulty printing to the edge of the document. This is not a fault of the image itself, but rather of the target printer used. Many high quality printers print to the edge of the paper or very close to it (or may even allow bleed beyond the paper), so it is best to keep this in mind when printing. If you want a white border around the print, for example to simulate a matte finish, you can easily achieve this by compressing the image to fit the maximum print area of a given printer. If you want a large matte area, you can resize the image or print centered with printer compression to achieve this look. It’s a creative process, so be creative.

REDUCE THE SIZE OF IMAGES

If you want to print a poster at home and you have tabloid printing, you can print them this way. However, he has some decisions to make. First of all, allowing the printer to maximize the image to fit the paper may not be a good idea to get the most accurate printout. In the case of a 2:3 image, for example, the print proportions would be incorrect to faithfully represent the image as designed. An 11″ x 17″ printed page (tabloid) can accommodate a 24″ x 36″ image if scaled down, and with no apparent loss of quality; however, 11″ x 17″ represents an image, although very close to 2:3, which is actually 1:1.54. If you print full width, there will be a small amount of wasted height and you will have to trim the print. However, if you can tolerate minimal distortion, you can print images in 2:3 format at 11 x 17 inches and in 3:2 format at 17 x 11 inches. A 1:1 image will print at 11 x 11 inches, of course.

The A3 paper size is functionally equivalent to the 11″ x 17″ tabloid paper size. It measures 11.7 x 16.5 inches. However, the printing of images will have identical considerations to printing in tabloid dimensions.

INCREASE THE SIZE OF IMAGES

If you wish to print in a larger size, you assume all risks. That said, buyers have reported that they print in what could be considered an excessively large format and are satisfied with the results. In essence, it has a lot to do with how close you intend to see the final print. A print size of 4 x 6 feet (instead of the native 2 x 3 feet) will work, as long as you’re not too concerned about image quality up close. From normal viewing distances, this can look very nice. In fact, many printers will enlarge an image using a nice, natural built-in blur to accommodate these enlargements. Your mileage may vary. Give it a try.

Also, if you print a 24″ x 36″ image, for example, and frame it with a large matte border, you will get a very large and impressive piece of artwork overall. How big is too big? The only limit is taste. Many fine works have been framed with huge mattes. A framing store will help you decide what looks best in your space. As with finding a favorite print shop, we’re sure there’s a framing store very close to you right now if you live in almost any city or town on Earth. However, if you are viewing this site at a research outpost in Antarctica or on the International Space Station, we cannot guarantee the availability of any particular resource.

TL;DR…RGB color spaces vs. CMYK

RGB – an additive color space
RGB colors (red, green and blue) are the colors you see on your computer monitor and other digital displays. For these colors, we add various amounts of red, green or blue to a black canvas to obtain different colors and, when these three colors are added in equal intensity, they form white. This means you can do a lot of bright, neon colors with this color mode that don’t really translate well to print, but look fantastic on a screen. The range of colors in a given color space is called gamut.

CMYK – a subtractive color space
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CMYK colors consist of cyan, magenta, yellow and black (or key). They are subtractive, which means that the initial canvas is white and, as colors are added, it becomes darker. The printout uses the CYMK color mode because we start with a white background (like paper) and add colors until it becomes darker. Because we can’t add white, CMYK colors are not as bright as RGB colors, so the colors you print tend to look duller than they do on screen. Thus, the gamut of CMYK is reduced compared to RGB and, in fact, certain RGB color values cannot be reproduced at all in CMYK (they are out of gamut) and are discarded when converting to this mode. Since it originated in four-color printing that used many text elements, sometimes printed over other colors, pure black is a special case in CMYK, as it is given its own “channel”. In theory, blacks can be reproduced much more accurately on white paper in CMYK than in RGB, which is a possible advantage of this color space.