Disclosure

My printer scares me.

Update: it becomes less scary with use.

Notes on Margins

Learned in Book School* to always design for the finished product -- then work backwards. Am making sets of photo art prints, but only planned as far as the various paper sizes.

Then brought home some inexpensive frames to see how the proof prints look framed and behind glass. Margins around the images either really worked or really didn't work.

Didn't work: anything where a little white strip of paper shows all the way around.

Really didn't work: narrow margins that are different top/bottom and right/left, leaving unequal thin white strips all around.

Worked: one inch margins. They give the print a matted look without the mat. And the wider borders give the images an intimate,  jewel-like quality.

Really worked: equal left-right margins with extra space at bottom. Mini art prints. Very nice.

Will have to do test prints close to the edge as the printer will go, so when framed there aren't any margins at all. This should have been the first step once I started making proof prints.

Also have to go back though the images and rethink crops and re-do templates -- all because I forgot what I learned in Book School.

*RIT School of Print Media

Oh Printer where art thou?

I have two degrees with the word "print" in them and still wasn't prepared for the arrival of my Canon Pixma Pro9000 printer. But haven't got a printing press or print studio, so some form of digital device was in order -- make that on order.

The new printer came with a new footprint: large. It now has it's very own table in my workspace, residing on one of those sturdy wooden kid-sized tables from before Fisher-Price.

The fun parts:

1. Purchasing a selection of art papers and learning to feed the heavy-weight papers through the printer

2. Installing print drivers, deinstalling and reinstalling drivers

3. Making AdobeLightroom and Canon Pixma printer play nice together

4.  Locating color profiles, and using them

5. Thirty-minute conversations with Canon tech support about loading paper, color management and installing print drivers (really good tech support by the way)

The printer and I are friends now. Just wish we had more time to play...