Behind the Scenes to Printing Fine Art

2021 Island Park

Fine art isn’t just art that is fine to look at. It is a creative art that doesn’t explain what the camera captures, but what the artists themselves capture. In fine art, the artist uses the camera as a tool in order to find a new perspective of a place or object.

This type of photography is more about the photographer’s perspective than it is about capturing a pretty picture. In my Professional Imaging class, one of the segments we focused on was fine art. For me, that was the landscape you see below. In this blog, you will see the behind-the-scenes look at how this photo was created step by step.

I hope you enjoy it!

The 3 photos below are of the same location, but were bracketed when taking the picture. Bracketing means that you set your camera to take 3 photos when you hit the shutter button. The 1st one will take a picture of the settings you programmed in your camera, the 2nd will take a darker photo and the 3rd will take a lighter photo. Bracketing helps with editing later on because each photo will expose different parts of the photo nicely: the sky, the shadows, and the subject (in this case, the bridge and grass).

After getting these 3 photos, I imported them into Lightroom and merged them together, and edited it to create the photo below. This photo will be used for the website.

In order to get ready for printing, we have to change the editing just a little bit so the resolution will be perfect. Otherwise, the photo will come out very dark and blurry. Below are the adjusted edits that I made and sent in for my photo to be printed for a big print of 16×24.

When printing, you need to focus on the shadows, sharpness, and warmth. The levels need to be high because the big printers processes it slower than normal printers do for documents. Because of the slower process, we need to print the image lighter so it doesn’t come out super dark and have very low levels of saturation. If you are able to print your photos yourself, you’ll want to be sure to do some small test printing in order to get the right colors and sharpness so it can be portfolio worthy.