Digital Prints

12
Mastering Digital Printing
Where Are They Now?
Jon Cone would go on to many other milestones, and he remains a key player in the digital printing
world. Graham Nash still takes photographs and is the figurehead of Nash Editions, while Mac Holbert
continues to run the day-to-day operations. David Coons and his first wife, Susan, opened their own
fine-art scanning service (ArtScans) two doors down from Nash Editions in 1993. Steve Boulter is a
consultant to the digital imaging industry. Charlie Wehrenberg still lives in San Francisco and continues
to work in the art world. Jack Duganne opened his own digital printmaking studio (Duganne Ateliers)
in Santa Monica in 1996.
All seven remain actively involved with art in general and with digital printmaking in particular.
Defining Digital Printing
Just what is digital printing anyway? The way I like to describe it is by being more specific
and using the words “high-quality digital printing.” This phrase defines the boundaries of
a complex topic and helps us focus on the subject of this book. So, let’s break down highquality
digital printing into its components. This may seem like an elementary exercise,
but it’s important to understand the territory we’re about to enter.
High Quality
High quality means better than normal or above average. This is not ordinary printing but
something at a higher level. Something more akin to art. (“Photo quality” is another term
often used for this in relation to inkjet printing.)
Of course, talking about art gets tricky. People have been debating its definition for thousands
of years, and it certainly won’t end here. However, I equate “high quality” with “art,”
so for our purposes, art (and I use the term very broadly) is created by individual photographers
and/or artists—they can be the same or not, and I’ll sometimes call the combination
“photographer-artists”—even if it’s only as a hobby or sideline. Whether it’s destined
for the walls of the Louvre or the walls of a living room or corporate boardroom, art is meant
to be displayed, to be admired—and yes, even bought and sold, and to provide inspiration
and an emotional connection with the artist or the viewer’s own thoughts and feelings.
The world of commercial art, which includes the fields of graphic design, advertising,
and marketing communications—commercial imagemaking—are on the edges of this
universe, and I’ll cover them in a limited way. But, we won’t spend much time with the
digital printing technologies that produce signs and banners, brochures, billboards, event
graphics, building wraps, and vehicle signage. While photographers and artists can—and
frequently do—use commercial technologies to create their high-quality work, that world
is not the primary focus of this book.
Digital
Here’s the basic concept: Digital means using numbers to represent something, and that’s
exactly what a computer does. A normal image is converted into numerical data (a long string
of ones and zeros) that describe or quantify each sample point or “pixel” (short for picture