Home > Topics > Site and Board Matters > New Article Announcements & Discussions > New Article By Michael Durr – Aluminyze Metal Prints
Tagged: metal prints, printing, prints
In a continuing series of articles about printing and showing your work, Michael Durr shares a video review of Aluminyze Metal Prints. If you haven’t seen it you can check it out HERE.
Kevin Raber
Owner and Publisher of photoPXL
Looks super Michael. Thanks for sharing.
Indeed!
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Mike Nelson Pedde
Victoria, BC
https://www.wolfnowl.com/
I took a look at the Aluminyze site. It appears that they do not provide a profile for their print process. The site notes that someone at the shop will optimize the file prior to printing. Wonder how this works in relation to fidelity to the original intent and wishes of the client.
Having seen your article, I recently sent in an image to be printed 20×24″. It is a rather dark, black and white image that includes a full range of tones from black to white. I have previously printed it successfully on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag Bright White using Piezography inks. While it prints well on paper, it looks even better on a calibrated flatscreen monitor, presumably due to the monitor’s higher contrast ratio. Hoping to get a more luminous print, I selected the glossy silver finish which Aluminyze advertizes as “luminous”. What they don’t say is that printing with this finish renders whites as a dull gray and in fact compresses the tonal range rather than expanding it as I had hoped. The blacks are not as dense as I obtained when printing on matte paper, it appears to be missing some of the mid-level gray tones, and the detail seems not quite as crisp. The glossy surface also produces annoying reflections that further detract from the finished image. If you catch the aluminum print at just the angle with enough illumination behind you, it does light up, but it is almost impossible to set up a viewing environment that works for the entire print. Even with the 30% promo from PhotoPXL, I still wasted $84.
Aluminyze did offer to reprint the image with a white finish at a 60% discount, but my guess it that this would likely have been at best no better than printing on paper so I passed.
Not to say they did anything wrong other than fail to provide enough information on their web site to make an informed choice of finish, but if you do order from them I strongly recommend first getting a small test print before ordering a large one, and that you avoid the glossy or matte silver finish unless you have good reason to believe it will work for your image.
Jonathan Sachs
http://www.dl-c.com
Jonathan Sachs
Digital Light & Color
www.dl-c.com
They look very impressive and once you consider that you can avoid the cost of framing a finished print, the prices aren’t out of line. I look forward to trying a few as I get get going promoting my personal work once again. As Jonathan has mentioned above, it probably takes experimentation to find the best type of photos that translate well onto metal.
Thank you for the insight!
Traveling and photographing for work and play for more than 30 years.
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[email protected]
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