Posters are a great way to promote your business or decorate your surroundings.
Poster shops — brick and mortar or online — do a brisk trade in photographic posters, selling everything from celebrity portraits (if only I had a Marylyn Monroe shot!) to the street photographs of Robert Doisneau (if only I had a photo of snogging Parisians*), to the iconic landscapes of Ansel Adams.
Four years ago, I took the plunge and prepared a couple of my most popular Eighties Vancouver photos for printing. I’d considered running off my own posters — after all, I own one of the best photo printers on the market, the Epson Epson Stylus Pro 4900 (recently superseded by the SureColor P800) that I use to produce my limited and open edition prints. However, this is not an economic way to produce large runs of print work.
There are three popular ways to print today: Inkjet, digital, and offset.
Inkjet
Today, most homes have an inkjet printer. You probably have one in your home office to print off bank statements and recipes. Most likely, your office printer can also print decent photos for the family scrapbook. If it is a “photo quality” printer, it probably came with a pack of 4×6 photo paper. It’s also likely that it has a carriage width of just 8½”, making it unsuitable for anything other than posters sized for telephone poles … not that I have anything against telephone poles.
If you’re an enthusiast or pro photographer, you might own a dedicated photo printer. Smaller photo printers — say, with a carriage width of 13” — will still fit on a desk, though you’ll be more likely to give it its own stand. Prices have come down for these printers, but just like your office printer its the ink where they get you.
For instance, my $35 Canon office printer sets me back $75 every time it needs new inks. That doesn’t hurt as much as filling the thirsty Epson 4900, which holds 11 x 200ml pigment ink cartridges, at $115 a pop. Yup, $1265 worth of ink.
So, it goes without saying that the Epson is reserved for making my quality prints. Using it to print posters would not be economical, unless I called them “limited edition” posters and priced them the same as my prints.
Digital
Digital printing is now a widely-available method, which includes the use of inkjet and Xerographic (electrophotographic) printers at commercial scale. Most towns of any size have digital print houses. However, whether you live in Toronto or Canal Flats, you can likely access an online print shop where you simply upload your design for printing.
Designing and preparing your poster
Before we move on to the third printing option, let’s examine some of the ways you might design your own poster.
If you are familiar with word-processing software — Microsoft Word or Apple Pages — it’s pretty straightforward to produce camera-ready artwork. In all cases your design should be output as a PDF file.
If you’re already familiar with Photoshop, you can certainly put a poster together quickly enough. Better yet, if you are a graphic design pro, working with an application like InDesign … well, you don’t need any advice from me.
Another option is to find a poster template. A quick online search turns up many candidates, as simple or complex as you like. My preference leans toward simple, clean and uncluttered. You really only need a title, your name and contact info — perhaps your website and social media profiles.
Finally, if you aren’t handy with any of these options, or you’d rather concentrate on the imaging part of the process, you could hire a graphic designer, like I did for the Vancouver posters.
Offset
The first rotary offset lithographic printing press was made in England and patented in 1875 by Robert Barclay. It is still by far the most economical way to produce large runs of print material today — fliers, business cards, magazines, books, and posters.
Duotone
If your image is black & white, I’d suggest one of the most economical and flattering ways to interpret monotone images: the duotone process. Duotones add a second ink to the primary black, a Pantone colour of your choice (employing two of four plates in a 4-colour press), to add depth and tone to the image.
Preparing a duotone is beyond the scope of this article, but is pretty straightforward if you know your way around Photoshop. This Adobe guide outlines the process. The results are beautiful, as near to photographic quality as you’re likely to see outside of traditional darkroom prints or modern inkjet prints on fine art paper. If you’re farming-out design, coordinate this request with your designer and printer.
Choosing a printer
Choose your print shop wisely. Ask to see a variety of their work. Do they have experience printing photographs to a high standard?
I was lucky enough to have access to one of the best printing houses in North America to produce my posters: Hemlock Printers. Hemlock serves an international clientele who value the ultimate in print quality, not to mention environmentally-friendly processes, from paper products to the modern carbon-neutral Heidelberg presses used in their Burnaby, BC facility.
The video tutorial above concludes with a video short (original here) made on their premises during the printing of my eighties Vancouver posters featuring Broadway & Heather, 1983 and Wooden Roller Coaster, 1986.
Vintage Vancouver posters available here.
*Doisneau’s famous Le baiser de l’hôtel de ville (Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville), it turns out, was staged. The truth came out in 1992 when Jean and Denise Lavergne attempted to sue the photographer for photographing them without their consent. The lawsuit forced Doisneau to reveal that he had asked Françoise Delbart and Jacques Carteaud, lovers whom he had just seen kissing, to reprise the embrace that would come to define the romance of Paris.