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Another less talked about aspect of printing is the depth or intensity of color saturation. Most high end professional printers will do a good job creating vivid prints, but some professional wide format printers are able to make colors that are more intense than others. Do your prints contain a full black? Although all printers print with black inks some print a deeper black adding to the look of a wider gamet. Are the reds a bright red rather than muddy rust color? Red is one of the harder colors to get fully saturated being a composite of magenta and yellow inks. The same is true to a lesser extent of green and blue tones. Some printers print with the three basic colors and others use black to deepen colors. Stan's Colorspan printer prints with all 11 colors at times in the blacks which gives it a saturation and depth not usually found with other printers. The Colorspan also lays down more ink on the paper than other printers which serves to increase the intensity and depth of colors.

                          

A short discussion of ink types is necessary here regarding what makes a superb print, although a fuller discussion will be found in Prints That Last. It is well known that printing with pigment inks will produce generally prints with a longer display life but they will not be as saturated and bright as those printed with dye based inks. Even the new Epson Ultrachrome inks, although brighter than the previous inks, will not fully match prints made with dye inks. The question then for anyone wishing to have prints made professionally by a master printer is which is most important, appearance in terms of vibrancy or the display life of the print. The answer to this may vary depending upon the purpose for the print which only the person contracting for a print job can answer.

Another aspect that is critical for producing a superb print is sharpness? What produces sharpness anyhow? There is no getting around the fact that image sharpness depends first and foremost upon the file size of the image. The larger the image the greater is the potential for sharpness and clarity. The real point at which one controls how sharp an image will be is at the beginning of the process when the image is being captured either in a digital camera or in the slide or print scanner. Camera's are limited in the maximum size of image depending upon their capability. An 8 megapixel camera will capture a much larger image than a 4 megapixel camera and therefore produce an image that has much higher sharpness and clarity. A flat bed scanner can scan at higher resolutions and make bigger file sizes with more resolution than a camera image. Stan prefers to use a flatbed scanner in his work with floral objects because he finds that he can get amazing clarity of detail that way which is not as available if he uses a digital SLR camera, as good as it may be.

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