Printing quality art images on your inkjet printer involves a careful balancing act between the type of paper you use, your printer’s settings and your screen-resolution settings.

In many cases, however, a few test prints of the high-resolution image and classic trial-and-error will be your best education for.

We will not attempt to delve into the nuances of individual printer specifications, other than universal applications that apply to most ink-jet printers. We will, though, spend more time in this article speaking of the different types of looks and effects you can achieve simply by changing the type of paper you use.


Printer Inks:
The ink in your printer can be just as vital as what your are printing, and what you are printing on. It is the ink that will determine the two most important things for your fine-art print: color tone and longevity.

Regarding longevity, printer inks come in two flavors—dye and pigment. In an ever-small nutshell, dye inks tend to be more vibrant but fade more quickly; pigmented inks are derived from organic compounds and, therefore, have a much longer color life but tend to be not as vibrant as dyes. Pigmented inks, for example, are the type used in the Giclée (ghee-clay) printing process, which is a more expensive but a far superior printing method for fine art.

Regarding color tone, the more color cartridges you have in your printer, the better your color will be regardless of whether you are using dye or pigmented inks. For example, if you have a printer with only two ink cartridges (black and tri-color), your resulting color will be less true than if you have a printer with four ink cartridges (one black and three colors). And so the quality (and price) improves once you have six, eight, nine or twelve cartridges. However, for most home-use purposes, we recommend (from our experience) that a printer with four ink cartridges works adequately.


Printer Papers:
The most popular option for printing art is photo paper, which comes in two flavors: glossy and matte. Glossy-photo paper delivers enhanced color and sharpness but, due to its shiny surface, smudges easily. Also, with certain images in particular art styles, glossy can draw away from the original feel of a particular painting or image. For example, the artwork of Caravaggio, which is dark in nature, looks almost tawdry on glossy-art paper. It is our opinion that it is more true to the original brush of Caravaggio when a matte paper is used for printing his artwork. In your particular case, you may simply want to experiment printing the same image on glossy and matte to determine the winner.

One of our favorite papers to use is photo-rag paper. For a paper to qualify as ‘rag’ it has to be made of cotton. The advantage of a cotton-based paper is that it’s archival and lasts much longer than photo paper. Remember those pictures of yours from the 90s that are already starting to fade or yellow? Yes, photo paper fades more quickly unless it’s carefully preserved. The added perk of rag paper is that it strikes a wonderful balance between the color-tonality issues of glossy vs. matte photo paper. Rag has an excellent vibrancy to it—not quite as high as glossy, but much more than matte paper.

Rag, like photo paper, also has some extended family. There’s ‘warm’ and ‘cold’ rag. Warm is better for pictures of people, while cold is better for pictures of landscapes. Texture is the next item. There’s very fine and more coarse rag papers, which provide a texture. Texture on the paper is a nice artistic touch, but it can slightly distort image detail. Really, it depends what your preferences are and how much intricacy is in the particular image.


Professional Printing:
If you don’t want to print yourself, there are an ever growing number of places online and off that provide printing services. As long as you have your high-resolution image on a flash drive, CD, or DVD, you can take it to your local photographer’s shop and they can walk you through your custom-print options. Finally, many major retailers offer in-house printing services.

Visit our art tips page for more pointers and ideas of what to do with high-res images.