Leighton Buzzard Photographic Club: Photographic printing

In the digital world, the printing of photographs has been in decline. Mark and Judy want to encourage printing. And the main purpose of their workshop was to get us talking about printing, both with them and between ourselves.

During the workshop they showed us, and discussed, some of the many prints they have produced over the last 40 years. They opened with some “trade processed” prints and continued with some of their own chemical and digital prints.

They also talked about mounts for prints and some of the old darkroom tricks used in chemical printing. Most of these – such as perspective corrections, retouching, and colour corrections – still translate to modern digital post-processing and printing.

With their digital prints they discussed their experiments with composites, colour-popping, digital “stretching”, tinting, and adding text to images.

After explaining the differences between the Adobe RGB and sRGB colour spaces, Mark and Judy continued with examples of pairs of prints produced in different ways, followed by a discussion of printer profiling and types of paper.

Like nearly all photographers, they now print digitally and they finished off with some of their recent work.

This was a fascinating and educational look at Mark and Judy’s photo printing experiences over many years, and all entertainingly delivered. And there was much for us – whether novice or experienced printers – to learn from it.

We are always keen to share our passion for photography and provide a warm welcome for new members at our meetings (at Greenleas School, Derwent Road). We run a varied programme of activities for photographers of all levels. See our website at lbpc.org.uk for details and join us soon to unleash your creativity.