Photo buying advice

Written by Timothy Edberg

This photo buying advice is to help you become a more informed buyer of photographic art. There are a lot of things that go into the quality of a print besides your personal attraction to the image, and there are even unscrupulous sellers who exaggerate claims or conceal drawbacks. Of course, you must adore an image before you even think of buying it, but what you learn here may help guide you through the thicket of variables to decide if the price being asked is fair.

How Was the Print Made?

The foremost consideration is how the print was made. There is a dizzying variety of means of producing a photograph, and some are much better than others. All photographs fade and discolor slowly over time, sometimes over centuries and sometimes over months, depending on how it was made.

We won’t know for sure how long a print lasts until it actually starts to fade, but accelerated aging testing (blasting it with a bright light to make it fade faster) can make crude estimates of the display life of a print. Take these test results with a grain of salt, but they do give some indication of the longevity of a print made by a given process.

I’ll start with color processes. In the middle of the pack these days, in terms of display lifetime, are prints made in the old traditional fashion, with enlargers projecting a film image onto photosensitive paper, which is then processed in a series of chemical baths. Many digital photo printers use this same method, but substitute laser arrays or L.E.D. technology for the enlarger light source to project an image on to the photosensitive material (more on this later).

Even within this one category, there is a large variety of tested lifetimes. Every paper is different! The best seems to be Fuji Crystal Archive paper, with an estimated time before noticeable color shifts in the 60 years (or greater) range. Ironically, Eastman Kodak historically has had much poorer papers.

Several years ago, Kodak introduced a paper claiming to have a 100-year lifespan, but this claim is based on fading criteria four times looser than the Crystal Archive tests — the Kodak lifetime would be 25 years under the same conditions that the Fuji paper yields a 60 year lifetime. Prints produced on the Ilfochrome process are probably comparable to the Crystal Archive paper.

The digital variant of this classic process is to have the image exposed directly onto a photosensitive paper using three colored lasers, LEDs, or a CRT as the light source. The lifespan of these prints is exactly the same as the lifespan of the paper they’re printed on, but the quality of the image is likely to be better due to the exquisite control allowed by digital processing. Lightjet and Chromira are popular large format machines of this type.

Fuji’s Frontier and the Noritsu 3000 series printers currently dominate the market for silver halide digital printing, although recent developments in inkjet technology are rapidly replacing chemical and silver-based printing in favor of the more compact, less expensive, and eco-friendly inkjet equipment.

At the high end of the lifespan, the range is specialty prints made by expensive processes such as the carbon printing processes. In these prints, three-color separations are made of the image and long-lasting pigment sheets are laid down in registration on a piece of paper. These can last centuries but are REALLY expensive. You’re not likely to run into one of these in your church bazaar!

Digital output using inkjet printers is all the rage these days, but beware: still, some of these prints can be very short-lived. I had one posted in an east-facing window to catch a few hours of direct sun in the morning. After six months, it was significantly faded. The problem is that many consumer inkjet inks are dye-based, and these fade rapidly in bright light.

A pigment-based ink, on the other hand, lasts much longer. Epson‘s version of these inks, called Ultrachrome, and Canon‘s Lucia pigment inks, when printed on archivally stable papers, has been tested to last even longer than Crystal Archive paper before noticeable fading or color shifts.

If the print is made on a color photocopier, I wouldn’t even touch it. These prints can often have a lifespan of a few months before noticeable fading occurs.

Note that I have been talking of display lifetimes, i.e. lifespan when exposed to light. If your photo is up on the wall, this is the only lifespan to consider. But prints fade and discolor even in the dark. The processes that cause the dark color shifts are different from those that cause light fading, so the light and dark fading times are not directly related to each other.

Beware of photographers that praise the lifetime of their work using only the dark storage numbers!

If your photo is going to be on display, it is primarily the light fading that matters. To trump up the other figure in sales hype is disingenuous.

Black and white prints tend to last much longer than color prints. A properly processed traditional black and white print can last for centuries. Note that this assumes it is a properly processed print. (For those who don’t know what these terms mean, this includes printing on fiber-based paper, using two fixing baths, a hypo-clearing bath, selenium toning, and extremely long wash times.)

In general, fiber-based paper (FB) prints will outlive resin-coated (RC) prints. Inkjet output of black and white prints generally lasts longer than color inkjet prints, even when using similar ink/paper combinations. Thus the Ultrachrome or Lucia pigment inks, used with certain archival papers, is a good choice for printing black and white prints.

To sum up: question the longevity of consumer-grade inkjet or photocopier prints and ignore claims of dark storage lifetime. Look instead for inkjet or Giclée fine art prints produced on archival media using Ultrachrome or Lucia pigment inks.

Fuji Crystal Archive is the best traditional color paper available today for images printed from negatives or digital files. Specialty processes can be very expensive, but give exquisite images with long lifetimes. Traditional black and white prints should receive proper processing.

How Was the Print Matted?

The matting is the thick board with a big rectangular hole in the middle that holds the photograph. It makes the handling of the photo safer since you’re only touching the mat. It sets off the photo in the middle of a blank field, separating it from busy surroundings for a more pleasing display.

A beautiful matting job can enhance the beauty of the photo. And when placed in a frame, the matting spaces the photo away from the glass so it can’t stick to it.

Mats come in a variety of qualities. The cheapest is poster board, simply glorified cardboard used for short-term displays. This stuff is cheap, but it is laced with the natural acid of the wood pulp that it is made from. This acid will eat away at the photo wherever it touches. If the photo is matted this way it won’t last nearly as long as it would in an acid-free mat.

Good mat boards come in two kinds. One is a wood-based board, but with the acid (and wood lignin, also an evil agent) removed. Even better is a board made of cotton (“rag board”). Be careful, as some matboards are declared acid-free when the lignin hasn’t been fully removed, and it will turn acidic in time. So look for “acid-free” in the mat board, but the two boards I’ve just described go beyond simply acid-free.

If the print is framed, it should be framed with a mat. If the photo is just popped into a frame, it will eventually stick to the glass and be ruined in time. If you MUST frame without a mat, make sure to use Acrylic glazing (like Plexiglass) instead of glass.

Acrylic is far less likely to permit moisture condensation between the photo and glazing. Moisture can readily accumulate when the frame is exposed to rapid changes in temperature in a humid environment.  This trapped moisture will effectively “glue” the two surfaces together, ruining your precious print.

To sum up: poster board makes a poor quality mat, acid-free and lignin-free wood pulp board or rag board are the best. If the photo is in a frame, it should be matted, or at least glazed quality picture glass or Acrylic.

Caveat Emptor:

Let the buyer beware: there are a couple of other things to watch out for when buying. One is the size of the print. If you comparison shop, be advised that some photographers list the “size” of their print by the size of the mat board it is mounted on, not by the actual photo size.

This gives them a false appearance of economy. Be sure you know which your particular vendor is using. There is nothing wrong with carrying around a ruler to check the size of the photos for yourself when you visit a gallery or artist’s display.

Lastly, let me point out to you that prints can look different under different illuminations. A print that looks muddy and dark under dim light may spring to sparkling life under a brighter light. Prints viewed under the yellowish light of an incandescent bulb may look different when viewed under sunlight coming through a window. If at all possible you should view a potential purchase under the same illumination, both color and intensity, that it will have when you display it.

When buying in person, don’t be afraid to ask the photographer if you can hold the photo and walk around into a light source like the one you’ll be hanging it in. Since this shows you are an informed buyer who is seriously considering a purchase, they should have no objection to this.