Despite the "radio silence" on the blog lately, I've been making prints as usual, in quantities typical for my own work and for client print jobs, for most of this year. The 7900 has performed well, with minimum hassles. I've swapped from PK to MK and back to PK a couple of times. There's been the occasional need for cleaning head channel pairs, but nothing out of the ordinary for these machines. Until earlier this week.
I got a commission to make a small framed print of one of my snowy owl photos. The picture was made during the irruption of these birds we had here in northwestern Montana in early 2012. Looking through those archives during a recent file purge, I found the raw file and decided to do a little work on it. I liked the result and made a small print. It was still hanging on the display booth in my print studio when a visitor saw it and requested a slightly larger version. This would be framed in one of my "standard" frame sizes.
The set-up is described in a posting from February, 2013.
For this standard size I make two prints on a 13 x 19 inch sheet. The prints are 8.2 x 12.2 inches (about 21 x 31 cm), with about one inch between prints. I cut the sheet across the center, leaving half-inch margins. Margins at the top and bottom of the sheet are a little less than one inch, more than adequate for hinge mounting the prints. I mount these in mats with 8 x 12 inch openings (overmatted, so the mat covers just a bit of the ink). The resulting framed prints are economical to produce. They are clearly larger than the 8 x 10 pictures I often find in the local galleries, so I can sell them at somewhat higher prices. These are the smallest framed prints I make; they've sold quite well locally.
I set up to print the owl picture and another, as usual. When the files were sized and then optimized for printing in Photoshop I pasted them into a template I've used many times. This is a simple, empty Photoshop document with guides setup for the two prints. I drag the pictures so they snap to the guides, and then print as usual.
This has worked fine, but this time the images on the sheet were very slightly less 8 x 12 inches, which means they were too small for my mats. I've no idea why this happened. I did everything just as I have many times before, but to be sure I checked all settings, sizes, etc. It all looked right.
I've not had time to reproduce the process and make another print, but I will do that in an attempt to understand and fix the problem. To complete the commission I made a new, single print on a smaller sheet. This resulted in a print of exactly the expected dimensions. I've since made several others, all of which were fine.
--Jay
