Photo Tex

In my last posting (9 November 2019) I mentioned getting an interesting commission. This may involve printing on materials I've never used, which is part of what makes it interesting.

A client, for whom I've done some scanning and printing work, is looking for a photo to be installed or mounted on the doors of a large cabinet. He showed me a rough sketch of the cabinet, but the design is still in the conceptual stage. I don't have any dimensions, but the cabinet will hide a large flat-screen TV, so the print, which will span a pair of sliding doors, will be several feet wide. The client is an experienced carpenter and craftsman; he's made some beautiful furniture and built a number of custom high-end homes. I expect the cabinet to be nothing short of gorgeous, and I hope his idea of mounting a photo on its front doesn't impact that.

I could make a print (or prints) and then laminate it, or print on a plastic substrate, or print on metal; these last two would be farmed out, not printed on my 7900. I'd also thought about printing on Photo Tex®, a material I'd never used, nor even seen up close. I've sold images to clients who printed them on Photo Tex and then applied the material to mural walls or outdoor signage, but I've not seen the final results. Those clients claimed to be happy with the finished product.

I ordered a sample roll of Photo Tex from the maker. This got me a 42-inch (107 cm) wide roll ten feet (3 m) long, which of course is too large for the 24-inch 7900. This is a lot of material for $30 USD, plenty for making test prints with different profiles. It's a much better "deal" than the Photo Tex sample packs sold by my usual paper vendors.

The sample arrived quickly. I cut letter-size sheets from the roll, downloaded the canned profiles from Photo Tex. They offer two, one each for MK and PK. I had PK loaded in the printer so I printed my usual profile test page with the PK profile. It looked pretty bad, but I set it aside to view after 24 hours. I then swapped the black inks to MK and printed the same test image with the MK profile. A little better, but not much.

A day later I still found both test images to be wholly unacceptable. They are little better than a poorly made image printed on plain bond paper, or the lowest-gamut of mat papers. Washed out low contrast, faded-looking color, weak blacks.

Next I made a custom profile, something I don't often do in part because I so rarely need to, and in part because what I have for making profiles isn't very good. I use LaserSoft's Silverfast scanning software with both my Nikon V-ED 35mm film scanner and my Epson V850 Pro flatbed. Both are profiled with LaserSoft's "Advanced" targets. A print profile software package is available. The software is used to make a print with several hundred sample patches. After an adequate drying period the patch print is scanned on the flatbed, and the software generates a printer profile. My results have been quite variable and never really very good. In this case my print made with MK ink and the LaserSoft-generated profile was much worse than the prints made with Photo Tex's canned profiles.

Photo Tex is quite popular and I'm sure has its place. With the right printer and profile it may be possible to get a decent/accurate print on Photo Tex material. With what I have, and the kinds of images my client is likely to want, it's not.

Perhaps I expected too much. But it was an interesting experiment.

  --Jay