Exploring lo-fi printing options

- I'm a photographic print snob. I admit it and I'm proud of it, I gotta say. I don't believe an image is really finished until it's on paper. You need to see that reflected light coming off of a piece of paper to get the same quality of light that you get when you look at something out in the real world. If you watched my Inkjet Printing for Photographers course, you've heard me ramble on about that in a kind of nauseating way for quite a while. You've also seen in that course that I can get very, very finicky about very precise adjustments of contrast and brightness and levels and particularly black and white as I strive to make a good print.

I really enjoy that work. I think that level of work is critical if you want to do a good job printing. So this week I'm gonna talk about not doing that because there's another way to go with prints, which is to go with more of a low fidelity type of print. That's possible now in a couple of different ways through some cool products and services that are out there now. Now the creators of these products and services might not be thrilled that I'm calling it low fidelity, but come on, the prints we're gonna see here are not top notch quality prints, but they're really nice and have a quality about them because of that lo-fi thing that they have.

I think we have all developed more of an eye for low fidelity over the recent years because of things like Instagram and Hipstamatic, and these technologies that grunge up our images. If you want to create a grungy looking print, you can do that with your high quality printer simply by grunging up the image and then printing it. You'll get a very high quality print of a low quality source. Another way to go though is to find a printer that doesn't do as good a job. What I've got here right now are two little tiny battery-powered portable printers.

I covered this printer before on the Practicing Photographer because these things are great if you're traveling and you like shooting people. Because after taking a picture of a stranger, you can actually give them a print and that's a really satisfying thing to do. If you're traveling in a poorer country, in a lot of cases you're able to give people maybe the only family photos they have. So these are great for that. They're not technically great quality printers and that means they're really fun to create what feel to be more like analog prints than the perfectly refined digital prints that we normally get.

This is the Fujifilm Instax SP-1. It doesn't weigh very much. It runs on the lithium batteries. You buy paper in packages of 10 and it's much very like the Polaroid process of old. The film or the paper itself has the same feel as Polaroid. It's got a chemical pack here at the bottom that gets squeezed over the film, over the paper. So when you print, this comes out and it's blank, and you wait for it to develop. So here on this side are prints that I've done with the Instax.

It prints pretty quickly. Costs varies, you buy packs of 10. I haven't looked lately to see what the prices are, you can do the math, they're not that expensive. Obviously, they're small. Just as are the prints from this Polaroid. This is a Polaroid Zink printer. This is a different technology. This replaces the old Polaroid PoGo printers, but yields very similar results, although I think the quality has improved some. These are two by three inch prints on Polaroid special paper. You print to this and they come out and they're done.

You don't have to wait. Both of these printers I've done all this printing from my iPhone. You install custom apps for your iPhone or Android phone. The Fuji turns itself into a Wi-Fi hotspot and you connect your phone to that hotspot, so transfer to the printer is very quick. The Polaroid is a Bluetooth device. You pair it to your phone and images get sent one at a time to the Polaroid via Bluetooth. So when I look at these, it's really hard for me not to look at them first and go, oh wow, you know, these highlights are blown, the shadows are stopped up, the color's skewed.

These are not great quality prints. If I relax and chill out some and let myself get into it, they're really fun. Let's start with the Fuji. These are definitely the lesser quality. They have a very, very soft, well, they're just very soft. You don't get a lot of sharpness out of this printer. They're a little washed out. They look actually like old Polaroids, it's like they've already been aged. But some of the things that happen to the colors are really interesting. This print, this is a geological feature that's just full of all sorts of reds and things, reds and oranges, and they've blown out and washed away.

It's got this really nice muted pastel quality that I like. Sometimes that doesn't always work. This has gone too pastel, I want the reds and blacks here. Here I've seen a big color shift. Those are the things you can kind of expect to see here. Again setting that aside, what I get are these images that have kind of a nice dreamy old photo quality that I really like. I said before that you could create a grungy or lo-fi image and send it to your high quality printer. What's nice about this is is it feels more analog.

It's not but there's a randomness to it and an unpredictability about both of these printers. I don't know what's going to come out of them, and I'm not used to that on my regular printer. So it's kind of a return to more of a film and darkroom sort of vibe that I'm enjoying. Neither printer does very well at black and white. The Fuji actually does a little bit better than the Polaroid. This actually looks like color, it's got a lot of warmth in it. This is not truly neutral, but it's a little more black and white, but it's lost a lot of sharpness. So these are the Polaroid prints over here, much better color saturation, better sharpness.

They look, here you can see what I was talking about, a lot more variation in the reds and oranges here, more detail in the clouds. The Polaroid prints don't have that old dreamy quality, but they're still a little bit random in what comes out. They still have an analog feel to me, and so it feels, it's definitely lower fi than what I'm used to. Couple of nice things about the Polaroid. It's nice that the print comes out and it's done.

You can say, oh but it's so exciting to watch these develop. Eh, maybe for the first couple of times, then you just want to see if you got the print right so that you can change it and do another one if you need to. These come out and they're done, I like that. It's also got this cool feature where it will tile an image across multiple frames. I can either do two by two or three by three. I didn't do anything layout-wise. I just opened up the app, chose this image, and said give it to me as a tile of four, and it printed these out. I actually like the divisions in here. I could trim them if I wanted and get a more seamless picture, but I like the tiled look.

Subject matter-wise, because these prints are small, they're not great for printing big landscapes. I tried it a couple of times and, you know, they're legible but a big landscape needs to be a little better. These are fun for printing discrete things, objects, simple scenes. Because they're small, they need to be fairly simple. Portraits, pictures of people, close-ups, those are gonna be the things that take well to this print size. Obviously any image where you need fine control of detail, where you want to be sure you can see something in the dark shadows or preserve bright highlights, you're not gonna get that from these printers.

That's the nature of lo-fi printing, so you gotta give up on that. What you're probably going to find is that adjustment isn't gonna make a big difference. I've printed some things on here before and gone, oh it needs more contrast, and gone and upped the contrast, and maybe there's a little bit of change, but there's not much. You have to really start skewing things a long way before you see a big change. So again, this is not about technical accuracy. It's about getting a feeling and these printers have very different feelings. They're both lo-fi, they're both interesting, and these are a lot of fun to play with.

Another way to go is with a service. There's a company called Parabo that makes a smartphone app that allows you to order prints of various kinds using a couple of different technologies. I have here a print that's printed on newsprint, and it actually comes folded up. Now I'm not clear if they're offering this service anymore. I did these only a couple of weeks ago and I just looked at their app and this wasn't here, so it may be that either this is offline for now or it's going to come back later.

So again, technically this is not a great print. It's newsprint so it can't hold a very dark black, so the blacks in this image are not real strong and that's affecting the overall contrast. I would like to stop for a moment to say don't worry that horse is not dead, it's just asleep. It got up soon after I took this picture but I stopped because this did look like a horse funeral. The horse is fine, it was quite active once it stood up. It's a very low contrast print. Once I let go of my desire for great contrast, I like the feeling of it.

They intentionally send these folded. I didn't do this, and if you're going, oh the creases are too bad, why did you fold it up. That's a feature. It does have, that adds to the lo-fi vibe. It adds a casualness to the image. One nice thing about Parabo is they have for sale off their website, a lot of cool mounting and hanging options. Really nice clips, boards you can hang images on, they sell strips that you can attach smaller photos to. So this is meant to be a casual lo-fi display and they've hit it.

A lot better resolution detail than I get out of these, obviously bigger size. I can show you one other. I think this print works better than the one I'm about to show you. One thing with all of these technologies is you're gonna learn what works and what doesn't, and what you might try printing and what you shouldn't bother with. I thought this would work better than it does. This image I don't believe can survive well the contrast loss that it has. There's too much fine little detail in there. It just looks muddy and lost. They got the color right.

They didn't do anything wrong. It just turns out that this subject matter's not well suited to newsprint. So that's one thing they offer. They have several other things including this. This is a risogram I believe. It's some kind of very strong screen. This is a fairly coarse halftone. Halftone is the same process that's used in a newspaper photo. Your image is printed through a screen and various patterns and densities of dots create the appearance of shades of gray, so dithering kind of effect.

I like this, it's coarse, it's rough, very stylized. I don't know if you can tell what this is. This is a macro shot of the letters from a rusted out manual typewriter. So it's old and rusted to begin with. It serves itself well, or it lends itself well to an old rusted looking kind of printing technique. These prints are, this is really nice thick paper. They're very well packaged. It's a very easy service to use and their app is very well designed. I think one of these is around $20 or so.

So you could argue that's pricey for a print this size but it's a cool effect and once you know how to use it, I think you might find this a nice alternative for when you're looking for a lo-fi approach. So a couple years ago I would be surprised if you had told me that I would be doing a feature here on how to get low quality prints, but the more I do it, the more I'm enjoying it. It's a really good way to shake up your visual system and loosen yourself up and get yourself thinking in a different aesthetic. These printers are especially fun because they're fun and portable.

You can take 'em around and give prints to your friends. They're inexpensive to work with. They're very, very easy and quick to do right out of your phone. So if you're just getting started in printing, and you're willing to give up some quality, this is a fun way to get used to your images on paper. So you still need to know your histograms and know how to get a good print out of a good printer, but spend some time if you're into printing also thinking about these nice lo-fi options.