Print Types

Piezography

Piezography is a revolutionary fine-art ink system made out of poly-encapsulated carbon particles that reflect and diffract light in very unique ways. Prints made with Piezography ink have a special tonal “depth” that is hard to explain verbally but when people see a print, they get it.

Resolution & Tonal Fidelity

Because you get rid of all color inks when you convert a printer to Piezography and then replace those color inks with intermediate shades of grey ink, the physical amount of nozzles that get fired to make an individual section of print is dramatically more. Whenever you have more dots and whenever those dots are closer together, you get increased resolution.

Piezography re-creates the fine hair-line resolution you get from contact-printing in the darkroom. Combine the quality of modern CMOS digital cameras and Piezography and you get the ultimate monochrome print. Cone Editions is the lab that invented the system and we have some unique tools that we’ve built in-house that allow the ULTIMATE achievable resolution and tonal fidelity.

Pigment Inkjet

An inkjet print is a monochrome or colour image produced with an inkjet printer using a digital file, whether the original matrix is digital or stems from the digitisation of an analogue matrix (negative or slide). The first inkjet photos date back to the late 1980s with the launch of the IRIS printer, the pioneer in Fine Art or "Giclée" prints. Pigment inkjet prints were introduced in the 1990s. They were produced with liquid pigment inkjet printers, using an intermittent (non-continuous) printing system. This printing process is known as DOD – Drop on Demand: the ink droplets are ejected on demand using a thermal or piezoelectric system.

Platinum / Palladium

The Platinum Palladium print has a long tradition, going back to the beginning of the history of photography, although the first patent of the process was only recorded in England in 1873 by William Willis. It was widely publicized until World War I, but due to cost issues and the difficulty of obtaining platinum and palladium, diverted for warfare, the process was forgotten until the early 1970s.

George Tice begins working in platinum and publishes "The Lost Art of Platinum Printing" in 1970, and demonstrates platinum printing in the widely disseminated, Life Library of Photography volume Caring for Photographs in 1972, reemerging the interest in this type of printing as a photographic specialty in the area of ​​Fine Art Print. Photographers like Eduard Steichen, Paul Strand, Alfred Stieglitz, or Eduard Weston, among others, were some of the most important users of this technique since the 19th century. It was however Irving Penn one of the most outstanding contemporary artists, impressing with great mastery on Platinum Palladium, a reasonable part of his finest images.

Platinotype

1°

The next step is to expose the paper to ultraviolet light in contact with the negative, then chemically processed and washed in running water. What results from all this work is an image with an unmistakable atmosphere, formed only with pure platinum and palladium metal microparticles embedded in the fibers of the paper.

2°

It all starts with the judicious choice of a high quality paper, 100% cotton. This is followed by emulsification with a solution of platinum and palladium salts.

This photographic printing technique is distinguished from others by the absence of any additional substrate, making the image part of the paper and with the chemical stability of platinum and palladium. Images become as permanent as the high-quality paper that supports them. Its duration in perfect conditions, can be evaluated in the order of the hundreds of years, making the Platinotype much desired by museums as well as collectors of photography. We can also highlight the lack of brightness, a very extensive and delicate tonal range, three-dimensionality sensation and other less tangible attributes, which give these impressions a unique character and luminosity.

Silver Gelatin

The invention of silver gelatin based photography as a ready made media changed the world as profoundly as the printing press, and the personal computer. It changed the world by making photography both portable and widely accessible. No longer did photographers have to manufacture their negatives immediately before exposure and likewise when they went to print those negatives. The invention of shelf-stable photographic media transformed photography from a tool with rigid technical constraints tool used by only those who went to great lengths to use it and made it a medium for the masses. Silver gelatin media launched photography’s classical period by allowing freely roaming photographers to go out into the world, transforming our knowledge of it. As a tool of creativity, it allowed photography to take its rightful place as a powerful, expressive art form, helping usher in the era of Modern Art and what has come since.