Our latest step by step tutorial will talk you through the process of mounting an A4 and A5 size photos on a foam board. The same process can be achieved on an A3 board, though you will require an A3 printer. Once complete, the photos could be displayed and the cost is significantly cheaper than having your photos framed on the high street.
Video Transcript:
Today we are going to talk about our new product on the PhotoPaperDirect.com website, it’s our photographic mounting foam boards. They come in sizes of A4 and A3 and they will allow you at home, without the need of any special equipment to take a photograph that you are going to print on an inkjet, an ordinary inkjet printer, using our 280g either satin or gloss premium microporous photo paper and create a mounted high quality presentation photograph on a stiff board that you can hang or display or stick to a wall or do pretty much anything you want with it.
And this is how it works. We are going to take the photo paper, all our papers come in these minimalist packaging, we put all our energy into paper, trying to save you money in the long term. Stick it into the printer and put a photograph on it. We are using an ordinary inkjet printer with ordinary inks.
So here we go, we printed our picture on the 280g range of premium microporous photo papers we have on the site. This is the pearl finish, we’ve printed it borderless, so this is going to be a really easy application. We are also going to show you an A5, just to illustrate that you can do different sizes and how easy it is to trim. And for those of you that don’t have a borderless printing capability we are not going to use this print but just to show you that we’ve got a white edge around the image and that also can be trimmed really easily. So this is how it works; we got our boards here, self adhesive foam boards here, we are going to put these aside for a minute.
We are going to start with the A4, really simple. It comes with a self adhesive layer, protected by this backing. It’s got a grid that will allow you to pre-trim it, should you need to, in this case we are not going to need to trim it, so we are just going to peel, throw that away. Take our photo paper, position it carefully, take your time over this. Starting, position it slow so we don’t have any areas showing. And we smooth it out.
This is the first stage, that’s done. We are going to do another one just pre-prepare it. So we can do all the sticking of the, at the same time – the same board, the same size. We are going to peel that off, take the A5, this is also borderless, we used an A4 paper, but this is actually an A5 image. You then position it careful, if you make a mistake, you can pick it up, that’s done.
So we’ve got our stuck on images on the foam board almost finished, what we are going to do is trim the edges that are slightly overhanging, or if you need to cut it to size. If you have a trimming mat you can use that, we don’t, so we are going to use a bit of cardboard here to protect the table. A good ruler, simple Stanley knife, I’ve changed the blade so it’s super sharp.
Mind your fingers there. That’s, its trimmed. We also provide you with a neat little hanger and to do that you take a measurement on the back, you want to draw it in the middle, this is 29.4, so the middle of it will be about 14.5. And what you need to do is simply push it in, job done. You can bend it out a bit, in order to be able to hang on the wall. There is a little tab there that needs to be pushed as well. And here a hangable, mounted photograph, on a foam board mount.
This is the A5 the image that we’ve done, so we do the same, we are going to have a few more trims on this again, I am using a metal ruler because its more accurate, any ruler will do. I just changed the blade in my Stanley knife so it’s nice and sharp. Mind your fingers. No expertise required, you can do this at home using bits of equipment that everybody has. Here is the same image in A5, mounted on a self adhesive foam board, printed with an inkjet printer on the 280g gloss. In this case the kit contains a number of board, we have different size packs, 5s, 10s, with the same amount of paper, and hangers.
As these I am not going to measure it, but I need it to go in the middle, as easy at that to use.
Regardless of the photo paper manufacturer whether it is Epson, Canon, HP or even niche suppliers, photo papers commonly use one of two technologies to accommodate the ink injected by the printer heads. This technology is called the ‘receiving layer’ and it is one of the features that differentiate between true photo paper and normal copier paper.
Photography paper is a name given to a range of papers that can accommodate large amounts of saturated ink while retaining the high definition, sharpness and true colour reproduction of the original image. This is achieved by coating the paper in a chemical known as the receiving layer. The receiving layer keeps the ink from running, bleeding through to the other side and helps ensure that the image quality is high.
Inkjet printers are traditionally the choice of photographers looking to print their work. Their colour palette, true sub-tones and 1440 DPI (at least) far exceed the capabilities of laser printers when it comes to photo print quality.
One of the main considerations for many users when choosing photo paper is the weight of the paper. Weight of paper is measured in GSM and correlates to the density of paper in one square meter of area. Heavier weight photo papers feel heavier to touch, but high weights will not affect the quality of the print itself as much as ink type and receiving layers will. Elements such as true colour representation, image sharpness and even archival properties are unaffected by weight.
The world of photo printer paper is moving forward in a rate not too dissimilar to other aspects of photography such as digital capturing, lighting and lens technology. Most photographers will need to print their work at some point at which point it will be helpful to come to terms with the most recent options for true photo paper printing.
