Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Printing on photo paper at home

I found a package of "semi-glossy" photo paper for a reasonable price (about US$0.65 a sheet) and tried to print some miniatures on it. As expected, the ink takes longer to dry, so to be safe I left them drying for a whole day. I tried cutting a mini but noticed that I was still smearing ink when pressing it down for the cuts. After that, I applied two light coats of spray sealant and left them to dry for another day. I was afraid it would smear the colors, but there was no visible effect. The following picture shows a comparison between the minis printed at the photo kiosk (on the top row) and the ones printed at home.
It is possible to see that the ones printed at home look "watered down" as if I had run the picture through a filter to increase brightness, although I certainly didn't do that. Also, for some reason there is slight shade of blue over the whole miniatures, something I can't notice when printing on regular paper. Anyway, the miniatures still look good, although not as good as the ones printed at the kiosk.

As an added bonus, the back of this photo paper takes glue a lot more easily than the other one, so I was able to apply a thin layer of PVA to glue them, and now I'm letting them dry for yet another day. After everything is properly cut and ready to play, I'll post new pictures of them...

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