mat — Blog — Fil Nenna Photography

This is my process to produce beautiful inkjet prints. We will cover preparing the images on the computer, setting the parameters for printing, picking the best printer and the most appropriate paper types, and I’ll show how the images are matted ready for delivery.

If there’s anything you’d like me to cover in more detail leave a note in the comments below and I’ll try to put together a more detailed tutorial for you. There’s a video version of this blog post you can view at the bottom of this page.

I’m printing one of my open-edition images – this one is from near Halifax, my hometown in England. The Yorkshire landscape is stunning and I want people to feel the texture of the rock, the rugged terrain and the weight of the sky.

I’d like to print out an 8 x 10 to be installed in a 16 x 20 frame - it gives a lovely wide border separating the image from anything else that is close by on the wall that it will eventually hang on.

Fine print of sheep in field near Halifax, yorkshire, england — Fine print of Sheep near Top Withens, Halifax UK.

Here’s how the dimensions break down – I have an 8x10 piece of paper, but the mat window has to be smaller else the paper will fall through. So the window is 7.5x9.5 inches for a ¼” overlap. I also like to leave a small gap between the printed area of the image and the matte cutaway, just to make things look tidy. In this case the printed area is 7 x 9 inches to leave a quarter inch gap around the printed image.

Printing

There’s a whole bunch of parameters to set for the printing including the paper size the print area size and the printer profiles so that the program is aware of how my printer treats colors and also how the selected paper is going to affect the colors. I also like to leave a think black border on the prints so that any whites in the image remain separate from the white of the surrounding paper.

I use a color calibrated monitor so that the colors that I am looking at what will be printed and so I don’t have to do any second-guessing or run a large number of test prints because the colors will be pretty much what I see on the screen.

With prints that are for sale we can’t cut any corners when it comes to quality. The printer (canon pro-10) uses pigment inks which are the most archival inks available. I do not risk using lower quality third party inks – I use the manufacturer’s inks which are some of the most expensive liquids in the world.

Canon pgi 72 pigment inks for pro-10 printer

Red river fine art print paper acid free

I limit my paper choices to the most appropriate matte paper and semi-gloss paper. These are top-of-the-line acid free papers - resistant to possible to yellowing overtime.

Once the print is created, the date and the name of the print is written directly on the back of the paper with an archival quality pen and I’ll also write my name there. I’ll also sign the mat but the mat might be replaced one day so writing the information on the print is much more secure.

Matting

I go to the effort of cutting my own mats for a couple of reasons. The first of which is because I like an 8 x 10 to be framed in a 16 x 20 frame and that combination is not easily found in pre-cut mats. There’s also my preference for bottom waiting the mat. That means placing the window higher than center by having a wider bottom boarder than the top by a very specific amount. This is called the optical canter and is an illusion that human brain finds satisfying. Find out more on how I cut mats in this detailed blog post.

The image is attached to the mat using a single piece of acid-free tape at the top of the image. You’ll notice that it is not all the way around the image because the paper on the mat will expand and contract at different rates over time - if they were permanently attached the picture would buckle. Attaching the image with just one piece of tape allows the picture to move independently of the mat.

Framing

I found that people have very specific frame preferences depending on their own décor and tastes. Providing a frame that will be eventually discarded would be wasteful. So instead I deliver matted prints that are ready for framing and this has the added benefit of lower shipping costs.

When I do frame the prints I’m a huge fan of a thin simple black frame. It will never go out of style.

So there’s the final piece. From preparing the image to hanging it on the wall - This entire process is based on the principle of doing things simply and doing them right to make the best and longest lasting print possible.

Cutting a custom mat for your photographs or artwork is simple and requires only a few specialized tools. I recommend a good mat cutter such as a Logan 2000, and a compatible straight edge which can be used as a guide for the mat cutter (see recommendations at the bottom of this post). Last, you need some scrap mat board for support underneath the mat you wish to cut, and a healing cutting mat to protect your table surface.

Before you begin to cut your mat, you need to figure out the size of the window that will hold the print. I like to have the window a quarter of an inch smaller than the paper sides along each side. So with an 8 by 10 piece of paper I would cut a window 7 1/2 by 9 1/2 inches to leave a quarter of an inch overlap so the print does not fall through the window. Sometimes I like to print my image smaller than the window so there is a quarter of an inch gap between the image and the mat (in which case I would print the image 7 by 9 in).

Work on the back of the mat.

1. Starting at the top left of your mat you can mark out the window width across the top of the mat. The remaining width represents both the left and right borders. So to figure out only the right border, divide this remainder by two and draw a vertical line with your pencil at that position.

2. We can do the same for the bottom border by marking the window height from the top left and then dividing the remaining highlight by two. Draw a horizontal line at this point.

3. Now that the right and bottom boarders are marked, we can use the intersection of a lines as of the bottom-right origin from which we can mark out the window height and the window width. Mark out the final lines for left and top borders.

4. The window is now ready to be cut out with the mat cutter. The image is perfectly centered in the mat.

The problem is that a centrally placed image looks poorly balanced to the viewer. This is an optical illusion. It looks more balanced if the image is placed a little higher than center. When an image has a thicker bottom border than at the top, we call it a” bottom weighted” mat.

5. A simple way to increase the bottom of border in proportion to the size of the image and the size of the mat is to draw a line from the window height mark on the left hand of the mat to the original bottom border line intersects the right hand of the mat.

6. The bottom-right origin point for the window is now where this diagonal line intersects the vertical line.

7. The bottom weighted mat is more visually satisfying and looks distinctly better than any mats you’d find in a commercial frame.

This construction technique is useful for the first mat you cut for a given mat and window size. You now have the border measurements for any subsequent identical mats you need to cut.