How We Print

Every print is made on a Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-2600, a professional Canon large-format printer used for fine-art and photographic work.

What this means for your print. The print head lays down ink in such fine detail, up to 2400 x 1200 dots per inch, that the eye cannot pick out a single dot at normal viewing distance. Stars stay as clean points, and street detail on a location map stays legible.

We print up to 60x80cm, our largest poster size, in a single pass. Full specifications are on Canon's product page.

The Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-2600 won a 2025 Pinnacle Product Award from PRINTING United Alliance, in the Output category for Roll-to-Roll Aqueous under 80 inches.

Check it yourself: PRINTING United Alliance publish their 2025 winners announcement, and Printing Impressions name the PRO-2600 and its category.

The PRO-2600 runs Canon's LUCIA PRO II ink set: eleven colours plus a chroma optimiser, and every one of them a pigment ink.

Dye ink dissolves into the paper fibres. It is cheap and vivid on day one, and it is why supermarket photo prints go orange on a sunny wall. Pigment ink sits on the surface as solid particles and holds up far better against light, humidity and airborne pollutants. Canon explain the difference in their guide to what makes an ink archival.

Eleven colours instead of the usual four is what gives a night sky depth. A four-ink printer builds every dark tone from the same three colours plus black, and deep blues collapse into a flat navy. This set has dedicated photo cyan, photo magenta, grey, photo grey, red and blue, chosen because it gives clean detail, deep blacks and consistent colour.

Every print is made on 285gsm acid-free museum-grade art card. Gsm means grams per square metre, the standard measure of how heavy a paper is.

A magazine page is around 80 to 130gsm. A high-street poster is usually 170gsm and flops when you hold it by a corner. At 285gsm this is closer to a hardback book cover: it sits flat in a frame and does not ripple behind glazing as the seasons change. Acid-free is the property that stops paper yellowing and going brittle, which is why old posters brown at the edges first.

The finish is matte rather than gloss, and that is deliberate for this product. Gloss mirrors the room back at you, and a star map is mostly dark, so a gloss print of a night sky is largely a picture of your own lounge.

Giclée is the term commonly used for fine-art inkjet printing. It comes from the French gicler, to spray, and was coined in 1991 by a printmaker called Jack Duganne at Nash Editions, who wanted a word that separated fine-art inkjet from ordinary commercial inkjet.

In practice it means a high-resolution file printed with pigment inks on archival paper or card. That is the standard we work to: 300 DPI artwork, Canon LUCIA PRO II pigment inks and 285gsm acid-free museum-grade card.

"Ultra HD" is not a defined printing standard, so rather than ask you to take it on trust, here is the number behind ours. Every size is rendered at 300 DPI at full print size, not 300 on the small ones and less on the large.

Check the largest one yourself. A 60x80cm print is 23.62 inches across and the file is 7086 pixels wide, which works out at 300 dots per inch. 300 is the usual floor in fine-art printing because at normal viewing distance the eye stops resolving individual dots around there.

From you pressing order to the parcel leaving the building. Nine steps, all in our own workshop.

1. Your file is rendered at print resolution. Your date, time and place are turned into a print file at 300 dots per inch at full size, the professional print standard.
2. A person checks the file. Before anything reaches the printer, somebody opens your file and looks at it: your custom text, the date, the layout. A human being, not an automated check.
3. Colour calibration. The screen we check on and the printer we print from are matched to the same colour profile, and the PRO-2600 recalibrates against its own built-in sensor. That is what stops a print coming out warmer or darker than it looked on screen.
4. The print run. Larger sizes take longer because the head makes more passes, which is the trade we make for detail over speed.
5. Trimmed to size. The printed sheet is cut down on the guillotine and squared off. Because we trim into the printed area rather than printing onto a pre-cut sheet, the ink runs to the edge and the print is borderless.
6. Second check. The finished print is checked again by eye under a daylight lamp. Warm household bulbs hide colour casts and banding that show up the moment a print reaches a window.
7. Framing, if you ordered it. Framed orders are fitted here, mounted square, with the glazing cleaned before the back goes on.
8. Packing. Wrapped in tissue and packed flat and rigid, in discreet outer packaging with no branding and no paper invoice.
9. Dispatch. Sent with Royal Mail tracked delivery from Manchester. Most weekday orders placed before 3:30pm leave the same day.

Steps two and six are the human checks, and they are why we usually catch problems before you do. They are also the slowest part and the first thing a cheaper operation removes.

We began making personalised prints in 2018. Picture Made Prints Ltd was incorporated in 2020 and is registered in England and Wales, company number 13105065. The public record is on Companies House.

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• How we frame, on the frames, the glazing and how a framed order is fitted.
• How we ship, on timings and packing.
• How our star maps work, on the catalogues and coordinates behind the artwork.
• About us, for who we are.