For years, I refused to print my prints. I dreaded the idea of fighting a printer, wasting a ton of ink and paper just trying to figure out how to get the prints to look right. My thought was, I'm a professional photographer, not a professional printer and that I should just let the pro labs do the printing. I also thought that as long as I sent them a good file, they should produce a high quality print. I did a lot of test prints with different labs to make sure that the final product was truly what I had envisioned and ended up with a very high quality final print. But then my favorite paper that I had been printing on for more then 10 years was discontinued by Kodak, not the print labs fault. So I switched to a different paper by Kodak that was similar in color reproduction. I went from Kodak Endura Metallic to Regular Endura, still Kodak's best paper photographic ever. I used this new, to me,  paper for about a year, when Kodak discontinued it as well. I tried a few other papers from the lab but nothing had the color of the Kodak Endura papers. 

     I was really at a loss for what I was going to do until I met up with a friend of mine that had been doing some printing of his photography with a new Canon printer and using Red River Paper's Polar Gloss Metallic. I was amazed at the color and quality of the print. It looked as good as anything I had seen from the labs, however, it was a pearlescent metallic which tends to zap some of the color out and also tends to be on the cooler side of the temperature scale. However, the quality was there. I went to Red River Paper's website and started doing homework on their papers and found that they have sample kits of all their papers. But first I needed a printer. I hated this part. After weeks, no months of agonizing research and and just waiting, I decided that the Canon Pro printers are where I wanted to end up. The problem for me was, the current model was over 12 years old and was due for an upgrade. I didn't want to spend thousands of dollars on a printer that would just be replaced in a year and soon not even be serviceable, so I waited. I wanted whatever the new version of the Canon imagePROGRAFF Pro-1000 was going to be or at least a discount on the sometime-to-be discontinued model. It never came, still hasn't come. Then the time came that I had to do something. I ran out of prints of my number one selling image, "Aspens".  So I made the decision and bought the Pro-1000 and one full set of authentic replacement ink. In doing more research, I found that Red River Paper has color profiles that match the Pro-1000 and other popular printers to their individual papers with instructions to load them based on your printer and operating system. Within 10 minutes, I had color settings matched to the different papers in the sample packs! Red River Paper made it sooo easy.

     I had been dreading the set-up and learn process for nothing. I now make all of my own prints and really have grown to love it. I am amazed at what I am creating now more than ever!