Acid-free

Gicler, a French verb meaning ‘to spurt’, is another industry term for inkjet printing. See inkjet.

Chloro-bromides share the features of all silver gelatin prints, giving deep rich blacks and crisp whites on a high gloss paper, as well as having good archival properties. Compared with silver bromides or silver chlorides, they have a warmer brownish-black tone.

Pigment, unlike dye, is a powder made up of tiny granules that will not dissolve completely in solution. This means that pigment-based inks leave particles of pure colour bonded to the surface of the paper that they are printed on. The resulting images can thus appear very rich and physical, densely saturated in colour –…

A stencil is made up for each colour of the image and put over a fine fabric mesh that is stretched over a metal frame. The coloured ink is spread over the mesh and stencil and the ink falls through the stencil to the underlying material (usually an art paper) to produce the image. The…

Also known as heliogravure, photogravure is arguably the finest photomechanical means of reproducing a photograph in large editions. Copper plates are acid-etched directly from an original silver print; the etched areas then hold differing amounts of ink in order to correspond to the tones of the original print. If prints remain untrimmed, the impression of…

A photogram is a photograph made without a lens or camera: objects are placed directly on top of a sheet of photographic paper which is then exposed to light. Where the objects obstruct the light, the paper remains unexposed (light in tone), while the rest darkens through exposure.