Types of Fine Arts Prints Offered by Marshall Photo:
Silver Gelatin

To own a Jim Marshall Silver Gelatin print, with its gorgeous palette of blacks, whites, and grays, superb detail, and lively sense of three-dimensionality, is to experience the immediacy of the moment the image was snapped.

Dating from the 1880s, and the recognized industry standard, the Silver Gelatin process involves coating the printing paper with a gelatin emulsion of light-sensitive silver halide. A print is created by exposing the paper to photographic negative by means of an enlarger or by contact printing. After chemical processing, the image is fixed and then dried before matting and framing.

Every black and white image at Marshall Photo is available as a Silver Gelatin print.

Marshall Photo uses:

Types of Fine Arts Prints Offered by Marshall Photo:
Platinum

Platinum prints are the warmest, most three-dimensional, and strikingly beautiful of all black and white fine art prints. With their rich range of complex tones—charcoal blacks, ochre browns, and almost silvery grays—it is no exaggeration to say that seeing a familiar photograph printed on Platinum-treated paper is akin to seeing that image for the very first time. The breathtaking look of Platinum prints, with their almost velvety surfaces, combined with the fact that they will last as long as the fine watercolor paper they’re printed on—essentially forever—makes Platinum prints the most archival and collectible of all black and white photographs.

Platinum prints are also hand made. The practice begins by coating a sheet of acid-free paper with liquid platinum, and contact printing the image onto the paper, to which the image actually becomes embedded. This hands-on process and the resulting chemical reactions that bring the photograph to life, creates a feeling of depth matched by no other black and white technique.

Marshall Photo currently offers a select group of 21 limited edition, numbered Platinum prints. Each one is hand-made to order by master printer Chris McCaw and matted by Tony Page.

Types of Fine Arts Prints Offered by Marshall Photo:
UltraChrome K3 Digital

Jim Marshall’s digital prints are printed by Ctein, the same master printer who produces his dye transfer prints. Ctein scans Jim’s original slides at high resolution using a liquid immersion carrier that ensures that every bit of detail and color in the slide is extracted. All dust, dirt, and scratches are erased from the scans in the computer, and the finest details are enhanced. The color and tones are meticulously fine-tuned, sometimes surpassing the quality of the slide itself. The images from older discolored and faded slides are fully restored to their pristine beauty; some of these digital prints are the first really good prints to be made from the slides in decades. In some cases they are the first fully color-corrected prints to ever be made of these photographs. The resulting digital images are immensely faithful to the original subjects, and they hold the most delicate highlight and shadow detail.

All images are printed on an Epson Stylus Pro 9800 widebed printer, using UltraChrome K3 pigmented inks. They are printed on Epson Premium paper, with a surface finish similar to traditional air-dried "F" surface darkroom prints. Independent conservation experts have tested these materials for longevity, and determined that their display life will equal or exceed that of any traditional color prints.

Types of Fine Arts Prints Offered by Marshall Photo:
Dye Transfer

Color printing’s answer to the black and white Platinum print, a Dye Transfer color print must be seen to be appreciated. The intense complexity and accuracy of the color palette—from blood reds to forest greens, velvety blacks to deep sky blues, purest whites to electrifying yellows—and stunningly natural skin tones, all but makes the image leap from the paper.

Labor intensive and costly, dye transfer prints are rare birds, especially after Kodak discontinued production of the materials in 1994. Marshall Photo offers a finite selection of limited edition, numbered Dye Transfer prints to discriminating collectors.

Each Dye Transfer is hand-made to order by master printer Ctein and matted by Tony Page. Ctein is one of the few people left in the US that have a stockpile of everything needed to print Dye Transfers, we are lucky to have him as a resource! For more information, see Ctein's website.

A Note About Limited Edition, Numbered Prints

Although the Silver Gelatin prints offered by Marshall Photo are considered to be “open” editions, meaning there is no specified or fixed number of any given image, both Platinum and Dye Transfer prints are sold as limited edition, numbered prints. Meaning, for example, that a Platinum print of Jimi Hendrix at Monterey Pop, or a Dye Transfer print of Mick Jagger at the L.A. Forum, will be specified as number “X” out of a total of, say, 25 prints from that run.

A Note About Vintage Prints

Because there is no one single agreed upon definition of a “vintage print,” some websites have been known to stretch the issue with “fuzzy math,” misrepresenting what is merely an older print as “vintage.” Technically speaking, vintage prints are considered to be ones the photographer makes from the original negative within approximately one year after the photograph was taken. The older the original is, the trickier it gets to accurately authenticate a vintage print, which can command many more times the price of a later print of the same image. Vintage prints are among the rarest of collectible photographic works.