This video is sponsored by Professional Photographers of America. Join a community of
over 33,000 photographers and find equipment insurance, education, and business tools
made specifically for photographers like you. So, I've tried acrylic. I've tried fine art papers.
I've tried printing on aluminum. I've tried metallic papers. And through all this
experimentation with printing my astrophotography over the years, I've definitely gotten some
results that I do truly like, but it wasn't until I discovered backlit prints on transparent film
that I really felt I found the ultimate method for displaying my deep sky astrophotography as
framed art. So in this video I'm going to explore what makes this printing technique so
powerful compared to other options for printing astrophotography, I'll talk about the pros and
cons of this printing method, and I will show you how to make your own wireless backlit frame.
Hello my name is Nico Carver and this channel is all about astrophotography the art of
taking photographs of the night sky and displaying them and there are many different specialties
within astrophotography and as my channel name nebula photos suggests my specialty is photography
of nebulae which are these beautiful clouds of gas and dust out there in space
one of the most challenging things about processing and mostly displaying photos of nebulae
is that there is a lot of subtle variation in the shadow detail that does show up pretty well
on a bright screen whether it's a monitor or a smartphone but it's much harder to display those
subtle variations on typical print media and so we're going from an additive model of color on
the screen yet that uses a white backlight and then it filters that light through all
these little red green and blue filters to make all the different colors you see on the screen
we're going from that to a subtractive model of color uh with traditional printing where you're
laying down combinations of pigments you know cyan yellow magenta black gray and those pigments are
getting absorbed onto a medium usually paper and there are definite downsides to each kind of model
for displaying color but the major downside with normal printing onto paper is that you'll never
reach the kind of contrast ratios you can with a screen and that means some detail especially
in the shadows are always going to get lost when you're compressing the amount of contrast
available now this is where backlit prints with a transparency film as the print medium
really shine as the method can achieve much higher contrast ratios than we get with
normal printing on paper or other opaque media so i first learned about this method in 2018 when an
astrophotographer named greg marshall had a booth at nif which is an annual astronomy conference and
greg was offering backlit printing as a service for asked photographers and he was showing off
some of his uh astrophotography using this method and i was just blown away by how good these prints
looked when they were backlit now greg no longer offers printing he still does make excellent
tools and accessories for astrophotographers those are available through his website watcheread.com
and i actually just ordered a new flats panel from him but to continue with the story uh
because gregg stopped offering backlit printing as a service this set me off on a journey to find
some kind of suitable replacement for what he was offering because i was just so blown away by it
and that turned out to be much harder than i thought it was going to be i tried for a long time
to make prints on transparency here at home using my home printer which is right behind me here
it's a eight color inkjet the canon pixma pro 100 but with the backlit transparencies they
came out very washed out once i lit them up you can see my best attempt here and you can see it's
not very good i just couldn't get the black level correct no matter how i messed with the settings
so eventually i gave in and i turned to commercial printing
i found out that there's a whole industry actually with backlit printing for signage and advertising
uh once i thought about it that made total sense because i'd seen these things before so i ordered
a duratrans print from blue river digital and that company specializes in this kind of thing and
duratrans is their most expensive product because it actually goes through a photochemical process
uh to expose it and it's not just an inkjet print but what that allows them to do is get
much deeper blacks onto the transparency which of course is very important for astrophotography
so even though this was expensive this was 59 plus shipping for a 5x7 print
for me to realize my artistic vision of what a framed print of my work should really look like
it's well worth the cost and i plan to order bigger prints from them in the future too
this video isn't sponsored by blue river digital but i'm proud to say this video is sponsored by
PPA Professional Photographers of America. I just joined recently and I'm very happy with what they
offer as part of a membership for a low monthly price you receive a bunch of unique benefits you
know we all know that astrophotography gear can get very expensive and to tell you the truth all
of my photography and astro gear is probably one of my biggest investments worth more than my car
so i've often thought you know i really should insure my photography equipment like i have
insurance for my car if it's so valuable but i've just never really gotten around to it well PPA
makes that super easy because membership includes fifteen thousand dollars worth of equipment
insurance and it's a very nice plan i did look into the details if something breaks and you need
full replacement it's a 350 flat deductible or if you want to get your equipment repaired it's just
a 50 flat deductible the equipment insurance alone makes it worth it a PPA membership for
me but then there's also data recovery services uh that could be huge like if you're shooting a once
in a lifetime event like a total solar eclipse or you know a meteor breaking apart and then lastly
PPA is very active in terms of photography education and training i know that many of
my viewers practice other forms of photography outside of astro so if that sounds intriguing
to you follow the link in the video description for a special discount on your membership okay
now let's talk about the pros and the cons of this printing method compared to other printing methods
so i've already talked about the biggest pro which is the improved contrast ratio and that
allows for more detail but just to drive that home let's compare a few sections here of the backlit
transparency print versus an inkjet print at the same size done on a very good fine art paper
another pro of backlit printing is it looks good in many different lighting conditions including
in the dark i think it's the only kind of print i can think of that actually looks just as good
in the dark as it does with lights and lighting conditions are one of the hardest parts of
getting a print to look right so for instance i really do like my high gloss metallic print i
had this made for a gallery show in dc and for the show it was lit very well that worked fine
then after the show ended i brought it home i've been displaying it here in the apartment and i
don't have professional track lighting so half the time i look at it and there's so much glare from
the window light or whatever that i can barely see it um so viewing angles viewing conditions um you
know being not quite as important if you have a backlit print are another big pro i think for this
method the biggest con of backlit transparency is the only way i have found that works for getting
it to look right is having the transparency print actually printed by a pro like using
this actual photographic process and this means you can't take advantage of home printing if you
already have a nice printer at home and it also means that that cost is higher a smaller con is
you need to use a backlit frame and traditionally this means having to plug into a power source and
then think of how to hide you know the dangling wire so to end this video i wanted to address
my method for getting around the wire which is to DIY a frame that is powered by batteries instead
and there are a number of ways i could have gone about making this but for this first tutorial on
making this kind of frame i wanted to keep it as cheap and as simple as i could think up okay
step one i'm just using a cheap shadow box frame from Michaels here and i'm gonna remove these
inner supports with a razor blade in my fingers and take out the front glass but save it for
later then i'm going to add some shiny foil tape to the inside of the frame just tear and press in
my shadow box came with some foam on the backing board so i'm just going to roughly
remove that from the backing board and then i have this led light strip with a battery compartment
so i'm going to cut out a spot from the backing board for that battery compartment to fit into
i'm then going to cut a piece of foam core that fits into the frame and add some foil
tape this is going to be a back reflector for our light box then i'm going to place the glass
back into the frame then the transparency print we had ordered and then a piece of frosted plexi
glass that i cut to size uh that's just going to sort of diffuse the light onto the print
then i'm going to glue and tape some foam some little pieces of foam core that i cut out to
to provide support for those front pieces in the frame and and keep them from falling back
then i'm going to stick on the led light strip so you just take off the backing and stick it
all along the sides and i started by just filling all available space with the led strip and i think
that worked out well then i put in the back reflector piece that i made with foam core and
tape and tested and it looks bright here on camera but it actually looks really good in person so i
was happy with this but if it was too bright you could remove some of the led leds from the strip
and then i'm just going to replace this backing plate that now has a cutout for
the battery compartment and secure everything and you're done it was actually really pretty easy um
don't need a lot of tools or anything to do this project so hopefully this was helpful and i do
plan to make other videos on printing but this is the one i was most excited about sharing which is
why i did it first and it was only possible thanks to my sponsor PPA so please remember
to take a look at the link in the description for a special discount on your membership for
Professional Photographers of America till next time this has been Nico Carver clear skies