The Last Layer: New methods in digital printing for photography, fine art, and mixed media

1. Introduction

A photographer or artist builds images layer by layer, each one adding complexity and meaning to the final work. For the digital artist, those may be Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Photoshop Lightroom layers or edits, and held in digital form rather than a physical surface. Yet in the end, the work must be transferred to a substrate—paper, wood, or even the glass screen an image is projected upon. It’s that last layer that makes it a complete work.

With the transition from darkrooms and printmaking into a digital world, the computer has become an important tool on the artist or photographer’s workbench, but we’ve lost that final handwork ...