Advancing Fine Art Printing Workflows with HD Aluminum Prints

Last week, Get Reel LLC had the opportunity to continue a long-standing working relationship with HD Aluminum Prints in Vancouver, Washington — a company known for producing exceptionally high-quality large-format fine art prints on aluminum for artists, photographers, and commercial clients.

I’ve been working with HD Aluminum Prints for well over a decade, and relationships like this are always exciting because they combine technical precision, color science, craftsmanship, and visual storytelling in a way that few industries do.

This latest project focused on optimizing the color performance and production reliability of a newly installed large-format printer designed to significantly expand the available color gamut compared to the company’s previous system.

One of the major advancements in the new printer is the addition of orange and violet ink alongside traditional cyan, magenta, yellow, and black channels.

These expanded ink sets dramatically increase the range of colors the printer can reproduce, especially in highly saturated oranges, reds, blues, purples, and difficult transitional tones that are often challenging in traditional CMYK workflows.

To fully utilize the expanded color capabilities of the new hardware, the workflow required transitioning from Wasatch SoftRIP to a more advanced workflow built around PrintFactory.

The goal of the calibration process was to preserve the visual consistency of previous production output while improving stability, reliability, and expanding the available color range only at the extreme outer limits of the new gamut.

Achieving this balance required custom ICC profile development, iterative print testing, gamut mapping adjustments, RIP workflow optimization, and extensive visual evaluation under controlled viewing conditions.

Projects like this continue to highlight how modern visual production increasingly depends on both creative and technical expertise working together.

For Get Reel LLC, projects like this remain especially rewarding because they sit at the intersection of visual art, technical problem-solving, and long-term collaborative relationships built over many years of production experience.