Using Your Fastback Foilfast Printer to Print Photographs

If you have ever tried to use your Fastback Foilfast P21 printer to print a photograph you probably noticed that it doesn’t look very good. The Foilfast P21 printer tends to view all of the mid tones in the image and prints them in silver. A photograph of a face will end up printing almost entirely in Silver (not exactly the effect you were probably looking for). However, at a recent Powis Parker Fastback Dealer meeting a representative from Fastback showed me how to print photographic images using the Fastback Foilfast printer and Adobe Photoshop. The result certainly wasn’t perfect. However, the photograph looked a whole lot more realistic than any other photographic image that I had ever seen printed in foil. Here are the instructions for adjusting your image using Adobe Photoshop so that it will print with your Foilfast printer …

1. In Adobe Photoshop change your image mode to “Indexed Color”
2. Set the color palette for your image to “Custom”
3. Load the Foilfast color set (download this file called Foilfast.act)
4. Set Dither to “Difussion”
5. Set the Ammount to 100%
6. You may check “Preserve Exact Colors” if desired
7. Click Ok

You may want to adjust the colors and the saturation before converting for better end results. Generally, a little bit more contrast and saturation is a good idea especially with photos that have a lot of mid-tone information. However, every photo is different so you will just have to experiment.

The photograph that the representative from Fastback printed with his Foilfast printer was great. However, I suspect that results will probably vary slightly depending on the image that you are trying to print. If you aren’t really sure how to do this in Photoshop you might try using the help section to find the appropriate settings in your version of Photoshop. Give it a try sometime and let us know how it turns out for you.