In Focus Vol. 3 No. 12

Repositioning Wallpaper and Graphics with Photo Tex

Advanced Signs & Graphics and photographer Linda Huddle Martin bring the great outdoors indoors and onto the walls of a local health care facility.

Digital wall murals are a big hit with all types of customers and potential customers. The trick is finding the right material for the project. Customers love the idea, but don’t always want a more permanent solution, such as the wallpaper-like products from dreamScape or adhesive-back vinyl.

Such was the case for a recent project printed and installed by Advanced Signs & Graphics in Lancaster, Pa., whose customer wanted the photography of Linda Huddle Martin to bring soothing landscape scenery to a new health care facility.

Huddle Martin runs Huddle Images, also in Lancaster, and was commissioned to bring her landscape portraits to the facility. She turned to Advanced Signs & Graphics for its printing expertise to come up with a wall mural solution that would fit the bill.

Originally, says Bill Felter of Advanced Signs, they were going to print the images on vinyl and apply them to foam board panels that would then be attached to the wall. The facility operators preferred a wallpaper-like treatment, and also wanted to be able to take it down and re-install it on a different wall at some point in the future.

“That’s when I called my account specialist at LexJet, Dustin Flowers, who consistently helps me out with the projects I get involved in. He sent me some pictures of another project using Photo Tex PSA Fabric. I talked to Linda, and she talked to her customer, and they were thrilled that they could take it down and put it back up somewhere else,” says Felter. “We decided to print it on our aqueous-based Epson 9800 using the ImagePrint RIP instead of our solvent printer. There’s also a solvent version of Photo Tex, but the customer is a photographer who put her heart and soul into the images and I wanted to make sure the final prints retained the fidelity of her images as closely as possible."

"I thought we might have a hard time blowing up the photographs that large, but they held up nicely. I scaled part of it in Photoshop and let ImagePrint do the rest of the scaling. Linda was also concerned about how the final reproduction of her images would look, but she was really blown away by the final images. They look amazing,” adds Felter.

Felter says that the installation of the images, printed in three panels for one wall and four for the other, was a breeze. The first installation went a little slower than the second one since Felter had not used the product before and was used to working with vinyl.

“Producing it was a piece of cake, and installing it was easier. It printed great. I just used a canned profile out of my ImagePrint software and the color was dead on. The only thing we did ahead of time was trim them down so they would butt up right against each other,” says Felter. “I have to admit I was a little nervous about working with it at first, but it got to a point after the second panel that I realized we could pull it off and easily re-position it if we needed to do so. We just took a soft squeegee and went down over the seams between the panels and pushed them so tight they practically disappeared, which was really cool. When you step back three or four feet you can’t see the seams unless you’re looking for them.”