Making print personal: Evely Duis on handcrafting a zine

Dutch-born fashion and portrait photographer Evely Duis has been creative for as long as she can remember. "I don't ever want photography to be just my job," she says, "I want it to be my passion – something I can put emotion into." The Canon Ambassador honed her artistic flair completing a bachelor's degree in photography at Brussels' LUCA School of Arts, at the same time as setting up her own studio. "It taught me how to show more emotion in my photography," she says. "Not just to create a pretty picture, but how to say something more with my work."

"Saying more" is exactly what Evely has done in her latest personal project, which covers the crippling migraines that have affected her from the age of 11 and for which she now takes daily beta blockers to reduce the frequency of attacks. Having previously produced a series of photographs on the subject, featuring numerous self-portraits, she's now printed her images to create a zine about living with this condition.

Here, Evely explains how she used the Canon PIXMA PRO-200 professional grade A3+/13-inch photo printer to bring her idea to life, while printing expert and Canon Europe Product Manager for Professional Printers and Software Suhaib Hussain highlights some of the particular benefits of using the PIXMA PRO-200 for personal projects.

"The PIXMA PRO-200 is very compact for an A3+ printer, so there are no problems making space for it in a busy studio," says Suhaib. "Because it is a dye-based rather than pigment-based printer, print speeds are very fast and pages are fully dry within minutes, so there is no time wasted. The PIXMA PRO-200 runs on eight inks and delivers really vibrant colours and rich deep blacks, which is great not only for photo quality but also for crisp text within a zine."

Previously Evely sent her images to a lab to be printed, so she hadn't had to make decisions about printers, settings and paper before. "Using the PIXMA PRO-200 has been a real adventure for me," she says. "It feels like magic to be able to print photos myself, to create them right here in my studio. Making each print is a special moment. It's great to be able to manipulate images, change settings and use different papers to get a different look and feel for my images."

"Canon offers a wide range of photo papers and fine art media but also works closely with prestigious paper producers such as Canson and Hahnemühle to give a choice of wide-ranging media," adds Suhaib. "This way we can provide exactly the look and feel you want, with readily available ICC profiles to ensure accuracy.

"For double-sided and even just regular one-sided photo print output, the precision of the paper transport system is critical," he continues. "The PIXMA PRO-200 features skew correction and automatically retracting side paper guides to ensure absolute accuracy, avoiding the cost and wasted time of print feed errors."

Evely used Canon Professional Print & Layout (PPL) software to ensure her final images looked exactly how she wanted them. PPL works as a standalone program and as a plug-in for Adobe® Lightroom® and Photoshop® and can be used for creating custom layouts of multiple images on a single page. "It's a powerful tool," says Suhaib. "Some photographers are surprised by how useful it is, especially as it's a free program available for Canon's latest pro-grade photo printers. One of the improvements in the Canon PIXMA PRO-200 is enhanced 'gamut mapping', which narrows the gap between what you see on-screen and what you get in print," he explains. "PPL goes further still, enabling you to make subtle changes in colour rendition and adding versatility to fine-tuning mono print output in 'Black and White Photo' mode, so you can get exactly the look you want on any type of paper."

Evely used Capture One photo editing software for tethered shooting in her studio and Adobe Lightroom for organising, RAW processing and making basic adjustments to her images. She used Adobe Photoshop for finer, more detailed edits and Lightroom for printing. To design the layout of text and images across her pages, Evely used Adobe InDesign®.

For Evely, a handmade approach was always part of the plan. "I wanted to create something personal," she says. "Laying out the zine in Adobe InDesign and printing it one sheet at a time as a booklet is actually quite straightforward. Some of the pages have cutouts, so the next step was to use a scalpel and literally cut them out. I wanted a hard cover for the zine, so I cut one out of cork board and applied a wrinkled black covering to it. For the spine, I made holes along the full height of the pages so that I could stitch them together. You end up with something that is truly unique.

"I've been thinking about creating large prints from my migraine project with the Canon PIXMA PRO-200 so I can hold an exhibition at some point," she continues. "I might also make a few more copies if anyone wants to buy them, but that hasn't been the goal. It's been a personal project, to give an outlet to my creativity. The migraine project is special to me, and it's wonderful that the PIXMA PRO-200 has enabled me to turn it into something physical that I can hold in my hands."