Many photofinishers employ a wet process, such as a silver-halide process, for photo finishing. The silver-halide process typically includes treating a photographic medium that is laminated on both sides, e.g., with polyethylene, with a chemical to transfer a photographic image onto the laminate. To produce different surface finishes, e.g., matte, luster, glossy, etc., the image is transferred onto a laminated photographic medium having a surface that corresponds to one of the desired surface finishes. This means that a separate photographic medium is used to produce each different surface finish, e.g., a glossy medium for a glossy finish, a matte medium for a matte finish, etc. In some applications, changing to a different surface finish requires stopping the photo-finishing process using a photographic medium for one surface finish and changing to a photographic medium for the different surface finish, which can be time consuming and costly because it requires an inventory of more than one photographic medium. Other applications involve breaking a photo-finishing order according to different surface finishes and using one photofinisher for each surface finish.
With the advent of digital cameras, many applications involve producing photographic prints from digital data. One application involves creating an analog image from the digital data and using the silver-halide process described above to produce prints having various textures from the analog image. Therefore, this application includes the various surface-finishing problems of silver-halide processing. Another application involves using an electro-photographic printer that converts, e.g., rasterizes, digital data into a format that can be printed on electro-photographic paper in the form of prints. The prints are often laminated with a thin plastic skin to protect the image. However, there is no provision for producing different surface textures.