fine art scanning, proofing and printing – professional advice please

I do a bit of painting and I’m starting to get a bit more interest and exposure so I’m considering getting some decent giclee prints done.. I’d also like some archival quality images as I’ve sold a couple of paintings recently that I’ve only got second rate jpg. images of

I’ve had a little dabble at this in the past at the print shop in town and got some very cheap but not so cheerful (unusable) results..

There’s a popular and well respected gallery/framers in the next town over offering to scan and master at £20 a pop, and I’ve also looked at a high end place in the next county that have quoted £400 each for the same job on the larger paintings..
To further confuse things, a local artist friend has recommended that I get her mate to do it for even less than £20

Why the huge discrepancy in price?

I understand that different technologies would be involved but wow!

What sort of difference in quality am I looking at here do you think?
I’m going to have to launch a kickstarter campaign to get this off the ground anyway, and I would love to start as I mean to go on, and that means top quality master files, but the difference between a couple hundred quid and £2.5k to get set up is staggering

any experience/advice?

giclee prints

Having managed and directed public art galleries, managed a fine art print studio, worked with all sorts of visual arts media, worked for technical and logistical services for art galleries etc….. In all that time I’ve never really been able to work out what a ‘Giclee Print’ is beyond a bullshit term for ‘inkjet print’.

Certainly when the term was coined 15-20 years ago large format printing was pretty sketchy so something to distinguish well prepped and executed prints was useful. A bit of snake oil rubbed in the proceedings helps convince buyers they were buying something traditionally crafted- by not using words you’d associate with a photocopy.

The reality is ‘Giclee’ means nothing- its a made up word and it sounds a bit french, its not a different process of technology. Its just a word used by businesses directing their services at the fine art market.

I have done a bit of slide scanning and sort of know about resolution from photography. Here are my thoughts

At the bottom end some one points a DSLR at your work and takes a photo. Presumably they have the skill to line everything up so its all in focus with no distortion

Downsides

White balance and colour reproduction might be inconsistent and inaccurate. If they don’t use a standard light source then results might be inconsistent between batches as well. If they use a calibrated sytem and standardised lighting then the issues will be eliminated.(If you take a picture with a camera even if the white balance is spot on some colours will not be accuratlty reproduced)

The resolution might be good enough depending on the size and detail of your your work

I expect proper scanning of large work is expensive. The resolution will be way higher which might be better. Some one charging hundreds should be getting completely accurate colour every time.

I have a huch that it some point you will need to start getting your head around “colour space” unless the scanning and printing is done by the same person.

I’d try a few combinations of scanning/photographing and printing.

To save money you can get prints made that are life size but not full size (cropped). See how these compare to the originals

Yes, you will be entering the world of colour management.
Most desenst sign companies will have large format digital printers and will probably be cheaper than the high street print shops.
Ask how many colours their printer uses, cmyk, or do they have extra colours for a greater gamut or larger colour space.
Often useful if you have skin tones in the print or grey scales.
The printer should also be calibrated, the machine not the person using it…
The scanner or other source should also be calibrated.

Yes, you will be entering the world of colour management.

This^
Even at a basic level you are looking at a Macbeth or similar colour chart and working in sixteen bit and possibly in pro-photo RGB as it’s a bigger colour space. Somebody charging £25 is just not going to know what ‘out of gamut’ means.
They probably do not know how to correct their lens distortions either.

There is a reason art-repro prices vary so much. Also ‘scanning’ isn’t really how large artworks are copied. You are looking at 40mp and up digital capture with flat field lenses (or as near as possible) lighting is also important especially with oils where you use polarised light to get rid of the speculation reflections.

Look at x-rite, datacolour etc for the colour managed workflow/profiling basics.

A reasonable amount of my work is photographing art-work and paintings for printing in catalogues, adverts and prints. It’s very tricky. I can get bloody close, but some colours just don’t exist in CMYK. Add in to that the change in conditions in which a print is being viewed or even whether it is on a light or dark background, etc.

I think I would work backwards and first decide what paper I was going to print on for my giclee* prints (I like the Hahnemuhle papers, and keep meaning to try the museum etching). Then find someone who can proof on the exact paper you want to print on.

This sentence scares me “mostly painting lurid abstracts in acrylics”. I think, especially if you’re applying that acrylic thickly, you may be in for a bit of a nightmare.

*as above a bit of a bs term, but in this case I’m considering it to mean high end inkjet print on suitably arty paper.

ooooops! I forgot that the word giclee is a bit of a faux pas 😳

FWIW I paint in a style where I aim get the colour as flat and uniform as possible, so the finish is almost like a screen print..
there’s minimal texture

This is all pointing to the expensive option in many ways..
For example – I’ve got a painting here on the wall now that under low ‘mood’ lighting is totally different to how it looks in daylight.. Different parts of it are illuminated and so on
I’d lose much of that effect if I compromise on the quality of the reproduction I’m assuming?

And yeah, the paper stock that I’ve been looking at is Hahnemuhle Etching

Thanks all btw

For starters, how big are your paintings? Flat-bed scanners can’t go bigger than A3, good drum scanners, like a Crosfield 6250 can cope with bigger, but the original has to be flexible, like watercolour or charcoal on watercolour paper, as it has to be wrapped around a large acrylic drum. If the artwork is larger, or rigid, then a photo would be taken, usual a medium format 6×7 or 6×9 transparency with a colour chart and greyscale included.
These days a good DSLR set up on a tripod, with the artwork perfectly square and lit with a good neutral light source and the camera square to the original would give a better result than the scanner.
For repro the scanned images would usually be scanned at 300dpi, because litho print uses 300dpi as standard.
With ‘Giclée’ prints, the dpi bit is largely irrelevant, although it’s not dissimilar to a print process called stochastic printing, which didn’t use a conventional regular CMYK dot structure but a random series of dots, and which could go up to seven colours; CMYK + RGB, and two others, orange and green to try to increase the colour gamut.
A proper colour chart with greyscale is crucial, when doing the prepress photoshop work you check colour fidelity against the chart onscreen, and having the greyscale lets you check for colour casts, the mid-grey should be absolutely neutral, any bias will immediately show up.
In litho printing also, whites shouldn’t be pure white, there should be a 5% dot, and black shouldn’t be 100%, but 95%, I think it’s probably the same with Giclée, but I ceased having any involvement with print before large-scale digital inkjet printing became readily available.
We used to do a digital Chromalin proof of any jobs, each one cost £75, back around 2000; a set of four Pantone certified CMYK inks cost £1000!
An archive quality print, with inks that are light-fast for guaranteed periods of time, which Epson inks usually are, isn’t going to be cheap, but probably cheaper than having a 250 run of prints run on a big Heidelberg press.
I used to really enjoy my job back then.

I’d lose much of that effect if I compromise on the quality of the reproduction I’m assuming?

Yes if the colour is beyond the gamut of your capture device or printer.

Yunki – i do a lot of large format digital print. And my work tends to be large areas of flat uniform colour, similar to you’re describing with yours. I’ve done a lot of trial and error over the last 18 months with different kit, printers, stock etc and it’s been a steep learning curve. And I knew quite a lot about print anyway. Rather tgan ramble on on here, if you want to email me (address in profile) I can give you some pointers on print. Got a good mate who’s a fine artist, who gets large format scanning done.

Some good advice above though

Most desenst sign companies will have large format digital printers and will probably be cheaper than the high street print shops.

When I tried this the output resolution was quite low….

It’s always a learning experience coming on here 🙂

thanks for all the replies
gonna digest this lot and get back with a couple more questions later

Most desenst sign companies will have large format digital printers and will probably be cheaper than the high street print shops.

That’s the last place I would look for art prints.
Places like printspace and genesis imaging are where I would be looking if I didn’t print myself, they specialise in archival art printing and framing.
It’s not about cheapness, it’s about high quality and archival quality printing/paper stock.

Ah, fine art repro. I remember looking at a large format camera set up on a massive copy stand thing, with 4 lights, and thinking ‘sod that’! Very happy to leave such things to ‘imaging technicians’. All that ‘colourspace’ and ‘gamut’ type stuff bores the hell out of me. Printing; I’d take it to the kind of place MrSmith mentions, as they have the very best equipment for the job. Most places will offer test strips/prints in different colour profiles and papers. Paper type can have a big affect on how the final print looks.

On the cheap: A DSLR with a good 50mm lens stopped down to about f8/11 should be ok for smaller works, say A0 or smaller. You do have to keep everything absolutely square and lined up though. Bear in mind that all lenses will have a bit of distortion in them, which you can hopefully correct in Lightroom/Photoshop. And many will have a bit of vignetting at the edges, again, LR can usually correct for this. It’s crucial to get your lighting absolutely even across the work; professional quality light meters (flash capable if you’re using flash) are almost essential for this, and then you have the issue of colour temp balance. Flash is ‘daylight’ balanced, but you’d more than likely need to use the same brand throughout, for consistency.

All this is why I’d just pay someone else to have the headache. If the results aren’t acceptable, then you don’t have to pay them.

I was speaking to one of my customers this morning who operates a high street photographic studio so I asked him if he did any reproduction of artwork. “Loads”, apparently, and although they’ve tried putting them in the studio & photographing it now they’ve built a jig and scan them piece by piece with a normal A4 scanner before auto-stitching them together in Photoshop. Apparently the results are way better & more accurate looking than photography! (Obviously they are doing stuff for local artists, not museum stuff). Seems like something OP could easily try himself though, must know someone with a flatbed scanner & copy of Photoshop!

Most desenst sign companies will have large format digital printers and will probably be cheaper than the high street print shops.

When I tried this the output resolution was quite low….

They must’ve either had a crap printer or not been bothered about doing a decent job for you! I have a very good solvent wide-format printer, the quality is exceptional. The main problem here (as mentioned) is the paper. Although solvent fine-art paper does exist, it’s expensive & specialised – I’ve never had any & it’s not something any of the big solvent suppliers sell. Could easily do you a very high quality print on some nice poster paper though!!

OK

some great stuff here, thanks for all the input – binners, you may well receive an email over the next day or two when I have a spare moment 🙂

what I’m seeing is that maybe someone with a good professional camera set up with the correct lighting and a good understanding of gamut and colour range, could possibly produce a file that would suffice if I am willing to compromise on precise colour representation?

If I want a completely accurate reproduction then it’s a case of put up or pay up?

Dont do prints of your paintings! Go on
a screen printing course or similar and make multiples that way.