A lot of the problems stem from the fact that there are no standards by which a company can call themselves capable of making quality giclées. It appears as though as long as you own a digital camera and an ink-jet printer, you can claim to do high quality giclée work.

What results is artists working with these companies and getting inferior products – colours that don’t match, papers that aren’t of high quality, printing methods that harm the chemistry and thus longevity of the inks, and ultimately frustrated artists. It is not uncommon for me to take a phone call from someone that starts off, “I’m told I should talk to you…”

Producing high quality giclées of original works of art requires many things – capture and lighting technology that is beyond the financial reach of any hobbyist photographer, a thorough understanding of colour theory, high-end printing systems that can control the infinite detail of colour accuracy on a variety of high-end papers and canvases, and an understanding of what it means to be an artist.

Back to the artists who start off with “I’m told I should talk to you…” These people are coming to me through word-of-mouth, and have typically tried 2 or three other giclée studios, all ending in frustration. Seems the studios think close-enough is good enough, which is rarely the case for an artist who has stared at a canvas for months and knows each colour in intimate detail. Close doesn’t suffice.

At Reproducing Art, as many of you know, we take great care to make your giclée as close to the original as technology and know-how will permit today! We’re constantly re-investing in technology and training, so you get the highest quality available. And we’ve got the infinite control to achieve exacting results – on some jobs, we tweak colour for artists by mixing one-third of a percent of one colour into another to achieve that perfection. Artists love it – they leave with the giclées they absolutely adore.

But the challenge doesn’t end with the artists – galleries are often unwilling to accept giclées – they’ve had bad experiences, and aren’t aware of what’s possible in the high-end market. One of my clients was telling me about a new gallery that took on his originals, and told the artist they weren’t willing to accept giclées – “We used to sell giclées for a short period of time, but they came back after 6 months with colour problems!”

He challenged them to look at one of his giclées of an original they had hanging in the gallery. They could not believe the quality – and the longevity wasn’t a concern. The artist assured them that he has been selling giclées prepared by us for over 5 years, and has yet to have a problem. Today, his gallery is selling giclées of his work at an aggressive pace.

I think in time, the fine art giclée market will start to thin out as lower quality players leave the market. Un-satisfied customers don’t return. That will leave those of us who understand the market and are able to serve the artist community properly.

The first step is to ensure that the image you are viewing on your computer screen is as accurate as possible. All monitors are different, and unless you can trust the colours you are seeing on your screen, it’s difficult to make edits to the images. To adjust your monitor, use a third party application and hardware device to calibrate and profile your monitor. There are a number of solutions on the market, like XRite’s i1 Display 2.

Next, try and use the highest quality setting on your camera as possible – RAW if you have that option. The key is to start high, and keep the images as high quality as possible. When you process your RAW files in Camera Raw, use a colour space like Adobe RGB. Try and avoid sRGB profiles – they are fairly compressed and may lose some of the glorious colours in your original shots. If you’re not familiar with colour profiles, think of them as maps to colour for your images. Without the maps, we wouldn’t know what colours to use when we receive your images, and they may be completely different upon receipt.

When editing your photographs, avoid the temptation to apply too much contrast. Setting your black point to zero and your white point to pure white looks great on screen, but no printer in the world will be able to print those blacks and whites. And be very careful not to clip your blacks or whites – look at your histogram, and if you see a vertical line right at 0 or 255, you are clipping, and losing information in your image.

Finally, when you are ready to save your images, save them out as TIF files and include the colour space with the image – Adobe RGB in this example. Try and avoid sending JPGs – that format is what is called a lossy format, and every time the image gets saved, some information gets lost. The computer’s attempt to compress the image as a JPG will introduce noise in the image – like banding in skies.

If you follow these simple steps, your resulting giclées will look fantastic on paper or canvas. Of course, if you are unclear about any of the above, please do not hesitate to call and talk to one of us so we can explain things in more detail.

This is a satin canvas that is able to reproduce colour unlike any canvas we’ve seen before. The saturation in the colours is fantastic, while maintaining high detail with very little noise – always a challenge with textured canvases.

In our testing of this canvas, we started calling it “proofing media,” the highest compliment you can give a printable surface. We were amazed with its ability to reproduce rich, saturated colours, without showing problems we’d seen in other canvases – ink tended to “slide,” down the textured peaks and pool in the valleys, causing un-wanted noise in the giclées.

We finish the canvas with either a gloss or matte varnish – depends on the final look you want to achive.

We’re glad to have IJ Technologies on board, and feel confident we have both ends of canvas printing covered with fantastic products – Black Diamond Satin for high-gamut giclées, and Hahnemühle Monet for the classic matte finish.

Two months ago, I was asked to try another sample of their product – a new canvas being introduced by them.

I was initially hesitant, but sat down one morning ready to start testing their new offering – Hahnemühle Monet 410 canvas. Our intial reaction after our first test was not good – the canvas just didn’t like a lot of ink, usually an indication of problems to come. But we continued with the testing and discovered that this 100% cotton canvas had an incredible ability to achieve saturation with very little ink. By the end of the day, we’d fallen in love with this canvas. It has great contrast, wonderful colour saturation, and a traditional canvas feel. It works extremely well with our varnishes, and stretches onto stretcher bars without any problems.

It has quickly become a favorite around Reproducing Art, and we know you are going to love it too!

We are pleased to announce the introduction of Hahnemühle’s latest matte paper, Photo Rag Ultrasmooth 305 (it’s so new, it doesn’t even appear on their website). It’s a wonderful matte paper with a very flat, smooth finish to it.

For those of you who have known Reproducing Art for some time, you will know that adopting a new paper or canvas is a very long process. Each paper or canvas we receive from our suppliers to evaluate goes through 8 hours of exhaustive testing. We consider the paper’s ability to accept ink, determine whether it has any problems with specific ink, or problems with ink mixing. We make sure there are no manufacturing characteristics that carry-over negatively in the final product. We look at drying times and final finish to ensure it’s of the highest quality.

If it passes all those tests and we feel it has a place in our product line-up, we start stocking it and add it to our list for you to choose from. We hope you enjoy this new paper.

As part of our workflow evolution, we brought in new printing technology that lets us print 64″ wide. Length is virtually limitless.

So, for that client who has always wanted a 5′ x 8′ giclée of your original, we can now satisfy that need.

If you’ve been happy with the results to date, you’ll be even more impressed with the new system. The migration focused primarily on the output side of our work. We put in place new hardware and software that delivers a higher level of control over colour and shadows than was previously possible.

I was never pleased with the quality of the giclées, especially matte ones, that had a lot of shadow detail. We always lost a lot of that detail. Our new system takes care of that problem and now produces amazing results – no more “plugged up” shadows.

At the other end of the colour spectrum, we’re now able to get more saturated colours on both matte and gloss media, as well as greater control over pastels.

For the artist, this means higher quality giclées that look almost identical to the originals. Not that we weren’t close before – just not close enough!

Would you believe it’s related to the music industry?

Art Business News, one of the publications I receive on a regular basis, wrote this interesting article on the history of the technique. Give it a read – I think you’ll enjoy it.

Till next issue – stay well!

Your giclée prints are bonded to the Dibond using a museum grade pressure release adhesive using a cold roller system. The light pressure activates the adhesive and ensures a tight bond between the giclée and the Dibond.

Once the giclée has fully bonded, we then apply a varnish top-coat with a high volume low pressure spray system (even coating without any lines from rollers), same technique we use for our canvases. This helps protect the print since you will not be mounting the giclée behind glass.

As an optional final step, we apply mounting hardware to the back of the Dibond so you can hang your art without a frame. Please let us know if you will be mounting the piece in a frame so we do not include the mounting hardware.

Sintra or Dibond: Using the Sintra or Dibond board option is ideal if you would like an alternative to traditional framing techniques using glass. It’s also a great technique for reproducing very dimensional works of art and you’d like to maintain the dimensionality, or showing your photo-based works in galleries. Sintra is basically PVC; whereas Dibond is two sheets of aluminum sandwiching a solid polyethylene core resulting in an extremely rigid board at only 3mm in thickness. If you want the ultimate rigid-mounting solution, choose Dibond. Dibond is the pricier of the two solutions.

If you’re not sure what approach works best for you, give us a call or drop us an e-mail and we’ll work with you to address your specific needs.

On a recent project with Kingston artist Christy Neill, we were presented with an interesting challenge. A mixed media original with depths within the piece often exceeding an inch. Turns out, the capture was the simplest part. Christy was looking for a more industrial look for the finished giclée, and definitely wanted to avoid glass.

The solution – sandwich the giclée between two sheets of 1/4 inch plexiglass. I recommended two clear sheets, one sand-blasted on one side. We printed the giclée on Hahnemühle FineArt Pearl 285, and adhered it to the sand-blasted side of one of the sheets of plexiglass. We then mounted the clear sheet on top, and sandwiched the pieces together using 3/8 inch bolts with lock-nuts.

The final piece looked amazing – great detail and depth in the giclée with a terrific industrial finish ready for mounting.

So if you can dream it, share your dream with us and we’ll see what we can do to meet your needs.

Till next time – stay well.