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As part of the preparations for the exhibition I’m putting on next week, I worked with a local printer to make a giclée (pronounced “zhee-clay”) reproduction of one of the images, ‘Calderglen.’
It was such an involved process I thought it might be interesting to read about, if you’re thinking of doing something similar.
So what I was aiming for was a faithful reproduction of the original image, which I would offer for sale at the exhibition to raise funds for the Alzheimers’ Society. Here’s how I got there:
The first thing I did was break the original out of it’s (crumbling, old) frame and scan it. I used the highest possible resolution my printer could achieve – 600 dpi (dots per inch).
My scanner isn’t big enough to fit the whole painting in at one time, so I had to scan it as two separate images. Once scanned, I digitally stitched the image together. Thankfully I use Adobe Photoshop and there is a menu option for that under File > Automate > Photomerge
It did its magic, flawlessly. After that I sat with the original next to me and the scanned version on screen adjusting the colours, saturation, and levels to get the version on screen to be as close to the real thing as possible.
If you’ve never done something like that before, it can be surprisingly tricky. Getting the colour right in one area can throw it off in another, and sometimes you have to make compromises so you can get the overall image closer to the original while an individual element would have been perfect but making it so would throw off everything else.
There is no way to automate the process because it’s about matching to human sight – digital imaging doesn’t see things the way our eyes do. It is a human, bespoke process that’s different every time you do it.
Having done all that fiddling about, I went to my local printer (Bare Branding) and asked them to make giclée prints that matched the original as closely as possible.
They offered to scan my original themselves with their industrial-sized scanner and I figured why not. They scanned it at 300dpi and brought it into Affinity, which they told me they preferred to Photoshop (which they also have) for colour matching. Their scanned file still needed some tweaking, but not as much as mine.
Once they had it looking good on the screen, they made some test prints.
We noticed something really strange. Despite looking fine on screen, when printed it looked – what can only be described as – ‘fluffy’ in some areas. The fine details of subtle colour differences, easily distinguishable to the human eye were rendered into a more indistinct area of colour when printed.
This leads us to step three.
So, they scanned it again, this time at 600dpi.
They repeated the same colour adjustments as before, then made new test prints. For comparison, they also made test prints with the scan I had made.
My printers offers two kinds of fine art prints, giclée and a more generic ‘fine art’ print which uses giclée inks and archival paper, just not giclée archival paper.
So we made test prints on both of those papers using both scans and, unfortunately, the fluffiness was still there, only slightly improved by the newer, higher resolution scan. The scan they had made looked better in terms of the colour trueness than mine, so we decided to stick with their one.
The printers told me they’d only experienced this issue once before. It was with another watercolour painting that had a similar palette and setting. Something about that medium with those particular colours in that environment makes it difficult to reproduce it seems.
So they set about experimenting with various settings until the hit on the winner – adjusting the black levels. They boosted these by varying percentages, and printed them on both sets of papers.
Together we reviewed the results and agreed that the 12% boost on giclée paper using their 600 dpi scan gave the closest possible reproduction.
Making a good-quality, as true to the original as possible reproduction of a physical artwork take times. It’s not like using a photocopier. This all took the better part of a day, which is worth bearing in mind if you’ve never done something like this before. There are so many variables that can influence the degree to which your reproduction resembles your original – the scanner, the software you use to adjust it, the inks it’s printed with, and the paper it’s printed on.
And I would say – for me at least – it was time well spent because now I have an offering that I feel proud of, that I think does my gran’s work justice, and helps showcase her beautiful work in the best possible light.
Exhibition Blog series:
