WE ARE AUSTRALIA’S LEADERS IN DIGITAL ART CAPTURE

Still leading the field, we have just installed Australia’s first 100megapixel Scan Camera.

• 100 megapixels - the sensor is a whopping 10,000 x 10,000 pixels!
• The camera is hand-made to order in Germany and uses Schneider APO-Componon lenses, the best in the world and the only lenses capable of resolving the detail produced.
• The camera produces a 572megabyte, 16bit file and the colour, tone and detail is unsurpassed.
• The range of lenses we use allow photography of subjects as small as diamond rings to large artworks up to 2m x 5m in our studio. If you can get it in our door, we can photograph it!

Have a look at the image below. The original artwork by David Hart measured 90 x 60cm. We captured a 766megabyte file measuring 120 x 80cm and the results you see below show an evenly lit, perfectly sharp image with no unsightly reflections typical of a highly textured image. To view a much larger version, simply click here or on the image.

You’ve spent hours, days, weeks or months on your latest creation. Isn’t it exciting when the first person to see it buys it and takes it away? Then you think to yourself, “Oh Bugger! I should have taken a photograph of it before it went“.

If you want to do it yourself, here are some of the things you need to consider when photographing art for reproduction…
•    Is your camera capable of producing a high quality 300ppi, TIFF or RAW, 16bit file?
•    What size do you want to reproduce your artwork and can your camera create a file that size without interpolation?
•    Is the camera mounted on a tripod and perfectly square to the art?
•    Is the art evenly lit with correctly colour-balanced light?
•    Has your computer monitor been correctly colour-balanced on a regular basis?
•    Do you understand about ICC profiles and what colourspace you should be working in?
•    Are you competent in Photoshop and able to make fine adjustments to correct the image?

If you answer “No” or “What do you mean?” to any of these questions then it will be difficult to produce quality art reproductions from the files you create and you could be disappointed with the results.

DIY ART PHOTOGRAPHY

At AHR we are extremely particular about the quality of our digital files. We are always striving for the very best possible result and have invested in the appropriate equipment to do this. However we are quite happy to work with files supplied to us provided you understand the variables involved. So let’s look briefly at the list above…

THE CAMERA –
To have any chance of success you will need a high quality digital SLR of at least 10 megapixels, preferably with a prime lens (not zoom) of around 80mm. This will give you a file that will make a reasonable A3 print if everything else is right. For the past 8 years, we’ve used a 50megapixel art copy camera and now use the new 100 megapixel camera!

FILE SIZE AND TYPE -
Many artists send us JPEG files that have been compressed so much that making a good 7″ x 5″ print is difficult, let alone an A4 or larger! To get the maximum resolution the only setting you should use on your camera is TIFF or RAW.  We only shoot in 16bit Tiff format for ultimate results.

FINISHED PRINT SIZE -
If you want to know the optimum print size for your camera, look in the instruction book. It should tell you the print size for each quality setting your camera offers. Do not settle for anything less than the highest setting – EVER – when photographing your art. You can always make a file smaller but making it larger will reduce the quality. Understand that to interpolate (enlarge) a digital file to a larger size means to create more pixels than are in the original file and while the results can be satisfactory for some, they are not always ideal. Our camera produces an 85 x 85cm image and we use multiple images perfectly merged to produce larger works.

GETTING IT SQUARE AND SHARP -
Apart from lighting and pixel detail, sharpness of the image is critical. The only way to guarantee sharpness is to mount your camera on a tripod, use the optimum aperture (usually around f8 but each lens differs) on the best lens you can afford. You will also need to ensure you are square to the art. If you are not, this will lead to some corners of the image being out of focus. Zoom lenses are not as sharp as prime lenses and the ideal focal length would be around 80-100mm. This will eliminate the barrel effect caused by wide angle lenses but not put you too far away from the artwork. Our camera is laser-guided to ensure it is square to the image ensuring perfect overall sharpness.

LIGHTING –
Lighting artwork correctly is critical when making reproductions. With the wrong light, you have shadows, colour casts, reflections, uneven coverage. All of these things will disappoint you when you see your prints. The colour of light (colour temperature) changes with the type of light used and the area in which the art is positioned. Imagine the colour casts you can get using ordinary fluorescent (green) tubes, reflected off an orange wall with a dash of sunlight coming through a window – three different coloured light sources lighting the one image will change how your image prints. Our system uses banks of colour-correct, ballasted fluorescent tubes that provide constant, even illumination that ensures the digital file is as close as possible to the original image.

MONITOR CALIBRATION -
You’ve probably had it happen to you, printed an image that looks great on your screen but looks lousy in print. There are several reasons for this. The first is that your monitor has probably never been correctly calibrated. There are several ways to do this, the ideal being to use a Gretag Macbeth Eye One or Spyder. We calibrate our monitors regularly to ensure consistent viewing. What we see on our screens is what we see in our prints.

ICC PROFILES and COLOURSPACE -
This is the really technical part and the second reason why your prints don’t look as they do on the screen. Understanding colour and profiling is critical to getting consistent results. Using specialised equipment, we have “profiled” every substrate (paper and canvas) we print on and this calibration is applied to each image when printed. This allows us to print the same image on different substrates and maintain colour control.

If this all gets a bit much for you – what can you do? Call Art House Reproductions of course!

We can photograph your art and produce a digital file that captures all the detail, texture, colour and tone of your original. Our state-of-the-art Copy Camera produces such a large file that we can print most images much larger than the original if required. We often copy originals measuring 1.5 x 3m or more. We can provide you with a file any size to suit your purpose.

For pastels, watercolours or un-stretched canvas originals, we use a large vacuum board to hold the prints perfectly flat which eliminates unsightly ripples and reflections. Some images like those with reflective metallic sections require special treatment to ensure they are lit correctly, this is where our decades of experience as photographers comes into play, we have plenty of tricks up our sleeves!

Will we work with your digital files to print your work? Of course, but we would suggest you order a proof strip first to see if the colour, tones and detail are acceptable to you.

The bottom line is this… if you are competent with a quality camera, correct lighting and Photoshop, and can follow all the steps above, you can create a pretty good digital file that will give you reasonable prints up to A3 but if you want anything larger, or want exceptional quality, you’ll need to contact us.