Re: fine art reproduction questions
Re: fine art reproduction questions
- Subject: Re: fine art reproduction questions
- From: Ben Goren <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 30 Apr 2010 12:57:06 -0700
On 2010 Apr 30, at 12:26 PM, Mike Strickler wrote:
> email@hidden wrote:
>
>> Can anyone offer advice relative to purchasing equipment for fine art, giclee reproduction.
>
> This leaves you with using a smaller, instant-capture back and photographing in sections
It's worth observing that this technique works superbly with DSLRs, as well. Get any new DSLR and a 50mm (ish) macro, take multiple overlapping images (by repositioning the artwork), and use Photoshop's panorama feature to merge them. Camera-to-subject distance determines the capture PPI, so adjust that as desired and take however many frames as you need to image the entire piece. Of course, you need to keep everything parallel, the same distance, and all the other usual and obvious caveats. Photoshop handles rotation without problem, and also corrects for peripheral illumination fall-off (aka vignetting) if your lens isn't up to par.
The challenge with art reproduction isn't the equipment; it's the color management workflow.
You can do surprisingly well with Canon cameras by using Adobe Camera Raw, the Camera Faithful profile, and setting all the sliders, tone curves, and everything else to their zero (not default) settings. Shoot a gray card, and adjust your exposure until, with those zeroed-out settings, the RGB values of the card match what you measured your gray card should be. Set your white balance from something like the BabelColor target or white polystyrene. Assuming you've got a good printer profile, that procedure may well get you better results than most of the others who ``oh-by-the-way'' offer giclee reproductions as a service.
If you want to improve further, you'll have to create ICC input profiles for your camera. You'll have to do that no matter what kind of camera / scanner / whatever you use, and the process is essentially the same for all. Shoot a target with known color values, use software to create a profile based on that picture, shoot the art in the exact same way as you shot the target, apply the profile to the picture of the art, and convert that picture either to your favorite working space for further manipulation or directly to your printer profile. Each change in lighting or equipment requires a new profile. Creating a profile for each work of art isn't all that much of a hassle and a good idea to include as part of the workflow, since it protects against drift as lights age.
You can use expensive commercial software such as what X-Rite offers for excellent results, or you can use the free software ArgyllCMS and also get excellent results. Argyll is command-line based while the commercial software is all pointy / clicky. Both have a learning curve, though the commercial software is probably gentler. On the other hand, Graeme Gill, the author of Argyll, actually answers his email and regularly incorporates suggestions and requests for improvement in new releases; I don't think you can buy that level of support from X-Rite or anybody else.
Cheers,
b& _______________________________________________
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