Re: fine art reproduction questions
Re: fine art reproduction questions
- Subject: Re: fine art reproduction questions
- From: Randy Zaucha <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 2 May 2010 12:46:27 -0700 (PDT)
Hi Ben,I was employed by Thom Kinkade for 2 1/2 years to accurately reproduce his paintings for mass distribution. I've seen more cottages and lighthouses than any man should ever see.
We used a Betterlight 100 megapixel back on a 4 x 5 camera outfit. Polarizing filters on camera lense and lighting.
When I first started there, achieving flat lighting was a real pain. Some paintings were 5 feet wide. Later we beta tested an HP system that used luminance mapping to correct the lighting fall off. Now you can get the same tool from Robin Meyer's website. (rmimaging.com) It's called Equalight and it is a very underpriced Photoshop filter. You capture the painting and then slide a white canvas in front of it and capture that. The filter determines the light even/uneveness on the canvas and corrects it in Photoshop. This is extremely important to getting a good reproduction because light fall off make accurate retouching impossible.
I'm not sure what you meant about not being able to use Betterlight due to floors.
The wild card is being able to make a good profile of the camera. HP actually profiled our camera using RGB lights. After exposure I took physical readings with a spectrophotometer from the painting and they were added to the final calculation of the image file. I'm not sure if they ever put that product on the market. Robin?
Once Thom brought back 6 paintings he made on a trip to Israel. He had purchased some paints made locally and they reproduced very differently than what we were used to. That batch took some extra retouching to get a good match. We attributed it to local minerals in the paint.
If you can, get your painter to make a simulation of the Gretag Colorchecker with his paints. Measure it and make a camera profile. That may get you some better accuracy. Be sure to make at least 5 reading per patch and average them.
We were very proud to make extremely accurate reproductions of Kinkade's paintings. The irony was that Thom's older paintings from the 80's were reproduced for offset press. Whoever was doing the color check on press got subjective and told the pressman to go away from the color of the original. They even dot etched the color to the detriment of the color match. Original and reproduction turned out very different and they sell them to this day. The new giclees of his work are extremely accurate reproductions.
Fine art reproduction always involves retouching because the camera will never see color like the eye does. A great camera profile and Equalight 2 can get you about 90% of the way. I set up a local company with those tools and they have youngsters making very accurate painting reproductions on the first print off an HP Z6100 printer.
Monitors...get one with contrast, brightness and individual RGB brightness controls. Then profile it. I use the Spyder 3 Pro at 2.4 Native white point setting.
Randy ZauchaManaged Color
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