Charles Lewis Art - California

What do we call them -  Prints or Reproductions?

From Zatista.com: What is the difference between a print and a reproduction?

A true print for the purpose of our site is a work that the artist has created by hand, and is created in such a way as to preserve the intention of the original work, such as with an etching, a woodcut, a linocut, or a silk-screened image. A reproduction is where the intent and purpose of the original work has been altered to the extent that the image becomes mass-produced and which loses all connection to the original.

With all due respect to the website Zatista, which is a fine resource, in my view this argument over print or repro has become meaningless. The traditional definition of print is okay in some ways. These prints they describe (except for many silk screens) were never derived from painted (or whatever) originals – they were conceived as a print series from the start. Silk screened (also called serigraph to make it sound more sophisticated) prints may or may not have a derivation from an original artwork: for many years, silk screening was one way of reproducing a painted original in a way that often succeeded in looking pretty good. (I exclude high-volume offset printing from this discussion.)  In most cases, the artist had minimal involvement in the silk-screened production process beyond approving the way it turned out. Most of these were intended as limited editions, but in editions larger than the traditional litho or other printing methods.  High-end silk screening is a very difficult, exacting procedure.

The Zatista definition says the following: “A reproduction is where the intent and purpose of the original work has been altered to the extent that the image becomes mass-produced and which loses all connection to the original.” Huh? Altered so that the image loses all connection to the original, just because it can be mass produced? The connection part is just wrong: the intent of the reproduction is to maintain as tight a connection to the original as possible, by making it as true to the colors and look as is feasible. Speaking as an artist who controls all aspects of his own printing process, this is not easy or fast. I typically spend a minimum of 50 hours painting a (smallish) picture, and a significant fraction of that in later preparing and tweaking it for printing.

The digitizing alone is very tricky, especially if you paint in oils which can be highly reflective, let alone use metallic colors which are very hard to reproduce. A really good digital camera might kind of work, in a very basic sort of way, if great care is taken with the lighting and the work is small. I take a more professional approach, having my paintings scanned using a Betterlight™ or other high end digitizing setup, in imaging shops that specialize in this sort of capture. These computer/photographic units cost many thousands of dollars and use proprietary software, scanning a picture line by line instead of in one shot. The Betterlight systems also use separate pixels for the red, green and blue spectra and combine them in the software. The resolution is much higher than consumer, or even professional digital cameras, enabling the capture to show every tiny detail, including the subtle shadows in the canvas texture. Sometimes this extreme resolution can make you a little crazy, because you see things in the digitized capture that you would have to look really hard to see in the original.

Lighting is critical. Many imaging shops use Northlight™ setups, or homemade light boxes. Either way, the color temperature must be carefully controlled and the spread of the light across the surface kept very uniform top to bottom and side to side. There is a debate over polarization: on the plus side, cross-polarization virtually eliminates glare and the tiny light flare spots in oil paintings; on the minus (or also plus) side, it also eliminates some of the subtle grain or texture of the paint and the canvas, making the print of the picture look somewhat more flat. This is a matter of taste – some painters that use heavy impasto or paint texture want it to show, while others prefer that it be suppressed. Some painters like the canvas grain to show, giving the print (sorry, Zatista) a more authentic look, while others don’t, or don’t care. The non-polarized version, if it shows a lot of the painting’s canvas texture, can be a bit strange looking when re-printed onto a canvas substrate, which has its own texture. I personally go back and forth with polarization – if a painting is done onto very smooth canvas and is painted quite flat with little texture, a non-polarized setup is generally fine. The cost of professional digital capture is not insignificant. I usually figure about $50 per scan in the local shops I use, or perhaps a bit less if I bring in several pictures that can be scanned with one setup.

That’s just the digital capture. Every time you digitize an image, the camera converts all the actual painted colors to some color space recognizable by a computer. Then another color conversion takes place as the digital file is printed by the printer. These conversions require a significant outlay of time and effort in Photoshop to bring all these colors back to something as close as possible to the original. It is essential to have the original available so small corrections can be made comparing the printer output to the painting. Some paintings seem to require a ton of adjustments – to almost every color, and also outlining various parts of the picture (like a face, for example) for individual adjustment– while others come in pretty close to perfect and only need a bit of tweaking.

It basically comes down to how much of a perfectionist the artist is, their skill level throughout the whole printing process, and how much time they have to work it all out. This is an advantage that artist-controlled printing has over commercial print shops, even using the same equipment. If a picture requires a dozen hours of color-correction time and many test prints, commercial shops have to charge for that, which can run hundreds of dollars even before the first good print is produced. I highly recommend that every serious painter become proficient in Photoshop, unless they have a lot of money for a Photoshop expert to do the pre-print work while they hover over their shoulder for hours. (Accept no substitute! Photoshop is the premier imaging software on the planet.)

So the question is, does modern digital capture and high-resolution inkjet (aka Giclee) printing devalue the print/reproduction over older technology, and does it  “lose all connection to the original?” At its best it certainly can look more true to the original than anything previously possible, and in my mind maintains a good connection to the original. Granted, there is no gradual deterioration in the quality of the print, as is the case with lithography and the like, but is that a bad thing? If you get number 100 of a 100-edition from a real lithograph, it’s going to look substantially muddier than number 1 or 10, so is long-term print consistency not a good thing? 

For now, Giclee printing offers the best way to accurately reproduce a painting that I’ve seen. Giclee prints on canvas, especially, can appear quite close to the original painting on canvas, if that is the medium. So let’s put this print vs. reproduction argument to rest in the same way the digital vs. film argument has been withering in the camera world. If an artist is into traditional printmaking using lithography or whatever, that’s great. For most painters, however, a carefully made giclee print is an amazing feat of duplication.