Capturing Your Art: The Critical First Step

Setting up for excellent reproduction

You’ve spent a lot of time and effort to create your masterpiece. Capturing what you’ve created is the most important step in creating faithful reproductions of that work.

Have you ever tried to capture your own work? The best of us can get close, but we still struggle. “The colors look off. The flash is reflecting off of the surface. The image is somehow skewed to a slight angle. The picture looks pixelated or distorted when I enlarge it.”

At PageMaster, we understand the challenges associated with image capture. We’ve tackled them with our 39 Megapixel medium format Hasselblad capture studio. Lighting, spot metering, color charts, software and systems are pulled together to provide an economical and accurate foundation to reproduce your work.

The images we capture of your works will scale well, from a gallery for your web site, to art cards, prints and massive giclee, canvas and banner reproductions. You’ll be delighted with the digital version of your work.

We have captured 4×8 foot pieces but most commonly encounter under 24 x 36 inch and smaller pieces.  Most images can be enlarged depending on the original texture and paint. We have printed double the dimensions with good results.

Considerations include even lighting, perspective control, accurate exposure and color fidelity. We use a number of tools to assist in the process and capture with a Hasselblad driven from a calibrated Mac enabling us to reduce steps and increase quality .

You’ve spent the time and talent to create a great work. Let us spend our time and talent to capture and reproduce it well.

What does capture cost?

Capturing your work is a small investment that will pay off with every print you produce. Here are our rates;

$50 for first capture (includes basic color balancing, proofing and web version for your use) Critical color balancing and image retouching work may be additional.

$37 per additional capture of similar work in the same studio and proofing session.

Note: We have reduced our entry cost for capture and these rates include JPG files suitable for on-line and portfolio/publicity use. Full resolutions images are available for an additional fee of $50 each.

The standard time for capture including proofing is 10 working days. Please let us know if a shorter time is required so it can be scheduled.

If you’d like to see just how good your work can look in pixels, contact us today.

Aaron Paquette with triptych of three 4′ x 8″ originals and 3′ x 5′ reproductions on canvas photographed by Dale Youngman, printed and stretched at PageMaster.

Next steps

• Book an appointment or call to discuss your needs
• Select the work to be captured
• Bring the work to our studio
• We tag the artwork with your name, job number, image name, media, and original size
• The capture process includes: taking the image, initial laser proofing, color adjustments, laser and glicee proofing, reviewing results and color with you, final cropping, saving, optimizing, backups and filing for reference.
• We create the final high-resolution .tiff file and laser, print and web versions including adding keywords, description and copyright info to the XPF/EXIF data of your image.
• An optimized 8×10 web file and an 8×10 high-quality print JPG are uploaded to your project (if you are using our web site service we will also add the image to your gallery).
• You pick up your art and we keep the proofs for color reference on future printing.
• The image is ready to use on paper, canvas, cards, or…

For information on next steps see Explore the Possibilities

Work from many of our artists is available on our on-line store. Visit PageMasterPublishing.ca