Start With the Finish

If you like to read magazines backwards, this may be of special interest to you because working backwards is the best way to make giclée art.

Basically, you start with the finish. That is, how will the giclée be presented? Will it be on paper, or canvas? Will it have a coating? Appear under glass? Be specially lit? All these factors play into the prepress you do before printing the picture, because they all impact the dynamic tone range and the 'character' of the giclée as it will be seen.

I am reminded of a movie called 'Leave Her To Heaven' by John M. Stahl that I saw on PBS last night. It was filmed in Technicolor® and for that reason had a distinct and particular 'look' that I recognized, being a nearly-senior citizen. It's a look shared by Kodachrome® slides... strong saturated hues and contrast with lots of shadow. We are not used to seeing that look anymore because entire industries have been built to solve the 'problem' of a limited dynamic tone range. Filmmakers and photographers now use light balancing and HDR (high dynamic range) to extend the dynamic tone range and gamut to near perfection. But what is perfect if beauty is in the eye of the beholder?

From the perspective of a giclée printer, perfection is in the details (together with the Devil). From afar, a picture can have a 'look', for example strong graphics versus pastels. But as you get closer, you should be able to see into the shadows and catch detail in the highlights. Exceptions to that are found in specific styles and techniques that are more monotone like 'line art'.


The pictures compared above show the restoration of color into the highlights of a sunset sky. These kinds of subtleties are lost in most pictures. You must recreate picture tones where none exist because they are 'blown out'. There are a lot of reasons why highlights get blown out, and there are ways to restore them that are all described in my book, under 'Highlight Control' - one of the thirteen steps to prepress success when making giclée art prints.

More tone detail is only possible with a wide dynamic tone range. The more colors you have available, the more detailed your tone separation can be come. Gradients open up and become wider, meaning less banding.

People choose giclée printing because it offers the highest dynamic tone range of any printing process, and the greatest detail (made possible by sprayed microdots versus the grids of hard-edge dots used in conventional printing). However, much of the effect can be lost - or at least substantially changed - by how the giclée is finished and presented.

A Jackson Pollock painting or a Yousuf Karsh portrait given a matte surface would kill the look of those artists' work. Their pictures require strong black. However, matte-finishes create scatter light which 'fogs' the dark tones. It's like moving the black point off the scale of the histogram. But suppose that is what the client wants... a matte finish for a Karsh? Then your prepress work must work up a notch, developing stronger tone separations in the dark-tone regions, which are going to become lighter to the eye in the finished presentation than they appear to you on your monitor screen.

To simulate what will happen, look at your prepress work through a 'white net' filter and observe the effects of scatter light in a 'simulated' manner. The white-net filter is simply a top layer in PhotoShop®, filled with white and then opacity-adjusted to whatever percent... something between 2 and 11% usually. Watch what happens to the interrelationship of dark tones to each other and to the light tones. The same 'loss' occurs in all tones but is especially noticeable in the darks.

By observing your prepress adjustments through the filter, you'll be more likely to use the heavy hand needed in this case. When you remove the filter, your work will appear exaggerated, which is what the giclée needs to compensate for the low-contrast matte finish it will have.

Of course the opposite also holds... a pastel to be giclée'd onto a high-gloss finish needs to possibly have the a 'white-net mask'. A 'mask' is the same as a 'filter' except it is applied to the image when it is printed, to lift the blacks away from 'pure' black into the 'dark gray' blacks you see in pastel originals, which themselves lack true black.

Techniques like these are described in great detail in Giclée Prepress - The Art of Giclée my new book about pixel-perfect printing. (www.gicleeprepress.com)

That is why you should 'start with the finish' when doing prepress work for giclée printing. Consider the dynamic tone range and gamut that will be seen by the viewer, and adjust the image file to compensate for the 'character' and 'look' of the finished giclée.

Speaking of finishes, at Vashon Island Imaging, my fine-arts printing and publishing company, we experiment a lot with finishes. In fact we sell certain types of 'artisan' finishes for premium prices. For example, we offer 'iridescent' varnish that sparkles. 'Antique' varnish is another favorite, giving giclée prints a very old and slightly distressed look that can add value to appropriate limited editions. These are also described in the book.

Going back a few years, our varnishing specialties grew from the fact that aside from varnish there weren't too many other finishes out there for giclée prints. There were those spray-can fixatives and the like, but I hate those because it is nearly impossible to get an even coating. That said, we now prefer sprayed coatings of liquid laminate at Vashon Island Imaging. We use a huge set-up involving a spray gun that I once used to paint my car(s). Without such 'industrial' scale spray gear, however, I don't recommend sprays for giclées. There are many reasons, which are explained in the book along with spraying instructions.

The varnish we continue to use is Golden® MSP Gloss Varnish (www.goldenpaints.com). That is applied with brushes. However, unless a customer requests varnish we have switched to liquid laminates because they are more 'user friendly' for most of our customers at Vashon Island Imaging.

Varnishes never really dry... which is why archivists prefer them. Even years later, varnishes can be removed. Maybe that's good for a Mona Lisa but for the average collector varnish is more of a pain. That is because two varnished pieces will eventually stick together and when you try to separate them, the giclée on one or the other will let go. Both pieces will be marred and require retouching with oil paints. The extent of the damage may require that the old varnish be stripped off and the piece refinished. For the giclée print shop it's a hell of a way to make money. I hate to see such damage and frankly it is nearly impossible to avoid when you have dozens of giclées all over the place as we do here at the Vashon Island Imaging studio. So now we like liquid lamination because all those problems go away.

We discovered liquid laminates the same time we added Epson® matte canvas to our media list. Coating matte canvas with gloss varnish was counter-intuitive. But when we switched to matte varnish the problems began. You cannot get a streak-free finish with matte varnish without an 'industrial' spray rig... which is why I built just such a rig at the Vashon Island studio, where we have plenty of space. But it's a conundrum because you don't really want to spray varnish either (because so much of that thinner will be pumped into the atmosphere... nasty).

In the quest for a better matte coating, we happened upon Clear Shield® (www.clearstarcorp.com). This stuff is water based... like that a lot. We first used it with little rollers and it worked well, leveling nicely and leaving a flat, even surface just like you want. The roller applied a good thick coat, too. This is all described in the book in more detail. Anyway, as happy as we are with the roller applications, the stuff dries too fast to be able to get across a big giclée in one go, like you can with slow-drying varnish. Nor can you sufficiently dilute the liquid lam to prevent fast drying without jeopardizing it's integrity (or so says the manufacturer). We split it 1:4 (one part water to four parts Clear Shield) for rolling and spraying. When it sets up, which is quick, it turns out like Saran Wrap bonded to your giclée... perfect!

The best part is that the liquid laminate finish is rugged and totally dry. The giclées don't stick together at all, which makes handling at the gallery or collector level so much easier (and for us too).

I'll 'finish' up by saying that, I feel much more at ease not releasing so many solvents into the atmosphere any more. It is ironic that to be more 'Green' we're using a synthetic coating system. Considering our intention to be more Eco friendly, I guess you'd say that we 'finished' where we started.