Articles

The Importance of File Preparation and Proofing

If you want to make the highest quality reproductions possible of your artwork, file preparation and proofing is not something you want to skip or skimp out on. This work is vital to getting flawless reproductions that match your artwork exactly. In this article, we’ll walk you through our art reproduction process here at Old Town Editions, and answer some of the questions that we most frequently hear about the proofing process.

Our Art Reproduction Process

At Old Town Editions, art reproduction is our specialty. All of our equipment, all of our materials, and every step of our process is tailored to making museum-quality prints for our artists. First, we’ll walk you through the basics of our process, and then we’ll get into the details of why these steps are so important.

Image Capture 

When you bring us your artwork, the first step of the process is the image capture. To get a high-quality print of your artwork, you first need an equally high-quality digital image. This is especially important if you want to make large prints, as you’ll need a sufficiently large file. 

Artwork by Mike Petty

File Preparation

Once we’ve got a high-quality digital image of your artwork, the next step is the file preparation. This is where the heavy lifting is to get as exact a match as possible to your artwork. Our expert technicians will print a physical proof, compare it to the artwork, and make adjustments as needed. We’ll repeat that process, fine-tuning every detail, every color, every nuance, until we have a final print that is as exact a match as possible to your original artwork. 

Another important aspect of the file preparation is the digital file cleanup that we’ll do. While our incredible image capture system captures all the details of your artwork, that also means it picks up things you’d rather not see on your prints, like dust and pet hairs. We’ll digitally remove those, as well as any other stray marks or spots you may want removed. Often, things that you wouldn’t think twice about when looking at a painting may end up looking like flaws on a print, simply due to the differences in these mediums.

Proof Archiving

At Old Town Editions, we take color accuracy and consistency very seriously. We take great pains to ensure that every print you order is consistent in appearance, no matter how much time passes between orders. Part of this involves careful maintenance of our prints, and keeping them running as long as possible. The other crucial part is proof archiving. When you pay for a file preparation, this also includes us keeping a physical copy of the final proof print on file for us to use as a reference if we ever need it. 

Eventually, printers do reach the end of their lives, and we’ll have to retire them. Every printer prints a little bit differently, so we don’t want to simply start printing your images on a new printer, as they would no longer match the rest of your edition.

When this happens, we’ll pull out the proof print we have on file, and readjust your file to ensure the prints from the new printer will match that final proof you approved. This is not a service you will get from online printers, or cheap print studios. This kind of care for your editions only comes from studios like Old Town Editions, and is worth the investment.

Common Questions About Proofing

File preparation, of course, comes with a price tag, and that price reflects the amount of time, specialized work, skill, and physical materials that are required to get to the final product. While we know how important proofing is and how worth the investment it is, we understand that if you’re new to the process, the price may seem high. Here, we’ll go through the most common questions we are asked to help you understand what makes proofing so worth it when reproducing artwork. 

Can I Skip the Proofing Process?

The simple answer is: no! Old Town Editions specializes in art reproductions, and we have built a reputation for producing prints that are exact matches (or as exact as possible) to the original artwork. Because of this, we do require proofing for all artists looking to make print reproductions with us. We want to ensure that every print that leaves our studio is as good as it can possibly be, and that requires proofing.

My File Looks Good on Screen. Can I Just Print It?

We hear this one a lot! It’s important to understand that how an image appears on screen is not the same as how it will print. Screens are backlit, adding brightness that prints do not have. Additionally, the printer being used, as well as the print surface and inks, will also change the appearance of an image. You could print the exact same file on multiple print surfaces, on multiple printers, and each of those prints will look different. 

Here’s an example to help illustrate this. Below are two side-by-sides of two different versions of the same images. On each, the left side is the version that we adjusted to be an on-screen match to the original artwork. If you held up the original artwork next to our calibrated monitors (more on monitor calibration below!), it would match the image on the left side. The right side, however, is the version we’ve adjusted for printing. While it looks completely different from the left side, this is what the file needs to look like in order for the prints to match the artwork. Even if your file looks good on screen, if you go straight to print without proofing and file adjustment, you run the risk of your prints looking completely different than your artwork.

Artwork by Chris Pankow

Monitor Calibration

To further the discussion about how images appear on screen versus how they print, it’s important to understand that not all monitors will even display an image exactly the same. You can test this out for yourself using this article. Open it on as many different screens as you have- your phone, your tablet, your laptop, a desktop monitor. Pick any of the images in this article and compare it across the different screens. You’ll notice that it looks different on each screen. Even if the differences are subtle, they are there. We often have people tell us a file looks great on their screen, and that’s how they want their print to look. Unfortunately, we simply have no idea what it looks like on their screen, but it’s a near guarantee that it’s not the same as how it looks on our screens. 

Monitor calibration can help tremendously with cutting down on the differences between screens, but still can’t guarantee that your screen matches ours exactly. We keep all the monitors in our studio calibrated to the same settings, to ensure that each work station is viewing images consistently. 

What if I Don’t Have the Artwork Anymore?

Even if you no longer have access to the original artwork, we do still require proofing. We will still make adjustments and run several rounds of proofing based on our professional judgement, and we’ll then have you come in to view the proof and provide feedback based on your more extensive knowledge of the artwork. And remember, as outlined above, the file preparation includes more than just proofing. It also includes that all-important file cleanup, as well as final image and proof archiving, to ensure color consistency over the years.