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Photographing your artwork is the first step to digital printing for artists. While scanning can usually result in a better quality digital reproduction a well photographed work of art can still yield incredible giclee and other digital prints.

Did you know that you can order a run of giclee printing offline. One little known secret is FinerWorks, while being an online print on demand service for artists and photographers, also has an offline program. The offline program provides the flexibility for artists, curators, decorators and businesses needing large or massive print runs to place special orders they might otherwise not be able to on our website. The advantage to these larger runs is we are able to still offer volume pricing on other media types not available for online orders.

So what’s the deal with those little green stamps of approval? That is a question that is bound to come up within the next few days as the first batch of order shipped with those stamped on the package begin to arrive. I recently was sent some prints by another company to see how they have been addressing certain packaging challenges. Even after shipping countless orders over the years, we are always looking at ways we can make improvements in the area of packaging and giving the recipients a sense of comfort in knowing their shipments are being sent with care. I was curious what they did after observing mention of this company’s packaging method numerous times on various blogs and websites. I thought it would be a good idea to see firsthand what they were doing, then see if we could adopt anything they use that would benefit our customers.

We have several local customers who like to paint over photographs. Recently a new customer came in to pick up his canvas print. He told me he wanted to completely paint over the photo printed on canvas so that it looked like an original painting. His main question was if he should have ordered it stretched and mounted. Right away I told him I am usually surprised when artists order prints stretched and mounted they plan to paint on unless they are only applying a few highlights and embellishments. I said while there is nothing preventing a person from doing so, they would want to be aware of a few things before choosing if it should be mounted or not.

Our calibration print is a special 8×10 print you can order which allows you to adjust your monitor to try to match the print. Once you have done this and start working on your images on your computer you will be working on an image which is more closely aligned to industry color standards versus. While you can order this print on most of the media types we offer, there is no need to order more than one since colors print on all fairly consistent on all of them. Sure you will see some slight differences if you ordered more than one calibration print and on different papers but don’t use the calibration print to determine what media type is best to print your images. For that we recommend printing some of your actual work on the different papers and see which either sells the best or you like most. The calibration print is mainly to try to bring your monitor into a state which is closer to the standards at which we we print.

Our upcoming Archival Canvas Paper is a bright white matte paper which will be available within a few more days. This new paper is the same but texturized version of our popular Archival Matte Paper.