BCreative provides custom content for Chromalink’s monthly newsletter, Colour Matters. This piece featured the growing popularity of Iphoneography.
Considering the growth rate in the fine art digital printing field, the world is experiencing a personal creative renaissance these days. One recent study reported a compound annual growth rate of 20% for large-format digital printing and the rest of the fine art printing industry is also expanding exponentially. It’s a self-love fest with everyone expressing their inner creativity.
Chromalink partners with many fine art commercial printers and individual creative people – professional and amateur alike – to ensure that their colourful creations are accurately represented in the final print. More people may be seeing the world through rose-coloured glasses but if that rose colour comes out as hot pink then it’s a totally different world. Chromalink helps to ensure the quality, accuracy and consistency of the colours in every fine art print.
The fine art printing field was once of limited scope and it was hard to attach the term “fine art” to the printed material. It took a rock star to give the industry a needed jolt. In the late 1980s, Graham Nash (who was part of the famed foursome Crosby, Stills, Nash and Neil Young) was experimenting with digitally-altered photographs but the ability to see, scan and print his artistry remained crude. Nash was instrumental in introducing the IRIS printer – the first high-caliber fine art printing platform – to a wider audience. Nash Editions also popularized the term “giclee” to give the new medium some French je ne sais quoi (it translates as “to spray”). By 1990 digital fine art was beginning to make its mark but the medium was unrefined and expensive – the first IRIS printer cost Nash $126,000.
Digital fine art printing has come a great distance since then, both technologically and creatively. There is now a lot of complexity and experimentation as artists explore the diverse visual experiences available with digital art. The field includes everything from museum-quality fine art photographs blown-up as large as billboards to archival giclee reproductions on colour-soaked canvas to exhibition-quality examples of iPhoneography, a popular new medium born of the fidgety fingers of people with an iPhone camera. And artists are taking creative advantage of the many different substrates available from Hahnemüle fne art paper to satin-coated canvas to dibond and metallic papers.
Chromalink’s client, Opus Art Supplies, has used their long established ties to the local artistic community critical understanding of the needs of artists and creative professionals to provide a high level of service in their Digital Printing depots available in all 6 retail locations. Opus’ trained digital art technicians such as Trevor Code at their downtown store know how important it is to achieve the correct colours when moving from screen to print. Digital reproductions of existing artwork come with certain colour expectations that only a properly colour-managed system can provide. “At Opus”, Code explains, “we take the time to explain why colours may shift or lose their luminescence. And we strongly encourage test prints”.
To ensure colour consistency, Chromalink regularly calibrates the monitors and printers in all of Opus’ locations. Chromalink also provides ICC profiles for each of the material substrates so that no matter the material, the printed colours will be as near to the original as is technically possible. “Chromalink’s colour management service ensures that the colours we print are accurate, consistent and repeatable”, Code says. “Artists expect creative perfection and that’s what we strive to give them”.
Haris Hasimbegovic, Chromalink’s colour management consultant, intimately understands the challenge of printing colour perfectly. As he explains, “Printing art is a craft and I think of Trevor and his colleagues at Opus as skilled artisans. And most are artists themselves which helps in how they see and develop the digital files. With colour, the details matter to achieving a high quality fine art print
In order to provide artists – whether professional or aspiring – with a better and more complete understanding of all of those colour management challenges, Chromalink is sponsoring a 2-hour workshop on “Colour Management and Printing Fine Art”. The seminar will open up an interesting discussion about how colour shifts across platforms and how artists can gain the skills to work more confidently with colour using accurate colour management principles. And there may even be time to show your latest Iphoneography masterpiece.
