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Desk-Front Displays for Photo, Art, and Promotional Prints

By Darren Vena

Fine Balance Imaging Studios uses changeable panels in their desks to exhibit their clients' art and promote their own services. (www.fbistudios.com)
Fine Balance Imaging Studios uses changeable panels in their desks to exhibit their clients' art and promote their own services. (www.fbistudios.com)

At LexJet, we love it when photographers and artists send us pictures that show some of the creative ways they are using some of the inkjet-printable materials we sell.

In two previous posts on this blog (about photographers Leslie D. Bartlett and David DeJonge), we’ve shown you why LexJet’s Water-Resistant Satin Cloth is quickly becoming a popular option for printing photo and art exhibitions. For one thing, the inkjet-receptive coating on this smooth, lustrous, wrinkle-resistant cloth is designed for high-resolution, full-color imaging. And, because prints on Water Resistant Satin Cloth don’t need to be framed or mounted, shipping exhibition prints from one site to another is a breeze.

But here’s one use of Water-Resistant Satin Cloth that we hadn’t seen until now. The clever, desk-front display system shown here was devised by Joe Menth of Fine Balance Imaging on Whidbey Island, Washington, a mecca for artists, photographers, and nature-lovers about 25 miles north of Seattle.

FBIPanoDeskShotJoe built the desktop display system earlier this year when Fine Balance Imaging moved into a spacious new studio, which was more than twice the size of their original working quarters. He says the desks from the old location simply looked out of place in their new surroundings.

So he customized the desks with fixtures designed to hold changeable graphic panels made from satin-cloth prints attached to recycled door moldings. (The door moldings are used like stretcher bars in canvas gallery wraps.) The panels can be slid in and out of slats in the desk fixtures whenever Fine Balance Imaging wants to feature something new.

“In the desks, the panels looks seamless and permanent because we’ve put trim over the top,” says Menth. “But we simply pull up the trim, pull out the frame, and drop the new prints in.”

The images are printed onto LexJet Water Resistant Satin Cloth using the ImagePrint RIP and the Epson Stylus Pro 9800 printer.

The desktop graphic panels are just one of the ways that Menth shows clients what’s possible with high-resolution inkjet printing and different types of materials. As you can see from Joe’s panoramic shot below, when clients walk into Fine Balance Imaging they see bold splashes of color almost anywhere they look.

SLJFBIpanorama view 2

Along with promotions for the studio’s services, visitors can see small exhibitions of the work produced by clients such as Michael Foley. His macrophotography series Miracles in Minutiae was printed on LexJet’s Sunset Select Matte Canvas and is displayed for everyone to see.  In the corner of the studio is a print on an aluminum sheet made possible with Golden Digital Grounds for Non-Porous Surfaces.  Hanging above the desk are paintings enlarged to 400% and printed onto Color Textiles Habotai Silk.  Most of the framed photographs were printed on Epson UltraSmooth Fine Art paper.

As for promotional graphics, a front counter sign is printed on LexJet Water-Resistant Polypropylene and the graphics in the I-Banner Stands are printed on either Water-Resistant Polypropylene or Water-Resistant Satin Cloth.

Fine Balance Imaging was founded in 2004, a couple of years after Nancy McFarland and her son Joe Menth had moved to Whidbey Island intending to start a small, family-run art gallery. Nancy and Joe are both photographers and artists at heart, but had worked mostly in technology-related careers that they never were fully passionate about.

At the art gallery, they started making small art prints for a few of their new artist friends. They opened Fine Balance Imaging in direct response to what the artists in the area said they needed. The fine-art business has since expanded to include an extensive array of capture, design, finishing, and marketing-support services for artists, photographers, small businesses, and consumers. These services include: high-end film and flatbed scanning; photography; graphic design; panorama stitching of multiple images; and photo restoration, color correction, and retouching.

But the bulk of the studio’s business revolves around wide-format printing of fine art, photographs, posters, banners, and displays. The studio uses the Epson Stylus Pro 4800, 7600, and 9800 printers with ColorByte Software’s ImagePrint RIP for consistent color from print to print.

For artists who want prints ready to sell at local festivals, Fine Balance will provide shrink-wrapped or polybagged mounted prints. Finishing options include UV-coating, hand deckling, or custom trimming.

As their services have expanded, so has their base of customers. And that’s why they needed to move to a bigger space and chose to do something more creative with their desks.  When more customers see for themselves the type of images that can be produced on Water-Resistant Cloth, Menth says, “More and more clients are using it to create frame-free, ready-to-hang art.” Fine Balance Imaging sells the prints complete with a simple hanging system made from dowels and satin cord.

This type of ingenuity in producing ready-to-hang prints that has made Fine Balance Imaging very popular with their clients. Plus, “Doing work that we truly love motivates us to uphold incredibly high standards,” says Joe.

He adds that, “Our clients don’t care what equipment is used to create their prints. They just care that we spend time with them personally to make sure that they’re happy when they leave, so they will come back to us again and again.”

You can read more about Fine Balance Imaging and how they find ways to help artists succeed in LexJet’s In Focus Newsletter (Vol. 4, No. 7) and in future posts on Studio LexJet. Or visit the Fine Balance Imaging website: www.fbistudios.com

Posted on by LexJet Posted in Case Studies & Profiles
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Lizza Fine Art Studio Can Handle Big Giclée Projects

Artists have traveled from as far away as South Africa to have their work reproduced at Lizza Fine Art Studios. According to Studio Manager Betsy Green, “Most visitors are delighted to discover such a high-tech studio based in such as a quaint, small-town setting. The studio itself is a converted roller rink.”
Artists have traveled from as far away as South Africa to have their work reproduced at Lizza Fine Art Studios. According to Studio Manager Betsy Green, “Most visitors are delighted to discover such a high-tech studio based in such a quaint, small-town setting. The studio itself is a converted roller rink.”

The number of studios using wide-format, pigment-ink inkjet printers for fine-art reproduction has multiplied in recent years. Having more choices can be wonderful if you simply want to make a few copies of work that you can sell at art fairs, use to promote yourself, or give to friends and family members.      

But if you have special requirements such as extra-large print sizes or need hundreds of prints quickly, it’s important to know about giclée-printing studios that can efficiently produce the best possible reproductions. Significant differences exist in the type of image-capture and inkjet-printing equipment that various studios use for giclée printing. And some studio owners are more experienced in the world of art than others.

One company well-equipped to handle just about any type or size of art-reproduction project you might require is Lizza Fine Art Studios. Located in the small town of Tunkhannock in northeastern Pennsylvania, Lizza Fine Art Studios has handled projects for artists from as far away as South Africa, including artists who exhibit at the International Artexpo in New York each spring.

The studio’s founder Bob Lizza knows what matters to artists, because he is a painter himself. He also has an eye for color honed by graphic design and close to 20 years of experience in the print world. For Bob, giclée is more than a printing process; it the intersection of art and science—an act of creation leading to a work of art.

 

The final quality of the reproduced art depends largely on the quality of the image capture. Lizza Studios is one of the few giclee-printing studios in the US to have a Cruse C285 ST large-format, flatbed scanner.
The final quality of the reproduced art depends largely on the quality of the image capture. Lizza Studios is one of the few giclee-printing studios in the US to have a Cruse C285 ST large-format, flatbed scanner.

Scanning Large Paintings: Because Lizza knows that every brush stroke and detail is important to the artistic integrity of a painting, he invested in the Cruse C285 ST scanner, one of the most technologically advanced, highest resolution scanners in the world. When a painting is placed on the bed of the scanner, a Synchron table system moves the art steadily under a bank of lights, providing even illumination as the image is captured using a large-format digital lens and a 10,000-pixel CCD array. The system was designed to minimize the amount of time the original painting is exposed to the levels of lighting needed to capture all the fine details in the art.

The Cruse C285 ST scanner can handle paintings as large as 60 in. x 90 in. in one pass and produce files sizes as large as 1 GB. Due to the efficiency of the lighting system and precision of the Synchron table, much larger originals can be accommodated. Positional lighting allows total control over how variances in textured surfaces can be captured.

Printing Large Jobs: Lizza Fine Art Studios has two 64-in. Epson Stylus Pro printers: an Epson Stylus Pro 11880 aqueous-ink printer and an Epson Stylus Pro GS6000 solvent-ink printer. Because it uses three densities of black inks, the Epson Stylus Pro 11880 is ideal for black-and-white photographs and images with subtle midtones. The Epson Stylus Pro GS6000 uses orange and green inks in combination with  traditional CMYK inks, making it possible to reproduce artwork with bold, vivid colors.  Because of the nature of the solvent inks, the GS6000 printer can print on less costly materials and run at faster speeds. Plus, the prints don’t require the additional step of adding a protective clearcoat. Thus, the Epson GS6000 can be used to produce higher quantities of art reproductions at more affordable prices.

An Eye for Color: No matter which printer is used to reproduce your work, Lizza knows how to achieve the best possible color match between the prints and your original art. Bob Lizza has spent more than 17 years scanning and matching originals, examining images on a computer monitor and managing colors that have been reduced to bits and bytes of data. Combining data gathered with high-quality color-measurement tools and his own eye for color, Bob can color match the vibrant red of an individual flower petal or the rich green in the eye of the trout.  If his naked eye sees any differences, such as greens that are just a shade too yellow, he knows how to adjust the colors until the match between the scanned image and the artwork is exact. Only when the color match is perfect is Bob ready to print.  He creates custom ICC profiles for the exact printing conditions and materials that will be used for your printing job. He knows how to adjust the profiles for precise, optimum control of the ink applied to the substrate.

After the Printing is Done: Lizza’s extreme attention to detail and service doesn’t end with the printing. For works printed on canvas, Lizza Fine Art Studios uses a spray system that provides a great deal of control over the varnishing process. They can lightly coat the print once, or apply two or three coats if you prefer a glossier look.

Lizza Fine Art Studio also provides custom-framing services. And if you request it, Lizza will issue a certificate of authenticity. The certificate not only assures buyers of your art that the piece is a genuine, limited-edition giclée, it also ensures that you have a record of what was printed, what substrate was used, the date it was printed, and how many pieces were produced.

As an artist himself, Bob Lizza believes that modern giclée printing is the best possible way to reproduce your original art. He points out that, “It has a higher resolution than lithography, and a wider color range than a serigraph.”

To learn more about Lizza Fine Art Studios, visit their website www.lizzastudios.com or call 570-836-8806. Or, you can read more about their work in the June issue of LexJet’s In Focus newsletter.

Giclée printing replicates the color, depth and texture of original works art by using sophisticated image-capture technology and wide-format inkjet printers that use six or more colors of pigment inks with the highest quality artist papers or canvases. Modern wide-format inkjet printers, such as the 64-in. Epson Stylus Pro 11800 and GS6000 printers used in Lizza Fine Art Studios, spray millions of droplets of ink per second onto canvases or art papers that have been pretreated to receive the ink. The spray of ink is so fine that the droplets cannot be seen by the naked eye. It takes a 10X or 15X loupe to see the black dots, which are the largest dots on the canvas or paper. A finished image is made up of close to 20 billion dots of ink, which are applied in continuous tone or stochastic screening patterns that can make it difficult to distinguish the final print from the original.
Giclée printing replicates the color, depth and texture of original works art by using sophisticated image-capture technology and wide-format inkjet printers that use six or more colors of pigment inks with the highest quality artist papers or canvases. Modern wide-format inkjet printers, such as the 64-in. Epson Stylus Pro 11800 and GS6000 printers used in Lizza Fine Art Studios, spray millions of droplets of ink per second onto canvases or art papers that have been pretreated to receive the ink. The spray of ink is so fine that the droplets cannot be seen by the naked eye. It takes a 10X or 15X loupe to see the black dots, which are the largest dots on the canvas or paper. A finished image is made up of close to 20 billion dots of ink, which are applied in continuous tone or stochastic screening patterns that can make it difficult to distinguish the final print from the original.

Fine-art printmaking studios across the US have purchased wide-format inkjet equipment and top-quality canvases and fine-art papers from LexJet. We will feature many of these other studios in upcoming posts on this blog. If you would like to locate a giclee printing studio in your area of the US, please call a LexJet account specialist at 888-873-7553.

Posted on by LexJet Posted in Case Studies & Profiles
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Stephen Gross Makes Prints for NY Photo Festival

By Kelly Price

For Patrick Weidmann's images at nyph09, printmaker Stephen Gross used a Canon iPF9000 and LexJet Sunset photo papers.
For Patrick Weidmann's images at nyph09, printmaker Stephen Gross used a Canon iPF9000 and LexJet Sunset photo papers.

A growing number of LexJet customers who initially bought wide-format inkjet printers to output their own photography are now offering printmaking services to other photographers and artists.

For example, Stephen Gross, an experienced commercial photographer with an interest in fine-art photography, now operates Brooklyn Editions. He works one-on-one with artists to produce reproductions of their paintings and other artworks.

To support the Brooklyn-based New York Photo Festival (NYPH09), Gross recently produced 90 color and black-and-white large-format prints for 12 of the photographers that curator William A. Ewing had selected for his All over the place! exhibition. The 2009 festival was held May 13-17 in several venues in Brooklyn. 

The New York Photo Festival was started in 2008 to address the need for the world’s photography capital to host its own world-class photography festival. The event looks at the future of contemporary photography through the eyes of several world-class curators and selected artists. The festival also features workshops and portfolio reviews for all levels of aspiring and professional photographers. 

William A. Ewing, director of the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, was one of four exhibition curators at NYPH09.  The other curators were: Chris Boot, an editor and photo-book publisher; Jody Quon, photography director at New York magazine; and Jon Levy, director of Foto8, a London-based photography publishing company.

In the All over the place! exhibition, Ewing celebrated photography’s rich diversity and inability to be pigeonholed into neat, convenient categories. Ewing also sought to remind people that fabulous work can come from anywhere in the world and that new discoveries aren’t always from living photographers.  The All over the place! exhibition presented works of three historical figures (Ernst Haas, Jacob Holdt, and Edward Steichen) along with those of  13 contemporary photographers (Anoush Abrar of Iran and Switzerland, Manolis Baboussis of Greece, Matthieu Gafsou of France and Switzerland, Oliver Godow of Germany, Tina Itkonen of Finland,  Anna Lehmann-Brauns of Germany, Juraj Lipscher of Switzerland, Kevin Newark of the UK, Virgnie Otth of Switzerland, Phillip Schaerer of Switzerland, Joni Sternbach of the US, Robert Walker of Canada, and Patrick Weidmann of Switzerland).

Gross output prints for 12 of the contemporary photographers featured in the exhibition. He used a variety of materials from LexJet on his 44-in. Epson Stylus Pro 9800 and 60-in. Canon iPF9000 printer. Prints ranged in size from 16 x 20 in. up to 60 x 88 in.

Visitors to nyph09 view works by Oliver Godow (foreground) and Virginie Otth (background) output by Stephen Gross on LexJet Sunset Photo eSatin Paper.
Visitors to nyph09 view works by Oliver Godow (foreground) and Virginie Otth (background) output by Stephen Gross on LexJet Sunset Photo eSatin Paper.

Which printer and material Gross used depended partly on the size and nature of the image and the type of material on which the artist had submitted the proof to be matched. For example, for some prints Ewing and Gross chose to use Hahnemϋhle Photo Rag. For other prints he used Sunset Photo eSatin or Sunset Fibre Elite.  For European artists that supplied Cibachrome prints as proofs, Gross used LexJet’s 8 mil PolyGloss film on the Canon iPF9000 to replicate the ultra-shiny surface.

When faced with the challenge of reproducing a series of black-and-white proofs on a paper with a slightly warm tone, Gross used Sunset Fibre Elite and his Epson Stylus Pro 9800 with the Colorbyte ImagePrint RIP. “The ImagePrint RIP gave me much better linear control over the tone,” says Gross.

The most time-consuming part of the project wasn’t outputting the prints themselves. Rather, it was working with the different types of proofs and files submitted by 12 different photographers from around the world.  While some of the artists supplied properly tagged files and corresponding proofs, others seem to have received different instructions about how to submit the proofs and files.  

The project involved several days of intense proofing before Gross output the prints that would be mounted and hung on the walls of the exhibition spaces. “The whole point of the show was to represent the artist,” says Gross. “So I really wanted each photographer to be happy.” After the conclusion of the show, the prints were given to the artists.    

Gross says the project was personally gratifying: “I really enjoy working with artists and photographers.” He says helping them solve problems related to exhibiting their work gives him the same sense of satisfaction he enjoyed when he taught digital photography at the college level.

In addition to meeting some of the artists, Gross took advantage of having his own photography critiqued during a portfolio review at the festival.

Gross, who has always enjoyed printing, bought his first wide-format inkjet printer from LexJet six years ago while shooting a national campaign for Elizabeth Arden Salons. He handled every facet of the project from creating the concept and casting the model to shooting, editing, and retouching the image. So when it was time to print posters for 27 salons around the country, Gross wanted to better control the quality of the printing as well.

Soon, Gross began printing editions for his brother Alex Gross, who is a well-collected painter. It wasn’t long before other artists and their friends started coming to his studio asking for help. Having been frustrated himself by the inconsistent quality he had received from digital service bureaus, Gross understood the level of individualized attention and quality that these artists and photographers were seeking. So, now Gross operates Brooklyn Editions along with his core business, Stephen Scott Gross Photography.

Unless a really big photography or printing project comes his way, Gross typically spends about one-third of his time printing for others and two-thirds of his time shooting commercial and fine-art photography.  He considers it a pleasant balance that gives him the benefit of working collaboratively with other creative professionals.

If you are a New York-area artist or photographer who would like large-format reproductions, check out Brooklyn Editions.  

If you live outside the NY metro area and would like to find a printmaking studio closer to home, contact a LexJet account specialist at 888-873-7553.  We would be happy to refer you to other studios that are equipped with 44- or 60-in wide printers, use LexJet’s exceptional photo- and art-printing materials, and have a successful track record of providing printmaking services to other artists and photographers.