Are you wondering how to turn artwork into prints – believe it or not this process is not as tricky as it sounds! This is what you will need to do :
Digitise Your Artwork
The first thing you need to do is to digitise your artwork i.e. create a digital file from the original canvas/sheet of paper. You can either do this yourself with the help of a good scanner or you can employ a photographer/print shop with a large scale scanner to do this for you. I’ve always done this myself because good quality scanners aren’t actually that expensive AND you are in control of how the final image comes out. I’ve just found that doing things myself is quicker, easier and cheaper although I can fully understand why you would prefer to outsource this step as it isn’t exactly a thrill a minute!
If you are going to digitise your artwork yourself then you will need a scanner that can scan in at a good enough resolution. The scanner I have is the Epson Perfection V370 but it has been discontinued. This is the latest model which has the same features.
The maximum resolution on this one is 4800×4800 DPI (so not quite as good as the V370 which was 4800×9600 DPI) but I think it’s definitely a great machine to start off on and it is very reasonably priced and it is very easy to use i.e. place your artwork in the scanner and press the button. The BEST bit about this scanner is that it has a flip top lid which means if you have a larger painting you can scan it in parts and then piece the parts together afterwards using software such as photoshop (which is exactly what I did with some of my larger paintings).
Digitally Edit
Once you have your scanned jpeg image you will need to do some editing to ensure the colours are as true as you would like them, that the whites are white and the dark areas and shadows are correct. Below you can see the main things that I change :
- I resize my image to a ‘standard size’ – for me this is 16×20″;
- I remove the shadow and outside edges of the scanned image;
- I clear up any blemishes/paint splats etc on the print that I don’t like the look of.
- At this point I also adjust the colour. I will sometimes change the colour profile to the Adobe RGB one (sometimes I may leave it as per the scanner one – I make a choice depending on which I prefer); I then adjust the vibrance/saturation/light and dark areas to my preference.
To remove blemishes I tend to use the Spot Healing Brush Tool in Photoshop and also the Clone Stamp Tool as I find these generally work really well :
If you are piecing together a series of images from a painting (i.e. you scanned a large painting in and want to create one file for printing) you will need to use software such as photoshop. I use the Photomerge function for this (File > Automate > Photomerge) :
A new window then pops up and I select ‘Collage’ on the left :
I then select the scanned image sections I would like to merge together :
Once I’ve selected my images they display in the Photomerge window. ‘Blend Images Together’ is automatically selected however if not then you may need to select it manually and then click ‘OK’;
Photoshop then goes off and does it’s thing on my images and then comes back with a merged image; Most of the time this is pretty good and just needs a little bit of editing.
I’ve only ever had an issue once with photoshop not merging my images correctly – in this instance the image was quite subtle so I can see why it had problems knowing where the joins were. In this case I merged the images myself manually which obviously took a bit longer.
This is the end of this section and I hope that you now understand
how to turn artwork into prints that you can then sell. If you have any questions or comments about this post of my website then why not pop them below or contact us on Facebook for a more interactive chat!
You can find the facebook page here :
How To Sell Prints Online Facebook Page
And here is the facebook group :
How To Sell Prints Online Facebook Group
