Complaints from Giclee print makers

[Richard Budig]

I use at least two giclee houses, and both complain that my work is too "shiny" and that they have to fight glare when copying my work. They blame the retouch varnish I use to keep values nearly the same while completing the painting.

I understand, and sympathize with them. I, too, have had to fight glare from a shiny canvas surface when trying to take a simple digital photo for myself.

They have asked repeatedly that I not use this stuff until after the work is scanned.

Of course, not using something like a light spritz of retouch means your fighting the problem of mismatched values -- dry paint tends to dull down, while fresh paint tends to be shiny and lush -- one of the reasons for using retouch varnish.

My question is -- WHAT TO DO? I just can't forego retouch, or in some way bringing all values into alignment, so to speak.

To their credit, they seem, in the end, to get very good reproductions even though they have a glare problem.

Does anyone have anything special they do or use to combat and deal with this problem?

[Michele Rushworth]

My giclee guy says the same thing about my work. I don't use retouch varnish though (I don't like Damar) so I oil out to get the values and sunken in areas back to where they should be. It's probably not as shiny as it would be with retouch varnish.

When the giclee guy photographs my work he uses a polarizer on his lens and polarizers on the lights and also carefully places the lights outside a 45 degree angle from the work. Seems to do the trick.

[William Whitaker]

Richard,

It's practically impossible to take photos of oil paintings without some pinpoint glare problems, even for professional photographers who take photos of paintings for museums. This is especially true in the dark areas.

The answer to the problem is Adobe Photoshop. I personally go over all photos taken of my work and retouch the glare spots using that wonderful computer program. It's easy to do and very effective. I've found that printers and others are very reluctant to touch your art. You save them grief by doing it yourself.

if you don't have Photoshop, you can save a lot of money by buying an older version, or an older version of Photoshop Elements.

[Michele Rushworth]

Actually, my giclee guy and I do that too. If it's a particularly shiny paintiing he will take more than one shot of it with the lights (and reflections) in different spots and then cut and paste the photos together into one good version.