Scanning

I’ve been scanning professionally for longer than I’ve been printing. My first job after graduating from my photography BA was at Cambridge University’s Scott Polar Research Institute, where I digitised their collection of polar photographs. Since then I’ve scanned countless original artworks, personal archives, and historic and institutional collections including works from the Drawing Matter archive, Frome’s Singer foundry, and Hauser & Wirth Somerset.

With the exception of the massive beast of a scanner at Scott Polar Research Institute (which cost about the same as a rather lovely cottage in Southern England), my high resolution Epson imaging scanner has the best detail, depth, saturation and resolution possible without having a spare $500K+ in the bank.

My scanning system can help the following:

• Artists

  My scanner can capture original artworks up to A1 in glorious detail. I’ve written an in-depth article about the pros of scanning for fine artists. Read it here.

• Archivists

  Nothing can replace an original, but it pays to make high resolution copies of works in your archive. This way you need not lend out fragile originals, and should the worst happen and your archive becomes beset by some unthinkable disaster, having at least the key items of your collection digitised will ensure such works are not completely lost forever.

  My first graduate job was at Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University, where I learned how to handle fragile artworks, glass negatives, and historic documents. So your collection is in safe hands.

  If you have only a few items to digitise I recommend arranging for this to be on the day you bring the works to me, so that they are out of their archive for the shortest time possible. Best to contact me in this case and I can sort the logistics out.

  For those who have a large number of works that need digitising, I may be able to come to your archive with my scanner and gear and make a run of it, working on a day rate rather than by the image.

• Photographers

  Digital will never replace film in terms of depth and soul. But printing from film isn’t straightforward, and can get very costly very quickly. A great compromise is to shoot on film, then scan the film to make giclee or digital c-type prints. This retains the character and grain of film photography without ballooning your budget. My system can scan in 35mm negs and slides, 120 and medium format, and 5x4” large format.

  If you’d rather go with a more specialist film scanning system, I can put you in contact with an excellent photographer who has an Imacon Flextight system - superior to mine (but comes at a higher cost).

• Family photo collections

  We’ve almost all got a box (or several) hidden somewhere in the house/ attic/ storage full of old family c-type prints and 35mm negatives from photolab kiosks. Those c-type prints will be slowly losing their colour accuracy the older they get. It seems a shame that such gems remain unshared. So dig out that box, and bring it along to me to digitise.

Technical details

Here’s all you need to know about the technical specifications of my scanning set-up

• Resolution

  The scanner’s maximum resolution is 2,400 dpi x 4,800 dpi (Horizontal x Vertical)

  But I scan at 450dpi as standard for art reproduction, which means your copy will go a bit larger than original.

  Where the reproduction needs to blow up bigger than the original, I can scan at a higher resolution. I rarely scan artworks at more than 850dpi, as the file begins to get too large and unstable (but it can technically go higher than 850dpi)

  When scanning archival images I tend to go to 600dpi.

  Some media, such as pastels don’t scan very well at higher resolutions, as the scanner picks up too much detail and the pastel marks can begin to look too sharp.

  Film is scanned at the highest resolution, 2400dpi.

• Bit depth

  My scanner is 48-bit, which means it can produce 16-bits per colour channel.

  I tend to scan at 48 (16) bit, which is the archival standard.

  Screen-based media is best at 24-bit (8-bit per channel), but since it’s simple to reduce the bit depth down, I find scanning at 48 (16-bit) is a good way of making sure your artwork is archivally-sound, creating a versatile file and never having need to re-scan the original again.

  What that all boils down to is that my scanner has the widest possible colour gamut, giving the most true-to-life colour possible.

• Optical density

  3.8 Dmax

  That means my scanner has a high dynamic range (deep blacks, pure whites and many tones between)

• File types

  I scan in tiff format, as this prevents any loss of data.

• Maximum original size

  My scanner is an A3 scanner. This means I can scan up to A1 size by using ai technology to stitch multiple scans together. Technically I can scan larger than A1, but because that would require me to scan the artwork in more than 4 sections, it becomes time-consuming, expensive, and the ai stitching technology struggles to piece more sections together without glitching.

  For this reason artworks larger than A1 are better professionally photographed - contact me for recommendations on who can do this. I don’t recommend you do this yourself unless you have a pro set-up, as it requires specialist knowledge and kit to do at a high enough quality and resolution to generate a printable file.

I cover related topics in my FAQ (at the bottom of the about page), including file ownership, copyright issues, and prices. If there’s anything not answered on that page or this one, contact me here.