The Artist’s Corner Episode 5

We recently introduced you to Alex, an artist who is beginning to turn his hobby as an artist into a career. To begin that transition we’ve brought him to the Windberg Art Center in Georgetown, Texas to digitally capture his most recent painting.

Richard Windberg, who has been capturing, printing, and selling art for over 20 years, offered to take us through his process so that we can better understand what’s involved in a professionally done digital capture.

Richard’s process begins by positioning the painting on a Hughes 6’x8’ easel which is lit using Northlight 900 Watt metal halide lamps. The capture itself is done with a Cambo 4×5 camera, and Super 8k Scanback. This set up creates a 12,000 x 16,000-pixel image allowing Alex to maintain quality even when printing to a large size. After the capture process, the file is sent to a Mac Workstation where it’s edited in photoshop and then compared to the original painting for color accuracy.

The whole process took about an hour and Richard’s fee of $50 could easily be recouped by selling just one print. Not only is the process inexpensive but it dwarfs the quality you’d get when using a phone camera. That difference in quality can negatively impact what you charge for a print, so we highly recommend working with a professional like Richard when capturing your art so you can create high-quality prints.