Thursday, April 24, 2014

Blogging for Thor: Scanning the Surface, Captain!

As I've mentioned many times before, one of the final stages in most of my alternative process work is scanning the print to create a permanent, digital record of the image. Many of my prints are unstable for various reasons, so the digital record is often the only way to get a permanent end product. Anyone that wants to be an active part of the artist community in this day needs to scan or somehow digitally image their work, regardless of medium. It's just a fact of life. Your digital images can travel far better than your prints can.

There are some drawbacks to scanning prints, though. The first is one I've already addressed: dust. You have to clean and spot the digital image before using it. It's time-consuming and difficult, but no more so than having to clean and prep a physical print for display. That's kind of a wash, really. What I really want to address today is the difficulty with recording and reproducing surfaces through digital means.

Now, what do I mean by that? Well, a few things, but kinda one thing. Surface matters a great deal to any printed medium. Photographic papers (inkjet or darkroom) come in a wide variety of surfaces. Matte, semi-matte, satin, pearl, luster, semi-luster, gloss, high-gloss, super-high-gloss, etc. That's just a fairly standard range. There are ultra-mattes, watercolor surfaces, cotton rag surfaces, etc. Alternative processes expand that even further by allowing access to essentially the full range of all possible paper surfaces. Even just exploring high-quality fine-art papers offers dozens or hundreds of different levels of surface smoothness, texture and feel. The choice of what surface you print on has a tangible impact on how your image feels to the viewer.

Basically, if you're going to be reproducing your work digitally, the original substrate's texture is largely lost. What remains just becomes visual, losing the tactile quality. If your original print was on watercolor paper, you can't recapture that texture perfectly; even printing on watercolor paper won't work. The tactile texture has been translated to visual noise by the scanner or camera and will be translated into ink by the printer. It's generally not a pleasant result. The original texture, translated into the digital image, looks like nothing more than distortion. It doesn't have nearly the same effect as actual, physical surface texture with true dimensionality.

There are other problems with scanning images. Certain things just don't photograph well. Metallic reflections, fabric textures, anything that shifts appearance based on perspective... some of my favorite lumens look disappointingly dull and disinteresting in their digital forms because the strongly reflective metallic highlights created by silver deposits in the paper brought to the surface by moisture just don't show up. They show up as blue or grey, with no shine at all. Chromoskedasic sabattier, which forms similar highly metallic deposits in a variety of oil-on-water shimmers, scans even worse. The results often appear as dull black shadows instead of glittering patches of light.

I've tried printing on different surfaces to reproduce the original surface, but the problem is the secondary visual texture created by the scan. My only real solution to this issue is to use smooth-textured original surfaces so there is no transfer. Then whatever texture I want to integrate can be applied when I print from the digital file, by printing onto a textured surface. Only one layer of texture, see? It works, but it isn't ideal. That offers no way to deal with metallic surfaces like chromo prints or collodion-paper lumens. It offers no way to help with cyanotypes or other alternative processes printed on leather, parchment, cloth or heavy, textured paper.

The only suggestion I have for those is just not to even attempt to reproduce the image as itself, but rather accept that the digital 'copies' aren't copies. They're documentation of a unique original, just like prints of a Van Gogh or photographs of a sculpture.

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