Fine Art Digitization

McClusky Nature Photography is happy to provide fine art digitization for reproduction and sharing.  Customers bring their artwork to our studio and we provide high quality digitized images of the artwork, suitable for printing, submission to art competitions, and posting on social media.  Virtually all reflections are eliminated in the digitization process, so digitization is successful even with glossy artwork or photos.  

Click to Pre-Register your digitization request

We provide a 8-bit 300 dpi tif image, a 300 dpi jpeg image, and, for social media, a 2000 pixel (long side) jpeg image, delivered by internet download or email (as possible based on image size).   16-bit tif images are available at no extra charge, although they are generally quite large.

Click HERE for online submission of the digitization request form.  Alternatively, you can complete the form when you drop off your images.  (To ensure we'll be there to accept your artwork, please confirm your drop-off time with John at 217-851-0763 on McClusky.Nature.Photography@gmail.com)

To best meet customers' needs, we offer a variety of levels of color and tonal fidelity:

• Digitization with basic color and tonal matching: $15
  • Digital capture using color-calibrated lighting, camera, and software
  • Image tonal correction
  • No additional color matching is applied
  • Reflective media, such as metallic paints and graphite, do require special processing due to the reflection elimination occurring during digitization, and thus will always require additional Color Matching time.
• Editing and Color Matching: $25/hr
  • Editing: includes things like sharpening, adding/removing people or objects, editing faces, background adjustments, photo restoration, etc.
  • Color Matching involves matching an image as best as possible to the original
    • Color matching can take a great deal of time, paper, and ink
    • A perfect match is impossible, no matter who digitizes the image due to
      • The specific lights used to view the image and print: it may match perfectly at neutral light (5000K) but differ under warm, blue, or fluorescent lighting.  Some paint pigments show much greater color shifts than others.
      • The color of the paper/canvas being printed on: for instance it is impossible to get pure white on a warm paper or canvas
      • Vibrant colors become more difficult to match the more matte the paper/canvas.  In addition, they are simply a stretch for our current level of technology, even with a 12-ink printer!  For example imagine trying to print a vibrant red, green, purple, pink, or blue only using a set of 12 black, grey, cyan, magenta, and yellow paints!
      • Thus a match will be tied to a specific media (canvas or a specific paper)
      • The saving grace is that without the original for comparison, it will be very difficult to notice any differences.
  • Editing and Color Matching is priced at $25/hr, and continues until either a very good color match is achieved or the cost limit is reached.  Generally:
    • $25.00 will achieve good color and tonal matching including global color adjustments and limited local adjustments
    • $50 will include additional limited local adjustments, resulting in higher color fidelity.
    • $75 will be necessary for the most difficult cases, for instance maximizing match of multiple strongly vibrant colors.  As a reminder, a perfect match is impossible.  
  • Paintings and drawing with metallic and/or reflective media (ie graphite) require special treatment so that they do not appear black in the reproduction, and so will always require a minimum of $25 editing.

McClusky Nature Photography uses professional-grade camera, lens, software, and printer to create your image.  Camera, lighting, computer monitors, and printer are all color corrected to provide the highest quality images.  Nonetheless, given the limitations in capture and printing technology, there may be minor shifts in color (especially highly saturated colors) no matter where your images are digitized and/or printed.