Candela Fine Art Printing

Janet Delaney, “South of Market Survey Project, 1980-83″

These images were part of Janet Delaney’s recent exhibition at Google’s San Francisco headquarters. The original 4″ x 5″ color negatives were drum scanned to create the best possible starting point for a exhibition-quality print. Due to the age of the film, we made the scans large enough to permit printing at 50″ x 60″ inches in the future without the need to scan the negative again. This is known as “scan once, purpose many” approach to scanning and printing.

 

Color negative for “FLAG MAKERS: a back alley sign near Howard and 3rd Street. l982″, mounted on drum for scanning. The Howtek Hi-Resolve 8000 drum scanner uses a specialized software package (Aztek Digital Photolab Professional aka DPL) that excels at scanning color negative film. This negative was pretty thin and previous attempts at scanning it (performed by another scanning lab using a Heidelberg Primescan drum scanner) didn’t quite pull out all the information that the Howtek + DPL did.

 

The original negative for “Moscone Center under Construction, 1980″ was damaged during the original processing – there is a light band in the upper left corner. Prior to Photoshop there was no way repair the damage except cropping the image. We repaired the corner to make the image look the way it should have without the processing damage.

 

 

Janet owns an Epson 7900 printer, which allows her to produce archival pigment prints up to 24″ wide in her own studio, using her own inks and media. After the scans were done, we collaborated together for on-site printing session in Janet’s studio to produce the prints.

 

Janet had some of her vintage chromagenic prints (c-prints) on hand to compare with the new prints. Epson Exhibition Fiber was Janet’s paper of choice for the new prints.

Proofing (making small test prints) is a critical part of printmaking. It allows you to see how the image looks on your chosen paper, and dial in fine adjustments to make your prints really sing. Even with a properly calibrated and profiled monitor and tight color management practices, proofing helps you get the last little bit of quality expressed in your prints.

The final print of “Pat serving coffee in the Budget Hotel (now the Good Hotel), 7th & Mission St. l980″, printed at 22″ x 28″ on Epson Exhibition Fiber paper. See the entire portfolio here.