#1: I also can recommend Breathing Color Lyve canvas; it's what we use predominantly at our print shop. It has a good surface, good white point, and minimal flaking compared to other canvases.
#2a: Be aware that canvas is not dimensionally stable, as a material, compared to paper. It may skew a bit during printing, and almost certainly will not feed "true" in the linear direction of media feed. In other words, if you print a 50" image on a piece of canvas it won't come out 50" long. We have to put a compensation factor into our printing RIP when using canvas, to adjust for the length differential. Depending on what software you're using to print, there may not be the ability to do this in the printing app, so you may have to experiment with how canvas prints on your setup and then adjust your file size manually to account for the differential.
#2b: Yes, if you stretch the canvas, this will impact the print dimensions of the image on the canvas. Stretching is not a precision matter the way that you can razor cut your materials for prints on paper when framing & matting. (And even in that case, most professional framers leave about 1/8" slush in the matting and backboard size because frame cut & join may not be super precise either.) At our shop, we normally expand images for canvas prints by 1/4" to 3/8" on all sides to allow the print surface to "full bleed" around the wrap edges when doing a so-called museum wrap -- where the full image is visible on the face of the print, and the sides are taped off (typically with black tape). For a gallery wrap, you need to increase the prints size by 2 times the thickness of the stretcher bars plus the same 1/4" to 3/8" slush to allow the print surface to wrap around the back side of the bars. You'll need to do some research on stretching technique if you plan to do this yourself.
#2c: If you're going to stretch canvas and sell or display it that way, consider that you're exposing the print surface to the ambient environment in a way that isn't the case when framing under glass. At our shop, we laminate every stretched canvas that we produce with a laminate layer that's affixed in a heated vacuum press. This protects the canvas surface from airborne contaminants, somewhat slows down UV damage, and also protects the canvas surface from sratches, scuffing and cracking especially at the corners of the wraps. If you don't laminate or use a sealant of any kind, you can expect shorter life and more damage to the canvases.
#3: All canvas manufacturers should have profiles for the Epson 4880. I don't have a great opinion of most canned profiles; a few are pretty good but most can be improved with custom profiling. If maximizing accurate and full colour & contrast is important to you on any media, custom profiling is very often worth the investment. Having said that, the BC Lyve canned profile and most others should be good enough for you to initially evaluate the media for how you like it. You may need to try more than one to pick the one that's best for your budget, taste and purposes.
#4: No. An image is an image is an image. Whether it's supposed to be a straight photo, a painting, or whatever, the printing workflow is the same. How you prep the image depends on how you want it to look in print... that has nothing to do with the genre of the imagery itself. If you want it sharper, sharpen it more. If you want it softer, don't sharpen or even blur it. If you want it more colourful, boost the local contrast and/or saturation. If you want it more watercolor-ish, then reduce the contrast and saturation. Etc. The primary implication for printing on canvas is that the canvas fabric weave itself is a factor in how fine detail will render on the print. The canvas is actually physically textured; if you have fine image detail that's approximately at the same frequency as the canvas weave structure (or smaller), this will impact how that detail looks on canvas.
Royce Howland
Last edited by Royce Howland on Thu Aug 06, 2015 9:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.
|