Reproduction, not photography

Copy work is the least glamorous thing a studio does and the hardest to do well. There is exactly one correct result, and everybody can see when you missed it.

The setup

• Two heads at 45 degrees, matched to within a tenth of a stop, cross-polarized to kill the sheen off the paper.
• The camera dead square to the work, checked with a mirror on the surface rather than by eye.
• A color target in the first frame of every session, so every batch can be profiled against a known reference.

The tolerance

Watercolor is unforgiving because the paper is part of the image. A reproduction that lifts the whites by two points loses the wash entirely, and a grade that saturates loses the transitions the artist spent the longest on.

We proofed six frames on the catalog stock before shooting the remaining seventy-four. That afternoon of proofing saved a reprint.

Eighty pieces, four days, delivered as layered TIFFs at 600ppi alongside web-ready derivatives.