Matching the Image
This is where the practiced eye of the artist is joined with the practical skill of the commercial/industrial designer. More...

Reproducing The Image
The cornerstone of the giclée process - what makes it possible to reproduce works of art with such unerring accuracy - is the enhanced digital ink jet printer.. More...

The Lizza Fine Art Studios Difference
Anyone can buy the hardware and software necessary to create giclée reproductions. Only another artist can understand what it takes to create a work of art. Only an artist knows art is an act of creation - a conscious decision to share a vision. Bob Lizza is an artist.

Bob's talent and experience are hard-earned with close to 20 years of design experience brought to the art of creating giclee fine art reproductions. His expertise in both art and technology, helped him develop several unique proprietary processes that deal with different media types and monochrome images. The Lizza difference shows in the results. Click here to request more information.

Capturing the Image
The quality of the giclée is dependent on the quality of image capture and that means lighting. Because Bob Lizza is an artist himself, he knows that every brush stroke, every detail is important to the artistic integrity of a painting. That's why Lizza invested in the Cruse CS285 ST scanner. The Cruse scanner uses the Synchron(tm) lighting system. The Synchron lighting system uses a patented moving lamp design. This design reduces overall light exposure on originals which provides even illumination across the entire surface of the original and eliminates the need for retouching.

If light is the paint, Bob's camera is his brush. He uses a 4 x 5, large format camera designed specifically for use with a digital scan back. No film is used -- the artwork is captured, digitally. The camera is married to the Cruse CS285 ST which uses world-class technology to deliver resolution and focus found in no other scanner.

The Cruse CS285 ST scanner is able to resolve images that are only 8 microns apart, taking advantage of the ultra-high resolution available through digital cameras. Unlike digital camera backs where focus can only be set visually, through the camera's ground glass, the Cruse Scanner uses a complex software algorithm to focus. This eliminates human error and maximizes sharpness on all scans.

When the work of art is scanned it produces files with sizes up to 800 megabytes -- a file more than 20 times larger than the data capture of a standard digital camera.
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Matching the Image
This is where the practiced eye of the artist is joined with the practical skill of the commercial/industrial designer. Bob has spent the last 18 years scanning and matching originals, looking at images on a computer monitor and managing colors that have been reduced to bits and bytes of data. He knows how to color match images in the original artwork -- the vibrant red of an individual flower petal or the rich green in the eye of the trout -- to the back lit image displayed on the computer monitor.

Here, too, Bob complements his innate understanding of detail in the piece, his desire to keep the integrity of what he sees intact, with technology. He uses a spectrophotometer, hardware and software designed to ensure the colors match. But because Bob isn't just trying to get an approximate match, he takes one more step -- one that addresses the difference between what the camera sees and what the human eye can see - the color gamut.

With unique proprietary processes, he studies and compares the tonality and the color of the giclée to the original. If his naked eye sees any difference, like greens that are just a shade too yellow, he can adjust the colors until he feels the color match between the scanned image and artwork he sees is exact. Only when the color match is perfect is Bob ready to print.
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Reproducing The Image
The cornerstone of the giclée process - what makes it possible to reproduce works of art with such unerring accuracy - is the enhanced digital ink jet printer. Designed to meet the criteria of artists and art collectors, these printers spray millions of droplets of ink per second onto fine art canvas or artist paper specially coated to accept the inks.

The ink jets are smaller than a human hair and spray inks at a rate of 4 million dots per second. The spray of ink itself is so fine - 1.5 microns which is smaller than a red blood cell - that the droplets cannot be seen by the naked eye. It takes a 10X or 15X loop to see the black dots, the largest dots on the canvas or paper.

When the giclée is completed, the finished image is made up of close to 20 billion dots of ink and not just any ink. Lizza Fine Art Studios only uses saturated, water-based archival inks capable of producing a combination of 12 chromatic changes and more than 3 million colors. Marry these vibrant and rich colors with the continuous tone and stochastic screening created by the giclée printer and the result is a work of art that is hard to distinguish from the original.