[mrk.creations]

Hello everyone!
I'm new to the community and I have a question I feel someone here might have the answers to my problem.
My online store is with shopify, and I've partnered with a print company so my pictures need to be a certain resolution in order for the print quality to be proper.
My question is, for those that also sell prints, do you take the photos yourself? and if so, do you use your phone camera or a professional camera? and what program(s) do you use for editing those photos for prints?

I recently hired a photographer that told me they'd done this before and knew exactly what I needed done and could take photos for print and it turned out he had no idea how to do it.... he then asked me for more money to figure it out, when he knew what I needed done and claimed to know exactly how to do it. It took me 2 months to get the properly edited files to upload to my store.
My goal was to launch my store in December but because of the troubles I ran into with the photographer I am still getting my site ready to launch and I am behind schedule. Now I'm at a point where I need to do this again with more artwork and I do not want to rehire this same person again because it's so unreliable.
Im just wondering what everyone else is doing in regards to selling prints online and how you ensure the best quality for your prints. Also, the print company I am partnered with is called Printful.

Thank you for in insight, I greatly appreciate it.

MRK Creations,
Melanie Mokrenko.

 

[LizaPaizisCreations]

Hi Melanie!

That's great that you're selling prints of your art
It definitely pays to have control over all the processes of manufacturing etc if you're going to have your own online shop...
I've been selling prints from my paintings for about 20 years now, and the best way to get them set up so anyone can print them is to scan the original paintings using a good scanner at high resolution. I use an Epson workforce scanner (in my opinion Epson makes the best scanner and printers for artists) It is a large format scanner and printer all in one, so can scan I think 15 x 11 inches and print 12 x 16 inches. I scan the paintings at 300dpi as jpg files, but it can scan much higher, and as tiff files if need be.
I print my own prints, but sometimes need to do poster sized prints which I use a company for, and just email the jpg files. I use photoshop to edit the scanned images - to clean them up, adjust the colours etc.
If your paintings are very large, you can also scan them in sections, and stitch them together using Photoshop.
I've found taking photos of my paintings just does not work as well or capture the fine detail/colours etc.
Scanning is the best way.
I hope this helps!