Art scanning for galleries and museums — archives, editions, merchandise.

Art scanning for galleries usually starts with one painting and quickly becomes a programme — an exhibition to digitise before it tours, an archive to capture before a move, an estate to document and catalogue. We plan collection digitisation as a project, not a queue of single jobs: the works are mapped against your calendar first, and where a loan agreement or exhibition opening sets a fixed date, we commit exclusive scanner time in advance so the deadline is met without compromising capture quality.

Handling runs with the discipline institutions expect. Every piece is logged in and out against a manifest with named handlers, stored flat and unstacked, and insured while it's on site. NDAs are routine rather than exceptional — a good deal of our gallery and museum work is never publicly credited, and that suits us fine. Originals travel by insured art courier in both directions, or your own team can deliver and collect.

What comes back is an archive, not a folder of JPEGs: archive-grade, colour-managed TIFF masters at up to 1200 DPI, named to your accession or catalogue numbers and backed up in triplicate. Those masters then serve every downstream need for years — insurance documentation, condition records, exhibition catalogues, licensing requests and print production — because the collection was captured properly once.

The capability that matters most for institutional work is capture. Our flatbed scans originals up to 3m × 2m in a single pass at 1200 DPI — no stitched seams running through a significant work, no lighting mismatch between quadrants, colour held even across the entire surface. Capture is 36-bit with 3D texture, so impasto, canvas weave and paper grain survive into the master rather than flattening out.

Production then stays in the same building. As a Hahnemühle Certified Studio we print archival giclée on the Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-4600 with its twelve pigment inks, and on the PRO-6100 for work up to 60 inches wide — using the same colour management that recorded the originals. There's no handover between a scanning bureau and a print house, and no re-proofing loop when the two disagree about colour.

And because we're a full framing workshop as well as a scanning studio, the rest of the job needn't leave Timperley either: trade framing to your specification, canvas stretching, mount cutting and commercial-volume production for gallery, hotel and corporate spaces. For a museum digitisation project that ends in an exhibition, a catalogue and a shop range, that's one partner, one colour standard and one point of accountability.