Oil painting scanning and giclée reproduction — minus the varnish glare.

Of everything that comes through the studio, oil paintings are the hardest medium to reproduce well. The varnish layer behaves like a mirror, throwing hot spots wherever a light source sits. Impasto ridges cast their own shadows under studio lighting, so texture reads as noise rather than brushwork. And the deep darks oils are loved for — umbers, Prussian blues, glazed shadows — collapse to flat black the moment a camera exposes for the mid-tones. The standard workaround is cross-polarised photography: polarising film on the lights, a filter on the lens, and hours of retouching afterwards. It suppresses most of the glare, but it also deadens the surface, shifts colour where the polarisation is incomplete, and still clips detail in the darkest passages.

Contact scanning sidesteps all of it. On the flatbed, the sensor travels millimetres above the paint under diffuse, even light — there's simply no reflection path for varnish gloss to bounce back into the capture. The scanner records what's in the paint, not what's on top of it. And because the capture is 36-bit colour at up to 1200 DPI, the tonal gradients photography clips off — the difference between a glazed shadow and a dead black — survive into the file. When people search for how to scan an oil painting properly, this is the honest answer: keep the sensor close, keep the light diffuse, and glare never happens in the first place.

Then there's the surface itself. Our 3D texture mode records the raised topography of the painting — brush strokes, palette-knife marks, the ridge where one colour was dragged through another — as data alongside the colour capture. Reproduced in print, that texture information is what makes a giclée of an oil painting read as a painting on the wall rather than a poster of one. It's the single biggest reason artists across the UK ship oils to our Timperley workshop instead of booking a photographer locally.

Pricing is straightforward: artwork reproduction starts from £20 at A3, and larger sizes are quoted by dimensions. Because the flatbed takes originals up to 3m × 2m in a single pass, almost any oil painting goes on whole — no stitching, no surcharge structure for awkward sizes, just a quote based on the area scanned. Use the scanning calculator for an instant figure, or send us dimensions and a phone snap of the painting and we'll confirm a fixed price for the scan, first proof and any edition printing together, so you can see your cost per print before committing.

On logistics: your painting needs to arrive unframed and dry to the touch — no wet varnish, no freshly worked passages, since the artwork lies face-up in contact with the scanning environment. If the piece is glazed and framed, don't wrestle with it yourself; our framing workshop de-glazes before scanning and re-glazes afterwards as part of the job. Bring the original to us in Timperley in person, or ship it insured — and for anything large or valuable, talk to us first and we'll advise on packing and courier options before you book anything.

Turnaround from delivery to master file and first proof is typically 5–7 working days, with edition printing running alongside our standard fine art printing turnaround of 3–5 working days after sign-off. Once your edition is approved we archive the colour-managed master, so future runs are printed from the same file, matched to the same reference proof — order ten prints this year and ten more in three years and they'll sit side by side without a visible difference. Your painting is scanned once; the edition never drifts.