Artist work to sublimate

[Quinsfan]

Hi all
I have just had an interesting morning at an arts and craft fair. My wife was chatting to a designer of ceramic items, which she often spends our hard earned cash with, when she mentioned that we are starting a gift business and would she be interested in putting her designs onto our items. Her response was very positive and she offered to send me some of her designs to have a play around with and see what I can do. She said she has her designs on jpegs at 400 dpi which she uses to send off to a greetings card manufacturer. I only have Corel Draw 8 and a free photo editing software at the moment so I do not know if this is going to be sufficient to reproduce her striking colours and do them justice. This could be a great opportunity for me but I feel as though I may need some additional software and tuition.
I also managed to get some details of a local artist who is looking to put their paintings onto some items, this I feel may need a professional photographer to get the full effect of her watercolours.
If any one has done this kind of work and could give me a couple of pointers I would be very grateful.

[Justin]

Moved this into Graphics and Artwork section for you :-)

[pisquee]

This is exactly what we do, both with our own artwork, and other's. We use Photoshop, and as I have no experience of Corel, I can't really comment on its suitability.

Artists and designers can be fun to work with, but they can also be either very picky about their colours or very layed back (and excited to see how their work looks on different mediums/processes)

If this is a route you want to go down, then you should make sure the artists understand the limited colour range that sublimation can achieve, but you should also get in touch with user/mod Paul on here and sort out a custom ICC for your printer/inks to make sure you are getting the best achievable results from you printer and inks - you may find it helpful to get profiles made for each specific substrate/medium you intend to print to.

Also, buy a ColourMunki or Spyder to calibrate your monitor (assuming you have a good enough monitor for this - ideally an IPS based screen rather than a TN) Should cost about £60.

You need to be able to rely on what you see on your monitor, and what your printer prints, to not only match each other (as much as possible) and you understand the differences of what each can achieve and how to interpret what you see onscreen.

You then need a way of getting the artwork into your computer - this is either going to be a large format scanner (most are rotary type feed, rather than flat bed, and depends on how wide the artwork is as to what size is needed, but also how thick the material (canvas/paper) as to whether it will feed through undamaged. If it works you get better results than photographing. We bought our own large format rotary scanner for this, as we were unhappy with the results we got from trying to outsource this part of the process - the only half decent results did cost a lot per scan, and even then weren't good enough to use.

Once the artwork is into the computer, either you (with your now calibrated monitor) need to be able to tweak the colours to match as closely what was in the original artwork as possible, or have the people scanning it do it for you. Using real-time soft proofing can help enormously with this stage, as your graphics software gives you an estimation screen as you edit (according to your printer ICC) as to what your printed result should look like, so you can tweak away.