Frequently Asked Questions

My file is ready to print:

If you already have your files ready for printing you can use our online ordering system.

We can print at any custom size, simply enter your dimensions into the calculator to see the price. You can also select your paper type and choose whether to add extra borders to your artwork. Adding borders here will increase the overall paper size. If you wish to have internal borders added instead (within your chosen paper dimensions) simply add this to the notes on your order. Submit your order and send us your artwork file using WeTransfer.com – after checkout you should be shown a link to do this. It’s a free service and allows you to send files up to 2Gb in size.

If you need some advice before ordering:

Please see the ‘How to Prepare Your File’ help sections below or contact us at the studio and one of our production team will be happy to advise you.

Our standard turnaround time for print orders is 2-3 working days. Please let us know when placing your order if you have a specific deadline. We can sometimes turn prints around same-day if it is urgent.

We have two UK shipping options available, standard or tracked.

Standard 48hr shipping is £6.60 (inc VAT), which comes with a delivery confirmation (not signed).

Tracked 48hr shipping is £7.80 (inc VAT) this method is tracked and insured with the option of email delivery notifications for each order.

All international shipping is tracked and insured:
EU Tracked (5 working days) £18.00 (inc VAT)
Worldwide (10 working days) £24.00 (inc VAT)

As all our work is print on demand, you can order any quantity from a single print to hundreds at a time. However please be aware that the minimum order cost is the equivalent of an A4 or 8 x 10” sized print. We can print smaller (such as A5) but it will be priced the same as an A4 print.

If you are ordering large quantities (over 50 prints) please contact us before placing your order to discuss your requirements and pricing in more detail.

Yes.

We use Hahnemühle’s certificate of authenticity & hologram system, which is excellent quality and provides extra security for your limited edition prints.

What is the hologram system?
A pair of hologram stickers with matching serial numbers are assigned to your work, with one attached to the back of the print and one to the certificate. The stickers are tamper proof (having small perforations that come apart should someone try to remove them). Therefore we can record the editions with this hologram number for future authenticating.

How much are they?
The first certificate is £10.00 (inc. VAT), which includes the cost of creating the design for you. All following certificates are £5.00 each (inc. VAT).
If you prefer to create your own certificate design, you can send this to us for printing (without the initial £5.00 design cost) and it’s £5.00 per certificate (inc. VAT).

I’m drop shipping my orders directly to my customers, can I send a certificate?
Some artists choose to use an embossing stamp for their limited editions, which includes their logo or signature. Please contact us for pricing and more information about this.

Alternatively you could use a digital signature and we can hand sign, date and edition each certificate for you instead (for no additional cost).

How do I order a certificate?
Please email us with your certificate requirements and we will set this up for you.

Please use the following guidelines:

JPG, TIFF or PSD, flattened to a single layer
RGB Colour Mode (sRGB IEC61966-2.1.), or grayscale for true black & white
300 dpi recommended

We can print up to 1.5m wide / any length

Ensure that your artwork is the correct ratio for the paper size on your order. For example, you can send us an A2 sized file for an A3 print as they’re the same proportion. However if your artwork is square and you order an A3 print the artwork will need to be resized to fit, either by cropping or adding borders.

If your original work is a different proportion to the required print size you will need to crop the image or add borders to fit it to the page.

Alternatively please contact us and our production team can work with you to resize your image before printing.

We accept RGB image files and print using a broad RGB spectrum of inks. If your files are in CMYK mode, please convert them to RGB before sending them through to us. The best colour profile to use for this is sRGB (IEC61966-2.1).

RGB has a much wider colour range than CMYK, and since we use a 12-colour machine we have the valuable addition of RGB inks at our disposal, as well as the regular CMYK inks.

All our papers are archival quality with a choice of matt or coated (gloss/pearl) finish. Matt papers come in a range of textures so you can choose one that best suits your artwork. There are two different price points for our papers, Klein or Hahnemühle branded.

You can read the full descriptions of each in our paper options section.

If you are based in the Manchester area you can visit us at the studio to see our paper range and real-world examples. Please contact us to book a time so we can ensure a member of the team is available. Alternatively we can post you a swatch book of our papers to help you decide. Simply email us at info@kleinimaging.com to request one.

We are always happy to help recommend the best paper for your work to get you started, just get in touch with an example/description of your work and we can make a suggestion for you.

Giclée is a digital printing process for creating archival standard fine art prints. Our 12-colour Canon giclée printer produces incredibly detailed prints for both the fine art and photographic markets.

Giclée prints render deep, saturated colours and have an exceptional quality that retains minute detail, subtle tints and blends. The term giclée is meant to be applied only to archival digital prints made with fine art paper or canvas.

The giclée printing process is environmentally safe since the inks are water-based and the paper is archival and acid-free. Thus, a giclée must be treated as fine art and placed away from direct sunlight, even though we use long-life archival UV-safe pigmented inks supplied by Canon.

Archival means long lasting – if displayed or stored correctly your giclée print has a lifespan of over 70 years. This is why so many museums and galleries choose giclée for their reproductions. We always ensure that any packaging or protective treatments that come into contact with our prints are acid-free and will help the print to retain its integrity over time.

Simply put, the 12-color ink set of our large format Canon machine offers us the highest quality reproductions, combined with the most consistent output across various media. This means you can have a print made today, and re-print a year later with the same outstanding results. The Canon setup allows us to get very rich colors and deep blacks, regardless of the media being used.

The Canon’s color and fine detail capabilities, combined with the ability to make prints over a metre wide make it the most versatile and outstanding machine for giclée prints.

We use Lucia Ex pigment by Canon as they’re long-life, archival, UV-safe pigmented inks and produce excellent vivid colours on all of our paper types.

Using a colour calibrated monitor and working in RGB using the sRGB (IEC61966-2.1) colour profile will give you the best results with our printers. We do offer a free monitor colour calibration service if you’re able bring your machine into the studio, please contact us for more information as you will need to install calibration software before your visit. Please be aware that all monitors will display an image slightly differently from each other, and as the screen is backlit, this will have an impact on the brightness compared to the paper print. If you’re concerned about colour accuracy we would always recommend ordering a small test print first.

If you’re new to printing with us or would like to check the colour or scalability of a new artwork it’s worth doing a small proof print before committing to ordering the final prints.

We recommend ordering A4 size (or equivalent) as that is our minimum order amount. You can order a scaled image of your whole artwork or a section cropped to actual print size so that you can see the details. If you are proofing several different images you can order a thumbnail sheet. Please contact us if you need any help with sizing your proofs.

Yes, we offer a complete drop shipping service, allowing you to simply forward your print orders to us and we then print, pack and ship on your behalf. This allows you to focus on creating the work without worrying about the cost of ordering large stocks of prints and packaging, as well as saving you time and storage space.

We can use your own branding or ship in unbranded packages, and can provide authenticity certificates for limited editions so you don’t need to hand sign every print.

See our drop shipping page for more information.

We have a variety of different packaging to suit all shapes and size of prints. Premium postal tubes, hard board envelopes with stiffeners for work that needs to be sent flat or for orders of 3+ prints, print boxes for oversized pieces, and archival print boxes for special orders. We can also custom crate work that needs to be protected at all costs.

Yes. By default, packages will be sent with Klein Imaging branding, but we are happy to use your own branding materials if you supply them to us. We stock logo stickers, flyers and dispatch notes for various different sellers. We always use your seller name as the reference on the postage label.

Our standard UK service is Royal Mail business post. This is not a tracked service, but we can generate on-demand delivery notifications (which does not include a signature). We can also send your packages via Special Delivery in the UK, or via International Tracked in Europe and the Rest of the World. These are fully tracked and insured services (delivery confirmations for international orders are subject to the availability of local mail services in the destination country).

We also regularly use UPS and FedEx to ship prints around the world.

The most straightforward implementation for website orders is to have your order confirmations sent both to you as well as to us (you can usually define the destination email addresses for your order confirmations within your shop settings). If you sell products other than prints, you would need to define the confirmations on a category-by-category basis so that only print orders are sent to us.

Alternatively, you can manually forward order confirmations on to us that arrive in your email inbox.

You are also welcome to supply the information for each drop shipment in a separate email to us if you prefer.

3 working days, or sooner.

We specialise in bespoke frames but we do offer some framing options for drop shippers. These frames are available for UK orders in A4, A3, A2 and A1 size. Please contact us for more information.

We’re always happy to meet with you to discuss your production needs and show you our paper samples.

Please email or call us on 0161 236 1907 to make an appointment with a member of our production team.

We specialise in bespoke framing for our giclée prints. If you are interested in ordering a frame with your print please contact us to arrange a studio visit to discuss the various options and get a quote.

Turnaround time for framing depends varies depending on the frame style and quantity but we generally allow between 2-4 weeks for framing production.

This is probably one of the most common questions we’re asked. In truth, the technology behind photography and scanning is very similar… a light source, a lens, an image sensor, and a lot of digital wizardry. We use photography here at Klein rather than scanning (which we used to do!), because it allows us the flexibility to work with original artwork of all shapes, sizes, thicknesses and textures, a lot of which would be difficult to put through a scanner. We’ve photographed 10cm Japanese illustrations on rice paper, all the way up to 2m x 4m canvases. All with incredible resolution, detail and colour accuracy that ensures print reproductions are as close to the original artwork as possible.

The actual process to digitise each piece of work takes anything between 1 and 4 hours depending on its complexity. We endeavour to process work in the order that it comes to us, so we usually ask if you can leave your original work with us for 5-7 days so that it can be photographed as soon as a slot is free. We will then contact you to let you know when the photography session is complete for you to be able to collect your original artwork and proof print.

Yes. Once complete, we make sure to send you a high resolution copy of the finished artwork image, as well as keeping a copy on our server and a backup on our cloud storage.

Yes. Included with every photograph session is a proof print for you to take away with you to demonstrate the reproduction quality and colour accuracy that we are able to achieve for your work. Proof prints are roughly A3 in size and will be on our Smooth Rag stock; if you’d like a larger proof print or a different stock please let us know at the time of booking your photography session, and we’ll be happy to arrange this at cost.

Once you’ve had your photography session completed and a copy of the file sent to you, we will invite you back to the studio to collect your original work and to approve your proof print. As soon as you’ve signed off on the proof you can order prints from any image that we hold on file, either now or in the future.

If you’ve had your photography or scanning done elsewhere, we’re more than happy to print from your existing image file. You can order proof prints if you wish or proceed directly to ordering prints if you’re confident that your image file is colour accurate and setup correctly for giclée printing.