Before printing at Image Science it is important to understand that most of the materials we use are not mass produced, commercial type materials - they are fine art materials, often hand made, and so each print may have unique character.

What this means in practice is that some of these materials may have occasional very small flaws that are part and parcel of the fine art print process. Because these flaws are rare, unavoidable, and because they're inherent to the process, we can't guarantee your prints will be 100% flaw free in all cases. If you're looking for that sort of clinical perfection, these may not be the right materials for you!

It's important to understand that the prints coming off these printers - and in particular prints off rolls - are not 100% finished products.  They may require some final trimming to remove slight marks or imperfections that can occur at the very edges of the paper, for example - we recommend you always leave an inch of white space around the edges at least with roll prints to factor this in.

Here's the important part: If any flaw is major, or has a serious impact on the image area itself, and we spot this flaw during our inspection process, most likely we'll simply re-print the image here and you'll never see it.  If we somehow miss it, then let us know about it (bring it back or send us a quick snapshot) and we will generally re-print the image for you.

However, if the flaw is a minor one (such as a tiny white dot, some sort of minor mark in the white space around the image that was in the paper before printing etc - see below), we will not re-print the image at our expense. It's just not possible to run a fine art printing service at reasonable prices and guarantee that every print will be 100% clinically flaw free.  It's also just not environmentally or financially responsible to abandon perfectly good prints that have these tiny faults - and this is no different to the days of chemical prints (which much more regularly had minor imperfections and were hand spotted).

We are happy to negotiate with you on this, and offer discounted re-prints, but as mentioned above these flaws are rare but inevitable with these materials, and it is simply bad for our business and bad for the environment to re-do prints with very minor imperfections.  Like many things in modern life, the minor imperfections should be accepted as a natural part of the process of using fine art, hand made materials.

Most prints come out perfectly, however it is not impossible the following types of minor flaws may occur:

• Skewing on the page - this is the most common problem with larger prints, and you should factor this in when preparing your files - leave at least an inch of whitespace around your images if possible. Your framer should be able to trim off the excess and bring the image back to perfectly square quite easily.
• Occasional white spots from dust - here a spot of dust has landed on the paper at some point, and then this has been printed over. The dust later falls off and hence a small white dot appears on the print. The dust often falls off quite some time after printing, so we may not even be aware of this occurring. Generally, these white dots can be touched up with a coloured pencil and a steady hand - we even sell a great retouching kit for this purpose. It's no different from the days of silver gelatin prints and retouching inks for dust spots - although much much less common!  If we spot the white dot on your prints, we will often do the retouching for you before you pick the print up of course, but sometimes the dust can fall off at a later date so it's good to be prepared to deal with this yourself as well.
  
• Occasional surface imperfections, darker dust marks - modern papers have very exotic coatings, and very often multiple coatings (up to six separate coatings!). This means sometimes the papers will have small surface flaws and/or darker spots on the surface due to dust or cotton seeds.
• It is not possible for us to guarantee that your image will be 100% perfectly centred/aligned on the page with millimetre precision. Please be sure to leave plenty of room for final trimming if you need a perfectly centred result (or have your images printed as roll prints and trim to size). The big printers are simply not capable of aligning things with perfection each and every time. The margin of error is usually well less than 5mm.
• Sizing of the final printed result may not be millimetre perfect with some materials, especially canvas - we strongly suggest you do NOT pre cut mounts/stretcher bars but measure the final product as printed before preparing your framing materials.
• Marks on the very edges of print can occur (ink spots (these are called 'head strikes') or very slight dints in the paper or minor surface imperfections) - if they are not in the image area itself, we will not automatically re-print - these marks should be removed by trimming or lived with (reminder, we recommend with roll prints you leave at least an inch of white space all around to factor this in and plan around a finished size somewhat smaller than the canvas size.