How to Photograph Your Paintings (Digitally).

Having photographs of your art is an integral part of being an artist. You will need them to present to potential clients, enter shows, advertise and promote yourself on websites and for insurance purposes. Many artist and collectors opt for a professional photographer to record the images. But if you have the equipment, skill and time, you can use the following tips to do it yourself.

A good photo of your artwork can often mean the difference between selling and not selling your art. This task can seem daunting at first. However, if you work at it with the following principles in mind, you will be sure to get the best images of your best paintings.

This article illustrates how to record your images with a digital camera. Most of the principles and tips apply even if you are shooting slides.

Santa Cruz House, Framed

Prep Work

The first step in photographing your artwork is to get everything together. This involves:
Choosing a camera
Gathering all the artwork you'd like to shoot
Cleaning any artwork framed in glass to remove smudges and dust
Having fresh batteries in the camera or at least on hand
Make sure you have the memory; clear a card if you need space
Install any software you need to get images into the computer and manipulate them
Set up cables for connecting your camera to your computer
Once you've checked these items off your list, or at least are mentally prepared to tackle them when the time comes, you are ready to rock and roll.
Choose Your Weapon and Get Ready to Go

The best possible way to shoot is with a SLR camera. Many composition and focus problems can be handled before you shoot. If you have one of today's great little point and shoot digital cameras, they can capture a good exposure with a little care. Once you have captured a quality image of your work, it may be submitted over and over, downloaded, emailed, put in a slide show or displayed on that new big screen. It's called repurposing and that's the beauty of digital. Every copy is identical to the original. No more slide dupes to label and catalog and since everyone is accepting digital images, you will be ready to expose your art to the entire world.

Gather any other accessories you might need. These should include a good tripod, a flash unit (if you insist - see below), or a polarizing filter (great for cutting back glare on a painting behind glass). Batteries become all the more essential if you are shooting with one of those energy-sucking digital cameras; it gets even worse if you enjoy using the LCD monitor as a viewfinder. An AC adapter and an extension cord might be what you need in that case.

One last warning before we get going: before using a glass cleaner to clean glass that is protecting your framed art, make sure it really is glass. If it is Plexiglas - much lighter and more flexible than glass - do not use glass cleaner as this scratches up the surface. A soft cloth and a little warm water - very gently applied - should be as far as you go.

Ready to dive in? Let's go...

How to Photograph Your Paintings Without Flash

By far the best thing you can do to make great photos of your artwork is to carefully choose your light.

How do you choose your light?!?? you ask. Simply override the automatic, flash-everything-to-a-nice-pasty-white function on your camera. Shoot outside on an overcast day or utilizing indirect light, i.e. shade.

Turn off your flash

The best light for photographing artwork is overcast or indirect natural light. Resist the urge to resort to flash unless you absolutely have to (if the day is really dark and dreary, your images may pick up a blue cast). Dig out your camera manual if you have to and force your flash to not fire. This will ensure your beautiful paintings will not be hidden underneath a layer of distracting glare.

Flash Alert		Detail of Flashed Photo
Natural Light

Close but no cigar

Sometimes you may want to try adding extra light. Your situation - your art media, your camera, your weather - may result in pictures shot with a flash being more accurate.
In the following example, the flashed picture is not too far off from the original. The non-flashed image is a bit oversaturated but still has more color and detail than the slightly washed-out image. Either of these images, with a little help from Photoshop, can be made more accurate. Without going digital, I would opt for the richer, more colorful image than the flashed image. You will especially note the difference if you click on each image to see the enlargement.

Flashed		Natural Light

Moral of this story? Experiment. With the immediate satisfaction of viewing each shot in the LCD, you can get it just right. The old rule of bracketing your shots will also give you the latitude to adjust the image later. If your camera has the capability, shoot in the camera RAW format. This will give you greater choices in both final resolution and editing.



Photographing Your Paintings Up Against the Wall

In order to get the best image, you may find it easiest to lean most images against an exterior wall. If you're in an environment like our rainy Oregon - be careful; keep the paintings safely tucked under an overhang or otherwise protected from the elements.

You may say, Why not leave them on the wall? The reason is that the light inside is never as bright and clean as indirect light outdoors. Indoor lighting may be tungsten or florescent or a combination of both. In addition, it has bounced around the room picking up even more unwanted tints. A bright even light from an overcast sky allows for lower ISO numbers and thus, less noise (grain) in the final image. Remember, this image will represent your work for entry/judging and will also appear on the GA2C website.

Up against the wall

If your pieces are small (less than 10" x 14"), then you may be able to lay them flat on the ground and shoot from above. Larger work will be more easily shot if you lean it up against the wall. Either way, you may also find it beneficial to place a large piece of white cardboard or foam core behind your painting. This will eliminate any distracting background and allow the viewer to focus on your artwork. You may also use an easel set level to your camera to avoid distortion.

Both of the following images were shot leaning up against the wall; one with flash and one without.

Leaning Against the Wall; Flashed		Leaning Against the Wall; Natural Light

It was much easier to shoot the photo (and subsequently crop the picture in Photoshop) by leaning it against the exterior wall of our house.

Get things straight

Whether you lay the art flat, use an easel or lean it up against the wall, your challenge will be to shoot the artwork straight on, without skewing the frame or edges by leaning one way or the other. Imagine the plane your film is occupying in space and try to keep it completely parallel to your painting. Your goal is to hold the camera as if you were to lay the film flat against the painting. Use a tripod to maintain the film plane parallel and keep the camera steady.

Askew and Flashed		Straight and Cropped

Also notice the glare in the flashed photo; can't say it enough :^)

Framed or Unframed

If your painting is nicely framed, include the frame in your image. You do not want to cut off the edges of a good frame any more than you would want to crop the edges of your painting. Unframed artwork can be shot with just a bit of space around the edges.


How to Photograph Your Framed Paintings

Framing an artwork, as you may have learned already, places more emphasis on your work and gives it a sense of greatness, completeness, realness and importance. It is a good idea for you to keep this effect intact.

If, on the other hand, your artwork is framed is a cheap $5 piece of junk somebody gave you at a White Elephant party, you will want to crop it out just as you would remove other distracting elements from your composition. Then rush to your nearest frame shop and do justice to your creation.

Whether you crop to the edge of the painting or to the edge of the frame, be wary of two potential problems - parallax and viewfinder misrepresentation.

Santa Cruz House, Framed

Parallax

Parallax is the effect of looking through a viewfinder that is distinct from the camera lens itself. Most point & shoots have you look through a small opening that is an inch or two away from the actual lens. As you get closer to you subject, what the lens sees and captures in an image will shift away from what you see. Do you want to know the solution that these camera manufacturers have held to for decades? Shift it back; guess how far off you are and reframe your photo. This usually means forcing yourself, when you compose, to eliminate the edge of your shot that is furthest from your viewfinder. To overcome the psychological resistance we have against cutting off a perfectly good edge is tough; to get it right is even harder.

Shooting a painting in the frame results in a noticeable shadow along one edge unless the painting is perfectly parallel to the light. Since this is usually problematic, using a fill can solve the problem. A large piece of white foam core placed at 45 degrees to the light source will bounce just enough light into the shadow area to reduce or eliminate the frame shadow.

Santa Cruz Mission, Framed

Viewfinder Misrepresentation

The other potential problem is caused by viewfinders not showing everything that will appear in the final image. Most viewfinders only show about 90 percent of the actual image. When you try to get real close - so you eliminate any distracting background - you may be surprised by final images that have a wide border of distracting junk around your artwork. The best solution in this case is to know your camera. I often zoom in about a centimeter of a turn to eliminate stuff along the edges.

Non-framed and Still Beautiful

Photographing Your Paintings Through a Glass, Darkly

With only trial and error as your method of shooting, glass can be a big pain. However, a few simple tips can make your job a lot easier.

First, turn off our flash (you still have that thing on?!?). Next, possibly enlist the help of a filter. Third, watch out for reflections.

Glass, Plexiglas, Non-glared Glass or No Glass

The choices are endless. When it comes to shooting our work, though, nothing beats a painting without any protection on it. Glass of any kind can get in the way of a good photograph. If it is super easy, you can take the image out of a glass frame. If not, don't worry about it; you can shoot around this.

Again the best thing is to turn off the flash. With the flash on, you will need to place yourself at a 45 degree angle and this will be a strict violation of rule #3, Keeping Things Straight.

You may begin to think we have a thing against flash. We don't. In fact, we love it. But only in certain circumstances. As an artist, you want the best and you probably have a keen eye. In this case, using a flash against glass will not give you what you are after; instead your painting will be obscured by a big ugly glob of glare.

Glare Alert		Detail

Another trick in combatting glare is to use a polarizing filter. This helpful accessory comes in two flavors - one for autofocus and one for manual focus. Both are best used with an SLR but if your point and shoot has threads for a filter (or if you don't mind holding a filter in front of your lens), you can make it work for you, too.
The only other thing you will want to do to make a good exposure of a painting behind glass is to watch out for reflections. It sounds simple but it is easy to completely overlook these at the time you take the picture. To combat this, take a moment and look everything over carefully before shooting. Make a note on your hand if you have to! Tape a little piece of paper to your sleeve that says, "Wait! Look! What am I going to see later that I am overlooking now?" And then adjust yourself, your camera, or your painting until you get it right.

French Church, Just Right

Digitally Repairing Photographs of Your Paintings

Even if you capture the best, image image of your artwork, you must often correct it on the computer. The goal is to produce the most accurate representation of the work possible. Resist tweaking out those little areas of the painting that still bother you. Remember, the art will be hanging in the gallery, not the beautifully retouched image you just spent hours "cleaning up".

It's likely you have a computer. If you don't or you simply have not yet acquired all the equipment to run your own "digital darkroom" at home, you may want to seek the help of a skilled photographer or Photoshop technician. If you are are almost all set up, but just need software, check the CD or DVD that came with your camera. Most consumer cameras come with some fairley robust editing programs and may be all you need. But if you got your's from cameraguy3928 on craig's list you may be missing the software. Sometimes you can download it from the manufacturer's website. If that fails. check out starter digital image editing programs such as Photoshop Elements. It doesn't have the Curves which we explore below but it does have Levels, which can be used to correct color. To get the Curves function, you need the full version of Adobe Photoshop.

Fixing up your photos digitally involves correcting things that went wrong at time of exposure as well as correcting problems that are inherent to the digital process. For example, the process of digitizing an image - scanning or taking the picture with a digital camera - often softens the picture. To bring it back to a sharp rendition of the original, we mask the unsharp effect. More on this later.

Digital Fixing 101

In this first example, we can compare a pre-sharpened, pre-color corrected image to one with more accurate colors and true-to-life texture. This is digital recovery, not enhancement. The thick, highly textured oil painting takes on the look of a watercolor when it first becomes digitized - before we can come to the rescue.

Before		After

Now that you've seen the fruits of our labor and are convinced on the value of this digital enhancement, let's take a look at the steps taken to achieve this effect.

Fixing a Flashed-out Photo

This beautiful painting has had the unfortunate fate of standing face to face with, God forbid... a flash! And the flash won. At least for now, that is.

Rock Coastline, Flashed

We have the power to rebuild this photograph, though. We have the technology. All our corrective procedure involves is a little work with the Curves tool in Photoshop. If you don't have a copy of this great program at hand, consult your software's help system for anything regarding color correction; the principles are often very similar from one program to another. Just keep an attitude of dominion over these precise idiots we call computers and you'll have no problem at all.
First step: open the image in your image editing software and go to your image color adjusting tool of choice. As mentioned earlier we will use the Curves tool in Photoshop.

Using Curves to Correct Color

Curves tool	pull down to darken image	too red	corrected

Pick a point right in the center of the curve line and pull it down a bit to darken the image. Now stare at the image until your eyes are about to bulge out (just kidding - kids, don't try this at home) and see if you can see any color imbalances. Is the image too red, green or blue? If so, go to the color channel menu on the top of the Curves control and select the color in question. Pick a point again and pull down.

You will rarely if ever need or want to pull the curve more than half a square; most images are close to being perfect and too dramatic of a change makes the image look fake.

As you drag your central point, go straight up or straight down - not toward a corner.

Masking the Unsharpness

This is a funny way of saying sharpening. They have their reasons, those technical folks at Adobe. For now, though, we will just concern ourselves with the subtle use of their awesome tool and stop fussing over semantics.

Too Much	Good

There is one rule in using the Unsharp Mark filter: don't overdo it. A light touch is all that is needed. In this first example, pushing the filter to its maximum causes the image to get really sharp - sharp like a rusty saw blade. We want to avoid that.

Simple solution: apply the mask just a bit. In this example, I am still going pretty extreme. But I couldn't help myself. It was not until I applied the filter effect and toggled back and forth between the before and after that I realized that my restraint (what little I had) was the right thing to do. A little of this filter goes a long way.

I reapplied the filter a second time after shrinking the image from its big version to the final, smaller version. It seems that any big transformations in the image editor beg for a bit of touch up.

Windows vs Mac Monitor Gamma

Windows monitors are a bit darker than Mac monitors, therefore if you're sending an image to a client of yours who is using Windows you might want to consider correcting the Gamma of your image to make sure your client sees similar range of colors as you do on your Mac.

Same goes for optimizing a website for PC users. Once you're happy with the image on your Mac and ready to send to a PC, jump to ImageReady (Apple-Shift-M) to compensate your Gamma. Select Image/Adjustment/Gamma... To simulate how your image would look like on a PC monitor without Gamma correction, click "Windows to Macintosh" (darker image).

To correct the Gamma for viewing on Windows click "Macintosh to Windows" (lighter image) and press OK. This lighter image will look normal on a PC, it will look like the image you see on your Mac without Gamma correction. Now you can either jump back to PS with the same combo or save your image from IR.

Just keep playing with your images until you get something you are happy with. Email it, print it, set it as your screensaver, or best of all, put it on the Web.

There you have it. You now know all you need to know to begin photographing your paintings. So put that paintbrush down and grab your camera.