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In this article, you will find some important tips for photographing works of art. You can use them to photograph paintings, prints, drawings, textiles, etc.
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Pay attention to the teip auxiliary lines at an angle of 45 degrees and perpendicular to the wall, which help when setting up the camera and lighting
Camera selection and settings
A fixed-lens digital SLR is the best choice. But compact cameras with manual control, and even an upscale smartphone, are also useful. Some very important camera settings
Turn off digital zoom
If your camera has digital zoom, the first thing to do is turn it off. Digital zoom enlarges a portion of the image in the camera, resulting in lower image quality and noise. The ideal focal length setting for photographing medium-sized artworks is 80 or 100 mm.
Stick to ISO 100.
For sharpness, select the lowest ISO, usually 100, and never use auto-tuning. A higher value, such as 1600, is great for shooting in low light, but gives grain. Use Adobe RGB as your working color space. Adobe RGB is capable of reproducing more colors than sRGB. This is especially useful if you plan to use your photo in print. You can always convert the file later to sRGB color space for use on the Internet. Converting from sRGB to Adobe RGB in a graphics editor is not the same as shooting Adobe RGB. Computer programs can only interpolate from existing information.
What file quality should you use
Choose the best quality file format, even if it seems a lot bigger than your current requirements. If your camera can shoot in RAW format, you will get better sharpness and tonal range. But the RAW format requires additional processing at the editing stage. If you are not sure, try setting the quality to RAW PLUS LARGE JPG.
RAW vs high quality jpg
TIFF is also a useful quality format. The camera software will automatically process the TIFF file. It will not compress and resize it, as in JPG.
Set the saturation settings to neutral
Saturation settings, if available on your camera, should be set to normal or neutral. This will accurately display the colors in your work. Later in the graphics editor you can apply more saturation and contrast.
Image style or camera saturation settings
White balance and color management
Most digital cameras have a white balance (WB) control on the camera body or in the menu. You shoot a neutral white or gray object, and a custom white balance setting compensates for any color cast.
Image before (yellow tint) and after using custom white balance.
Lighting
A standard lighting installation for photographing a painting uses two identical light sources located at an angle of 45 degrees on each side in front of the painting. Both light sources must match in power and be at the same distance from the center of the image. This provides uniform light without a shadow – one light destroys the shadows cast by another light. Such an installation requires a rather large room to remove light sources away from the picture and avoid glare in the picture. If it doesn’t come out to move the light sources, use a lens with a longer focal length (80-100 mm). This moves the camera away from the subject and helps eliminate glare.
If the picture is behind the glass, you can eliminate reflections using black material located around the camera lens or a ring flash .
Standard lighting scheme for shooting a picture
Try not to mix light sources – when shooting indoors with artificial lighting, block the light from the windows, when using natural lighting, turn off all room lights. Hang a painting or other flat work of art on a wall of neutral white, gray, or black. Placing the object vertically will facilitate its evenly balanced lighting. Use the level to check the verticality of the image, then adjust the camera so that the height of the lens matches the center of the picture. Here you need a strong tripod to get clear photos and precise image alignment. To eliminate any camera movement, use the cable lock, mirror lock setting, or self-timer. Use the level on the back of the camera to make sure that the back of the camera is also parallel to the shooting wall. When the back of the camera and the image are parallel to each other, the perspective should be close to the correct one, distortion will also be minimal. Get as close as possible, leaving only a small space around the edges of your work, this can be trimmed in post-processing.
Consider the direction and quality of light
If you use window light as the main source, place a white screen on the side opposite the window next to your subject, it will reflect part of the window light and balance the dark side. To show more texture in the picture, check out the lighting setup and examples below. Notice the example where the shadows in the image on the right fall.
Turn off the built-in flash
Before taking any photos, make sure that you turn off the built-in flash. Keep a blank white or neutral gray card in front of the subject. Take a picture by filling the entire frame with this card. Use this photo to set white balance. This will clear any color cast that you can see on white or neutral colors and also help more accurately display other colors. Take a second photo with this new white balance option to make sure that it now looks pure white or neutral gray.
Use the gray card to find the correct exposure.
Including a white or gray card in one of your photos gives you a specific guide. You can use such a frame in a photo editor to clear any color cast. If you use the eyedropper to read various tones in a photo editor, then absolutely neutral tones without any color cast will have equal numerical RGB values. For example, pure white is 255 255 255, neutral medium gray is about 120 120 120, and very dark gray is 50 50 50. The fact is that they are close to the same value, which indicates the absence of a color cast. Theoretically, when neutral colors are neutral, other colors will also be more accurate. Overexposed, normal, and underexposed images and their resulting histograms. Aperture priority is a good choice for shooting. And f / 8 is an acceptable aperture for digital SLR cameras. Take a picture and check the correct exposure using the histogram in the camera.
Check focus and take details
Enlarge the photo to 100% on the camera or computer screen. Check the focus in the center and in all four corners. Repeat shooting as necessary, adjusting the focus.
Image editing
Most image editors will work with TIFF or JPEG. For RAW files you will need to use a RAW converter. Make all retouches on a copy of the file with an increase of 50 or 100%. When done, make another copy and resize this copy to the required size in pixels. Save it as high-quality JPEG with the appropriate profile, sRGB or Adobe RGB.
Avoid re-saving JPEGs and resetting the quality level more than once, as this affects the sharpness and clarity of the entire image canvas.
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