Photographing Your Artwork – Part 3

In this third and final installment on photographing your artwork we talk about one of the most important aspects of fine art photography, making sure your colors are true and “balanced”.  Website’s like TheArtGallerist.com will not approve images that do not properly represent the original painting or other work of art.

Color Balance

Ensure the color balance is set properly.  You do this by making sure the white balance on the camera is set correctly, otherwise there may be an ugly cast on the final picture.  You can rely on the camera’s auto setting for “daylight” or “shade”, but for best results it is good to set the white balance manually. 

If your camera has a “custom white balance” setting, turn it on.  Place an 18% grey card (or a plain white piece of paper) in place of your artwork and photograph it using the same setup and lighting that you will use for your artwork.  This will give the camera a “reference” point to base the white balance on for the rest of the shoot.  Another option is to simply include a small piece of white paper in the actual frame when you photograph your artwork (since it is unlikely that artwork will fill up the entire frame of the camera).  If you are using this method, you can use your photographic post-process software white balance feature to select the white/grey area of the picture and base your white balance off of that.

Take the Photo

Avoid camera shake from your finger by using a cable release, which is essentially an extension of the shutter button available for a few dollars at camera stores, or by using the camera’s self-timer to take the photo several seconds after you release the shutter. Remove your hand from the camera after activating the self-timer.

What to Do With Your Digital Images

The photos of your original oil, acrylic, watercolor or mixed media paintings stored in your digital camera can now be downloaded to a computer for review or enhancement. A variety of software exists which will let you crop extraneous bits of the image, such as the white paper you used to color balance.

More sophisticated software packages such as Adobe Photoshop have functions that will let you adjust the perspective on an image that is not perfectly rectangular (indicating that the camera was off-center while shooting). This process does not distort the image; rather, it removes the distortion (foreshortening) created by the off-center camera position.

Make sure you save the original large image files from the camera so you can use the images and still have them available for other purposes should you need them in the future.  Saving them onto a CD will also give you a backup copy in case of hardware problems.  For fine artists represented by TheArtGallerist.com, a video demonstration of how to edit, resize, and save your images as jpeg files will soon be available to help you understand some of the basics of photo editing using Adobe Photoshop. 

Finally after all your hard work, you may be disheartened to learn that the quality of the image you have worked so hard to capture will ultimately be determined by the quality of the viewers computer monitor.  Yes, that’s right.  Doing your best to capture a quality image is important, but the variances in computer monitors that  people will be using to view your artwork online simply means that there is absolutely no reason to submit or upload images that are too high a resolution.