Traditional Art Forums » Traditional Art Photography

I was surprised to find this forum empty as I'm assuming it's a topic many people have some experience in, and probably even more questions about how it's done :)
I do not claim to be a professional at this, in fact I'm not even half of a professionals pinky finger when it comes to photography, I can however share with you some information I have dug up in several places over the internet and from people I know who know cameras and how to use them.

What you should be using to photograph you artwork:-
-Camera: try and get the best quality camera that you can, it helps if it has manual focus and white balance settings, along with filters and contrast settings.

-Tripod: Get a sturdy tripod with as many changeable bits as possible, you want to be able to take photographs from several different angles and heights and not have to spend ages moving bits around and blancing your tripod on stuff.

-Easle: It doesn't have to be an actual easle, just something to place your artwork on and keep it steady whilst your photograph it...an easle is possibly the worst choice actually, because it will not keep your picture verticle which is really what you need, I personally stick my drawings to the door that leads into the room I'm in using Blu-Tac (miracle substance!).

Light Source: The lighting of your picture is one of the most important parts of photographing your artwork, because of this it can also be one of the most expensive, mainly due to the cost or buying professional equipment and the cost of running the stuff. It is however possible to get a good picture without bankrupting yourself, if possible you should use an adjustable lamp to light your pictures, but make sure that there is no light shining directly onto the picture as it can glare back at the camera. Also, if you can get a daylight bulb then they are said to be extremely useful.

-Dark Room: Not the type in which you develope photographs, the room in which you are taking the photograph in should be as dark as possible until you turn on the lights, you want to be able control all aspects of the lighting and room with wide open windows isn't going to let you do this.

-White Balance Material: A sheet of white A4 copier paper will do for this, you just need something with which to tell the camera what white should be under the current lighting conditions.

Patience, you might have to take many different photographis with different settings and levels of light intesity until you get the best result, photographing your artwork can actualy be quite good fun if you experiment a little while your doing it.

Okay, so that is pretty much all that you are going to need to get a decent recording of your artwork, now we get onto the actual set up and use of all those tools (I didn't realise there where so many until I wrote it down ^_^).

Okay so to begin with you need to get all the stuff listed above together, you can try and improvise stuff you don't have with things that you do but I can't predict what results you get, they might be better or they might be wrose, that's the fun of experimenting!

Okay so all of our tools are in our chosen room, the fist thing we need to do is cut off all errant light, so close all curtains, blinds and windows, shut the doors and turn off your computer monitor and television (unless your reading this as you set up, in that case wait until everythings ready before you turn it off).
Now you should be left with the main light you use to light your room, this is necessary to set up your equipment (obviously ;P).
Now, you need to decide where you are going to mount your image for photographing, it should prbably be near a plug socket so you can plug in your light source and preferably on a backing that is in high contrast with the image itself so that it doesn't get confused with part of the image when it comes to removal.
You also have to make sure that it is not set to high for your tripod or too low for you to be able to work your camera, chest height is good if you can manage it, if not then just get it as close as possible.
So now you've got your image mounted it's time to set your light source up, a poseable lamp with either a daylight bulb or a high wattage bulb with dimmer switch will do, if you have only a set lamp with a single on off switch then you are going to have to move it around the room and place things in front of it and around it to get your levels of light how you want them.
Spend time on setting up your light source as it's really important to the look of your final image, once you think you have your light generally correct you can turn of the main light you have been working by and fine tune the light source for your photograph, once you've done this you can turn you main light back on again.
Now it's time to set up your camera, firstly you'll set your tripod up so that is face your image and placed at the correct heights, all the alterable bits (camera base angle, swivel, neck angle) should be set to default so they are pointing straight ahead, you should also make sure that you tripod is sitting on even ground so that when you attach your camer it will be head on with the image (also so it doesn't fall over and damage your camera :-O )
Once your tripod is set up you need to attach your camera, this next bit is possibly the most complicated part of the process but it's also the most fun, once your camera is attatched and pointing directly at your picture (your image should be filling the entire screen with nothing else inside the shot ((if you can't get it exact you should leave some room outside the image, never cut into the picture, you can cut out any excess later ))) Oh and you can alter how much space your image takes up on the screen either by moving your tripod and camera closer or futher away from the image, the problem there is it can alter the light source you set up earlier with unexpected shadowing which is really irritating as you'll have to set it up again(should not take to much work but it is still annoying) if you don't want to go through the trouble of doing that you can use the zoom on your camera, you should use optical zoom ONLY!!! never use digital zoom as it distorts the pixels of your image and makes for a horribly blurry image.
With your light source and camera placment set now is the time to set your white balance, some cameras do this by default but it is not difficult to do manually and you can make sure it is correct.
Take a peice of A4 copier paper and hold it infront of your image (or stick it on CAREFULLY with blu-tac) now use this to set your white balance and then romve the paper.
Once this is done you can focus your camera, you should do this manually, set the focus area for the most detailed part of your image and then start to set the focus, the camera I use zooms in automatically when you do this which is fine, alter the focus of your camera until the lines are as sharp and clear as you can get them, your image is now in focus :)
That is the main setup of your camera completed the rest of it is just experimentation but I will give you a rundown of the best processes to go through to try and find your best image settings (you should always write down the sittings that you use for future reference!)
I use a Konica Minolta A200 so the settings it uses are the ones I will be explaining to you here.
The first thing you should decide is what colour mode you are going to use, if like me you work mainly with graphite pencils or charcoal on white paper then balck and white imaging will work fine, it also makes the eventually memory the image takes up smaller.
If you are working on colour paper or with colours in your artwork then it all comes down to personal preference, you can use the embeded colour profile which should just give exactly what's infront of you (it won't unless your using a really high quality camera but it's as close as your going to get a this stage) or you can use (on my camera at least) Vivid, which I think makes your colours well... more vivid. There are also options for Nat and Portrait, I think Nat is file type but I'm not sure and prtrait seems to make no difference whatsoever.
Once you've chose the colour mode your going to use you might want to redo your white balance, I don't think it make any difference but it doesn't hurt to make sure (we will do this once more after we set the exposure filter but again I don't really know if it makes a difference.)
Now that you've set your colour mode (and rechecked your white balance using the method I explained earlier) you got play with some more settings.
We will next focus on ISO, I can't remember what this means or what the actualy affect is on the image, I remember reading a defenition that said it altered the amount of 'noise' in the image, I had never really noticed as noise in any of my images so I don't reallu know what i meant, and I have tried using the highest, lowest and auto ISO settings and have found little to no difference, personally I use the lowest ISO setting which is 50 because this lets the picture take quite quickly, the others tend to take longer to process the image.
Next we will set the filter, I don't find this to be of much use unless your using the black and white colour mode then it is only really useful to set it to +5 or -5 which gives you the same result, it makes the image seem a little light and a bit crisper.
Now we will alter the saturation, this only works if you are using a colour mode, as far as I can tell it will make your colours brighter and more extreme, this setting really comes down to personal preference and how true you want to be to your original image, I think it can be used to compensate for bad lighting or differences between the way you see the image with your eye and in the light you are using or through the view finder.
Next up is the contrast, this is the difference between your lights and darks, or highlights an shadows. The higher you set your contrast the darker your darks become and the lighter your lights become, if you lower the contrast your image will start to grey out (if your using black and white at least) and the values will come closer together and you start to loose some of the details in your image, I think this can be used to compensate for over lighting or extremely bright lighting from side where one part of your image is almost white while the other is almost black. Whe working in pencil the more contrast you have in your image the better it tends to look but I would not bother altering it on the camera as well are going to look at that in photoshop later,
The final camera alteration that I know how to make to help your image come out looking better is the exposure filter, from what I understand this decides how much light is let into the image by the shutter (I think that is controlled by how long it is left open).
This is used to compensate for the lighting in your environment, you are in a room whichs is too dark then you should highten the exposure to let more light in, if the room is to bright then you should lower it to let in less.
I suggest you take a picture using every different exposure setting (until the white becoms blindingly bright or the darks stop you being able to see the image) you can choose between these later on. Once you have decided on your exposure settigns you should check your white balance one last time using the method I explained nearer the beginning.
Now shoot away dear friends!

Okay, you've finally taken a photograph (in real time this setup usually only takes about ten minutes to complete ^_^) and your ready to stick your images on the web. You plug your camera into your computer (assuming your using a digital camera) and bring all of your photos over onto your harddrive.
The firs thing you should do is open every image in photoshop and crop them down so that only what you want to be in the image is in there,
One of the problems with phtographing your atwork is that comes is always lost, it can be contrast, saturation or light but the one thing I find is ALWAYS lost unless your using an extremely high quality camera (8mp or more or SLR/DSLR) is the sharpness of your picture, apparently oil paints can come out lookig like water colours and some of my drawings end up looking like I either dipped them in water or photographed them on a moving train, or both.
If this is the case then the tool you need (in photoshop at least) is called 'unsharp filter' or 'unsharpness filter' and it is located in the sharpness tab under the filters section. When I was informed of this wonderful tool I was advised only to alter it by small degree's, I don't know whether it is the original quality of my images or just the way I see my artwork but I have found using this tool by small degree's is almost useless. I tend to go from 0% to 500% (which tends to be too high), then too 250% (which tends ot be to low) and eventually end up at around 75% (just right! ^_^), when you decide to use this tool is decided by one other factor which we are going to discuss next.
Resizing of your images.
We all know that pcitures start to look smarter and neater the more you lower their resolution, the trick is finding the balance between the original image and the best looking but tiny image you end up with, it's usually about half way but you also need to take into account the websites you are going to be uploading your image to and how large their image viewing area is, you want your image to be a comfortable size for viewers which generally means making it around 900x700 or something similar.
If you decide you are going to resize your image then you should wiat until you have done si before you use the unsharpness filter on it as the drop in resolution will soften up your lines and lose some details (and mistakes) in the process.
Another thing that is often lost in photographing artwork is contrast, and that is the final thing we will be discussing here.
There are three ways of altering/fixing contrast loss after taking a photograph.
In photoshop they are called Brightness/Contrast, Levels and Curves.
You will only need to use one of these and all of them have an auto function built in so i suggest you try that before you go messing around with them, also always keep a backup copy copy of your original image and make another with ever successfull alteration you make, the last thing you want is a computer crash the wipes all your hard work or an autosave that makes permenant something you where planning on ctrl-z'ding your way out of.
If you find that using the auto function doesn't give you satisfactory results then you are going to have try and make the alterations manually, this can be quite difficult bu the three contrast alteration methods I have mentioned come in three distinct difficults.
Brightness.contrast is easy but crude, it can improve your image overall but can also lose alot of your finer details and subtleties.
Levels can go between being moderatley easy and fiendishly hard depending on how much effort you are willing to put in, the biggest selling point of this particular method is that it allows you to alter your overall contrast/brightness as well as your Shadows, Midtones and Highlights seperately.
This is the method I personally use.
My images tend to be brighting in the image than they are in real life and I like quite a lot of contrast, so what I do in levels is to make my shadows darker by drawing the slider toward the midtones, I then make the midtones darker y drawing it toward the shadows and make the highlights lighter by dragging it away from both of ther others.
Th eproblem with this method is that it can expose any markings left by fingerprints or stray graphite in the paper, you have to make sure that your lightest highlight doesn't meet the same brightness as your blank paper unless you actually ued blank paper to make your brightest highlight, this method can also expose any bad lighting by causing a gradient effect across your apper, the blank paper around your darkest image parts tends to appear darker and the lighter parts lighter, this can be fixed by removing the paper the from the image using the magic wand and lassoo tool but that is hard word and tends to look quite poor, it is easier to just compromise and push your contrast etc to their furthest point before they star to show up these problems.
The final method is Curves this is a very odd method of altering you brightness and contrast and I have yet to figure out if it is easier or hader thatn either of the other two, it is certainly easier to get wrong and also easier much more difficult to get a good result, I don't know if this is built in problem or just a personal one though so i will still tel you havw I was told to use it.
You begin with a new window opening when you click curves, it has a grid on it and a line going from one corner to another, you grab the line in the centre of the page and pull it towards the bottom right unmarked corner in a straight line, this will darken the image and also alter the contrast of it, I have had some success with using the curves feature before moving on and fine tuning it with levels.

And we are done, I had no idea this was going to be so long when I sat down to write it, it's going to take you much longer to read these tips than it is to actual take and alter your first picture but I can assure you, if you struggle with your picture taking then taking the time to read and understand as much of this article as possible will help you considerably, I would also suggest you read into each part of this tutorial on other websites in more detail to get a better overview of how they work. Hard as it may be to belive, this was as brief as I could make this.

Good luck and happy snapping!

Joseph Adams

Traditional Art Forums » Traditional Art Photography

How To photograph my artwork without professional equipment.

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