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Message
Posted
Having just visited the Patching's festival, I couldn't help but notice that a number of paintings I have seen previously posted online, seemed rather lack lustre 'in the flesh' so to speak. I realise that 'thumbnail' pictures online can intensify detail and colour, but I do wonder whether some paintings on display had been somewhat enhanced with the aid of computer software.
Posted
Not having been to Patchings for a number of years and not this year.....it's a terrible place to get to from here. I can't speak personally on the paintings hung.
But on occasion having gone to galleries to see well known works of art , only seen before in books , I have been disappointed by the originals on display. I think paintings here are tweaked before being put on the gallery but also the photography of them , lighting etc alters the colours . So people try and get them back to the original. Yes I have tweaked colour as it's often much duller in the photograph than in " the flesh "
Posted
We all know, or those of us who post online anyway, just how difficult it is to achieve an exact reproduction of our work, but I do try and i'm sure that most of us do, and not deliberately attempting to enhance our work in any way. The only way to achieve near perfection is to take your work to a 'Repro House', which lets face it is just not practical, and I don't think necessary either, for a book illustration, yes, a must.
I was disappointed to read the author's comment about some work appearing 'lacklustre', quite an insult actually, these are fellow artist's and valued contributors to this site and proud to have had a work accepted for Patching's, myself included, and I don't consider my entry to be 'lacklustre', and neither did the judges. To be honest, I didn't actually see many at all that had been displayed on the gallery, maybe a very small handful at most, and even then I couldn't have remembered what they looked like on the gallery to have made any comparison.
Edited
by alanbickley
Posted
I would love to visit Patchings. I don't know how long it's been going but I only heard of it in the last few years, but up until around 10 years ago I lived a 20-minute drive away. Maybe next year.
I find it really difficult to get accurate photos of paintings. I find that the colours can look completely different between the images on my laptop and my 2nd monitor . I generally tweak the brightness/contrast to make it look the closest I can get, but it will never be accurate. I also photograph under artificial light, as it makes the colours look less washed-out than daylight can. Which, I suppose, is also enhancement of sorts?
Kay
Posted
Not quite sure what this post is doing under this heading, but never mind... it's not been used for much else for quite a while.
To the question - I never tweak images before posting them here, for better or for worse: there's a skill, which I don't necessarily possess, to photographing paintings; I always photograph mine outside, in good but not high-noon daylight. Sometimes the results are fairly true to original, sometimes they're a bit foggier, but if I were to start trying to bring them to the way they "really are" - and i have TRIED to do that - I would enter a minefield. For one thing how and where do you stop? I'm not sure I would. And for another, a painting looks different in different lights - take it outside and you see colours you won't see indoors, and mistakes you didn't notice indoors. Put it through a photo enhancement process and you're removing it from the realm of the human eye and natural light, and you may deceive yourself.
Looking at an image onscreen is never the same as seeing it for yourself - there are textures which are all but impossible to replicate however good the technology is: show me a painting or print in the flesh, and I can tell you if it's an oil painting, an acrylic, a print on paper, a pastel: show me the same thing on screen and I can never be sure.
Trying to enhance your work with Photoshop - which I don't possess - is a trick I'm sure has been pulled, but I hope not here: there's little point in it, unless all you want is easy praise - it doesn't make the actual work any better. I think I can promise that my stuff is no worse than the way I've photographed it - whether it's any BETTER is something else again....but if I've taken a poor photo, and can't for whatever reason get a better one, I'll usually say so. I must say, I don't see how that helps, though - all the viewer has got is the photograph taken: you can't really look at it and say 'that's ghastly, but of course in reality it's probably marvellous...'. So if I take a bad photo in future, I think I'll just bin it.
I don't suppose any spite was intended in the original question - it's a legitimate question to ask, and I can exclusively reveal (there should be a drum roll at this point) that the question has been asked privately before, it's just that the questioner didn't want to air his suspicions in public. Perhaps it's better out than in, though - like a lot of things.
http://www.isleofwightlandscapes.net
http://www.wightpaint.blogspot.co.uk
Posted
I've actually had the reverse experience to that of the complainant in that I have posted photos of my paintings in the POL online gallery and have usually, but not always, found the images in the gallery make the painting looked somewhat less true to the original in colour. I have put this down to my poor photography, probably compounded by poor lighting, but notice that the detrimental effect is more pronounced with my oil paintings than with watercolour or acrylics. I wouldn't know how to digitally enhance an image and am not interested in trying to find out. I would certainly hope it is a practice not adopted by painters in the gallery regardless of where they exhibit their paintings.
