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Photomanipulation - between a rock and a hard place
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Message
Posted
A recent forum discussion (Painting with brushes, paper canvas and colour) has shown differing opinions on digital "paintings" but a general consensus that photomanipulation is disliked. I struggle a little here. What you are aiming for is a true representation of your work to upload to the gallery. I am lucky enough to have a Nikon D90 and take several shots, using different aperture and speed settings, then choose the best setting and then reshoot changing the white balance settings. I don't always get what I want and, following another thread on the forum, sometimes wonder why I bother, as there are times when an iPad or an iPhone photo is more representative of the original. The more sophisticated the camera, the greater the difficulty, it seems. Back in 2015, I downloaded the RA Summer Exhibition guide to photographing your art work and was surprised to see an "Editing" section which says "You may want to boost the contrast to bring out the details of your artwork". This surprised me but it did come with the caveat "but do not over edit your image as you want it to be a true representation of the work". Now it is confession time, I do, if necessary, "edit" my photos by tweaking the contrast/brightness settings (I use the open source f.o.c. GIMP programme). I don't "tweak" any other settings, but have to admit, despite the apparent OK from the RA, I do feel I am cheating a little bit, though with the intention of producing a true, or at least truer, representation of the original - warts and all. Without professional lighting, I doubt I can ever get a true representation, which leaves me between a rock and a hard place. Do I tweak, which does feel like cheating, or post something which does not do justice to the original?
Posted
It's an interesting question Tony, because I always send my photos to "My Pictures" to edit because they rarely resemble the actual painting in the first stage. My camera isn't an expensive one (A Sony Cybershot) , and I take pics at verious times of day including flash, but you have to be careful of creating "false feathers" or you are only fooling yourself if you enhance your paintings beyond what they are. It's tempting, of course, expecially when the results turn out brilliantly, but we're only fooling ourselves unless what we show is truthful. I don't actually think we are talking about this here though, rather more using someone else's photographs and "overpainting" them using digital art programs. That's a bit despicable and fools no one. Everything depends on the one person we can't fool, ie ourselves. Hope I understood you question right.
Jim.
Edited
by Wanderer69
Posted
I was also surprised, if not troubled, by the guidance from the RA. I don't go to the trouble that you go to though Tony when photographing my work; but I do try and get as near as possible and this may mean a bit of re-photographing and so on.
I always try, when possible, to take my work outside but obviously not in sunlight. The best results seem to be by positioning my work under this large white canvas parasol which remains out for the summer months. It blocks out any direct light and shadow and works for me.
An important point to remember also, if you have entered it into an exhibition as an initial digital image, this will need to be accurate because the judges will get to see it if selected.
Posted
An interesting thread. It seems to have evolved into two discussions, as these things do. Tony's original post was about submitting 'tweaked' photos of your artwork. I like to paint in bright colours, and my work is contrasty, so posted images that aren't high contrast and vividly coloured wouldn't represent my work. I 'digitalise' my work with a scanner (for up to A4 size), and a cheapish camera for anything larger. My scanner's default settings produce a washed out look, so I've made a custom setting in the scanner to correct it. This consists of increasing the DPI setting (Dots per inch) from 150 to 300...300 being the minimum resolution suggested for printing (in case I want to make a print), the other alteration is to increase the contrast slightly. This makes my digital images look like my paintings and drawings. Photos of my work taken with the camera vary...sometimes they are fine...sometimes I increase the contrast slightly. (It depends on the light conditions when the photo is taken.) When I post on POL I have to make changes...my digital images are a bit big. My first attempts at post pics on POL didn't work, I assumed it was because they were too big(??).
So for POL posts I REDUCE the DPI to 100, and also reduce the largest dimension of the pic to 700 pixels...this produces a much smaller file that POL accepts happily. Sometimes reducing the resolution like this makes the sharpness a little soft...so I sharpen them as well. (I've had a few comments about 'blurry' pics when I forget to sharpen the smaller pics.)
The other part of this thread seems to be dumping on Digital Art...yes, if people present photo-manipulation as paintings that's wrong...but it's the people who are at fault, not digital art. I like digital art and would do more if my hands were steadier.
So if this makes me a nasty underhand tweaker of pictures, then I'm guilty, m'lord.
Lew.
Posted
I have two cameras, neither of which is exactly top end (though they cost enough when I bought them!). I have to take photographs outside, in daylight - the house is too dark, artificial light yellows everything. I don't tweak what I post; but often have to take more than one photo to get something that looks like my painting. The scanner works on some pieces, not others.... but I'm reasonably confident that when I post, you get what I can see.
However, I wouldn't object at all to your using whatever your camera can do to make the photo and the painting as close as possible - and if that means adjusting contrast or light, it's no more manipulation than straightening the image or cropping the board. You don't want to be so pure that you end up with a photograph which horribly distorts your painting - washing out colours, losing detail, blurring. I take it that this is what the RA means - because using software to turn your painting into something it isn't is pretty pointless, unless you're so dependent on easy praise in online forums that you've probably got a psychiatric problem!
I declare a mistrial in Lew's case, and award costs from the public purse.......
Posted
Yes Sandra, the colours do seem much more accurate when photographing outdoors, but as I have said, never in direct sunlight.
Scanning your artwork, as Lew does, is an accurate way to represent your work, but in my case far too small for my work. There are A1+ scanners out there at the repro houses, but there is a cost involved and a far from convenient way if you just need a decent image to post on the gallery.
On the issue of DPI Lew, 300 is the maximum, and is the usual DPI used for lithography printing in the glossy mags and so on. Newsprint, which is obviously more absorbent requires something around the 200/220 mark for colour, 180 for mono. Even then, the scanned image will be taken into Photoshop and colour corrected to the original.
Digital reproduction for a Giclée print will probably be totally different, I have no experience of this method, but I do have on conventional litho printing, having spent the greater part of my life in that environment as a graphic designer.
We all see some shocking photo's on the gallery, on the skew, blurred, uncropped - need I go on?. It is important to represent your work to its best advantage, but many don't consider this important enough to take a bit more care - I think that it's important.
Edited
by alanbickley
Posted
I use my phone to take photos which is a 23 mega pixel camera, and it does take super photos but sometimes the colour needs to be tweaked to produce the correct tone to match the painting. I also adjust the contrast and sometimes the brightness to get it right. Before I found POL, I joined SAA and they stipulated that your photos could not be bigger than 600 pixels. I now automatically alter the size to that before posting here. By the way, I have cancelled my membership of SAA now!
Posted
I take all of my WIP images with my iPhone, then colour correct them in Photoshop as quite often they're taken at night under artificial light. I adjust the levels to get rid of the yellow cast that bulbs give, then bump the contrast and shadows slightly. Final images, high res up to A2 for print just in case, are scanned (quite often in two or more parts) then put together in Photoshop. I don't see any of this as photo manipulation, although others may disagree.
Posted
Cross purposes indeed. Digital painting is such stuff as can be done on an iPad with a paint programme. The sort of thing Hockney was doing a few years ago.
Digital imaging is something different and whilst it may be deemed to include digital painting, for convenience here, I suggest it is most generally considered to be the creation/preparation of images for reproduction either in print or on the net.
A monochrome digital image is an 8-bit image (from 2-to the eighth, no superscript here) 2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2=256). A colour image is a 24-bit image (3 channels (RGB), 3x8=24). A ‘perfect’ image will show a full range of tones from 0 (black) to 255 (white). There are many, many reasons why a photographed image will be inadequate in this respect—lighting, camera resolution, lens quality, to name but three. The advice given above by the RA is perfectly sensible and proper and is not manipulation, in the sense of ‘cheating’. It’s simply what, in the olden days, would have been done in the darkroom by photo-chemical means: getting the best possible result from an exposed image.
If you have access to Photoshop you should always, always, check the tonal range in the Levels dialogue. It will be deficient; they always are unless, by pure chance everything itemised above and more, just happens to have been absolutely right for that image. That’s likely to be a one-in-a-hundred image, so you need to adjust the levels to correct the tonal range. That’s if you’ve got access to Photoshop.
If you haven’t then you’ll need to use the basic correction software that iPads and the like are supplied with. If this means adjusting brightness/contrast manually then I suggest you adjust it so that the darkest areas are black, BUT—and this is important—still showing some detail. Similarly the whites should also still retain detail (disregarding spectral highlights such as reflections from metallic surfaces which are not likely to be a problem in photographing a painting).
You can help yourself by using the other means that have been very sensibly suggested here. Find a place that is evenly lit—daylight is most likely to be your best option—and photograph your painting there. I photographed some of my artworks with my iPad and the biggest difficulty I experienced was because, with a lens of such extremely short focal length, it can be very difficult indeed to get the image square and parallel—tiny movements make a big difference. I was able to correct this in Photoshop.
And all of this ignores the fact that, to upload an image to this site, and for other online purposes, you will then save your image as a JPEG, which is a dreadful file format (as I’ve said more than thrice here) and should be discontinued. But we’re stuck with it. It also ignores the fact that my monitor is not calibrated the same as yours is so no matter how much time you put into the preparation I won’t see what you see. For most general purposes however, it is sufficient of course.