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Photographing Art work to send in for Gallery

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Mike Smith

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Can anyone help me I find the quality of my artwork I send in for the gallery tends to look nothing like they do in the flesh. any offers on what I am doing wrong
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Alan Green

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Lighting is important; I find that my sketches on white paper tend to look very grey in the gallery unless I tweak them on the PC before uploading them. And use a proper camera; phone cameras are ok for what they are but they'll never be as good as a purpose-built camera.
michael

Michael Edwards

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I lay my work on the floor of my studio (day and night - it makes no difference) away from any sun light and take the photo with a 'proper' camera with a flash. It works for and I've never had a problem so far.
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Linda Wilson

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I find all my photos need a bit of tweaking on the laptop. I use an Apple computer and therefore have a "Photo" application to edit the photos where I typically increase the brightness, or exposure. So you are not alone in this.
With Sarah, Phil, Ellen, Rose the dentist, and the granddaughter whose name I forget.

Robert Jones, Napa

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I have a good basic camera but nothing flashy. I usually take my pictures outside to photograph them - the paintings look better in natural light, and photograph better too. There are useful links above for a more professional approach (which you need on the Saatchi site, which is why I've abandoned it) but for this site my trusty Olympus does the job - outside, not so close to the picture that it blurs, nor so far away that you get a huge expanse with your painting lost in it which you then have to crop back: I suppose around 3 feet away. And don't shake. So far, my photographs accurately reflect the appearance of my paintings. Perhaps that's where I'm going wrong.......... http://www.isleofwightlandscapes.net

Stuart Fraser

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Lighting and photographing artwork is full of pitfalls, especially as every monitor can have different colour settings. It just so happens I have been through this process as part of a bigger project in the last 3 months. I decided to document the whole process including lighting, photgraphy and pre press and made a tutorial guide in Adobe Spark to help other artists. It may be of help so I include the link here Canvas to Print Project

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Peter Davison

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Getting decent photos of my paintings is a perennial problem for me, they never seem to represent the actual painting accurately with regard to colour and tone. I've not tried adjusting the photo on my computer but might give that a try in light of the above comments.

Alan Bickley

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If you were having work printed on say a litho press or even making a giclee print you would have the original scanned on either a drum scanner or more likely a flat bed scanner for smaller work, only this way can you guarantee reasonable accuracy and even then your repro house will still have to tweak it in Photoshop or similar. But as we all know this is not practical or necessary when we are simply posting on the gallery but the point that I am making is that you can never achieve totally accurate results, albeit a good SLR camera will go some way towards the right direction. I always photograph my work outside, it just seems better somehow, a bit lighter and less drab perhaps, strange how we are all different.