How to Photograph Your Artwork

In this video we're going to talk about photographing your art. I have got my camera, my 7D Mark II with my 60mm macro lens set up on my tripod and we're going to take the highest quality images possible. Now the reason we want to do this is because we want to share our work on social media. You probably want to put it on a website and if you ever want to make prints you've got to make sure that you have really high quality stuff. There's a few settings on your camera that are really important to be aware of. First is you want to be shooting in the highest quality RAW format if possible. Second, your ISO should be set as low as possible to 100 and your f-stop should be anywhere from 8 to 11. What that does is it just ensures that everything is crystal clear and completely in focus. Another important setting that you need to remember is shooting with the timer mode on. What that does is just make sure that there is no shake or vibration when the picture is being taken. Now that we have all those settings in place we're ready to photograph the work. All right, all of my settings are where they need to be on my camera. In my studio it's really easy for me to get glare on my image so what I've got here is my camera is set just slightly higher than my painting looking a little bit down just so that I'm minimizing that glare factor. You just want to make sure that in your studio with your lighting that you reduce your glare as much as possible. I'm looking at the painting on my camera I just want to make sure that it is exposed properly so as I push the button lightly I can see the light meter. I want that dial to be anywhere between one and negative one. I'm also looking at my painting and I'm gauging it with how it looks on the screen and I'm going to adjust that so that it looks as similar as possible. So we're ready to take the picture I'm going to hold the button push it down timer setting is on I'm not touching the camera until it's done. Okay guys there it is I'm going to take that file over to my computer so I can start editing. Okay so I'm going to open the file in Photoshop because it's a raw file it will open into camera raw. The goal here is just to make it look as close to the original as possible. Once it's ready I click on open and it takes it into the main Photoshop suite. Now that I'm here I'm in the perspective crop tool I'm using this so that it straightens the image when I crop. I put in the parameters the 9 inches by the 15 inches and now I'm going to select the corners individually so that it knows how to reference the crop. Once I'm happy with where the corners are I hit enter and what it does is it straightens that image in that perfect dimension. So now I go up to image image size and I'm going to clean up these dimensions I want this width to read as 9 I want the height to read as 15 and I want the resolution to be a nice clean number so I round it up to 240. Now that I have the image at the size I want it I'm going to save this original file. So in order to do that I'm going to go up to file save as and it's going to open the window and I'm going to click on save a copy that's going to allow me to save it as a jpeg and I rename it to the skeptic and I hit return twice it saves the image and now I have a high res file of my painting.