Advice needed on how to take pictures of paintings

Fabre

I have been struggling for a while now to take decent pictures of my paintings.

What do you recon is the best way to take pictures of paintings? lights and reflection being my major concern.

At the moment I have a digital 4 megapixels camera a Canon powershot S45 and a 500W outdoor wall halogen lamp.

rob1891

that halgoen light would be quite yellow/orangy would it not? Our back door one is anyway. I don't know if this would apply:

http://home.planet.nl/~ucklomp/about/studio/index.htm

but it might help, Alfred uses ghetto techniques to photograph cameras for his website (filled with ghetto cameras!).

Getting defuse light seems to be the key, you could use large white cards to reflect light onto the painting if the right cloud coverage isnt there!! If the back wall of your house is painted white that would do nicely.

Rob

Fabre

thanks for the tip rob1891, I followed the advice, there a was nice uniform cloud coverage yesterday so I gave it a shot, must say I am quite happy with the results, it is not perfect but it should do.

Had to cheat a bit by using the "vivid" effect of the camera otherwise the colors seemed a bit washed out.

without the "vivid" effect



With the "vivid" effect



What do you think?

rob1891

The second one looks good but it really depends on how much the colours match your painting more than anything else! You are better off to do the vivid effect in photoshop, there's a lot more control over the adjustments you can make to the colour and it shouldn't be too hard to get the photo looking exactly right.

The unvivid photo does look a bit dead though and as this is what you have to work with it's best to try and get it as good as possible so you have less adjusting to do.

Zoom in to 50mm or more and step back to fill the frame, I think I can see a little distortion which might be caused by a wide angle focal length, though I could be wrong. Your camera has 3 metering modes, it's probably already on center weighted, but just check to be sure. You have a feature that will take 3 photos in a row, the first slightly underexposed, second exposed according the the meter, and third slightly over exposed. Turn this on and set it to +/- 1 EV. This is super handy for digital because it's not like you are wasting film!! You can look over the photos after and pick the best exposed one and then it's off to photoshop. You could also turn the painting to face the white wall in the background if you're not getting enough light, but then you'd need make sure the new background is okay to crop out of

best of luck!

Fabre

I am not very familiar with photoshop what kind of filters /effect should I apply?

rob1891

I wouldn't use any filters at all.

I'm not a photoshop guru, but play around with anything under Image>Adjustments menu. It has basic things like contrast/brightness/saturation that you might be able to do on the camera but there's more control than I'd imagine the camera has. There are also colour levels/balances/curves you can adjust if you find the colours on the photo aren't really matching up to the painting. (Though it is probably better to take them again if that happens, sometimes I get a blue tinge from scanning negatives and those are good for removing that).

btw, you can probably use any photo editor, those are all pretty standard functions.


Rob