Artwork capture - what artists need to know
By Bruce Cairns, Norfolk Art Place
This is quite a detailed article, but I hope it is informative. You might want to grab a cup of coffee before you start reading.
If you are a professional artist, or aspire to become professional, you will want to maximise income from your work. Once you have sold an original, it is gone. However, if you have had it professionally captured beforehand, you can continue to earn money from the work, most obviously by selling giclée prints.
Capturing involves producing a digital file from your artwork so that the digital version can be used for giclée prints, exhibition catalogues, greetings cards, your website, and any other uses and revenue streams you have in mind.
There are two main ways of capturing artwork – scanning and photography.
Scanning
Most scanners are too small for most artwork, and unless they are carefully calibrated they won’t provide sufficient accuracy of colour, tone or detail – and only the very best ones can provide that accuracy even when calibrated. They also usually involve the scanner bed coming into contact with the face of the artwork.
There are specialist artwork scanners. They are very expensive and large. They often use fluorescent light sources which are not suited to accurate reproduction. The results often need adjustment to correct colour errors. The results are sometimes not properly sharp. Some scanners come into direct contact with the artwork, which can cause damage.
There are a number of specialist businesses in the UK that use very expensive artwork scanners and operate them really well, producing excellent output - but invariably at a very high cost to the artist, and usually involving significant input from the artist in agreeing colour corrections.
You may have come across “scanning backs” used by some artwork photographers, such as the Betterlight back. These are used in a 5x4” view camera, and scan the artwork at high resolution. The results can be of a very high quality, but the technology is now old, will not be supported indefinitely by the manufacturers, and many artwork photographers believe that it has been superseded by medium format digital technology. Having compared Betterlight scans to the output from modern medium format digital camera sensors, we decided that a scanning back was not something that Norfolk Art Place wanted to invest in.
We do not use scanning, but we respect those who do use it well.
Photography
There is a wide range of possibilities here.
Level 1 – the phone snap
At one end of the scale, many artists are used to taking photos of their artwork on their phone, to upload to Facebook or to put on their website. This is fine within its limitations, but it doesn’t work if you want a revenue stream from giclée prints. The colour, tone, resolution and alignment will all be inaccurate and literally useless for all commercial use, even greetings cards (unless you are very un-fussy about quality, which most artists are not!)
Level 2 – DIY photography
If your planned use of the image is not critical, you may be able to photograph your own paintings, with a decent camera on a tripod and the artwork on an easel with even lighting (overcast daylight is best). This will be fine for a record of your work before you sell it, and will probably be fine for your website.
However, for critical use, especially high quality giclée prints, this will not work. The colour, tone and sharpness will not be correct, and you will almost certainly not have the painting properly aligned with the camera, so that parts of the image are not properly in focus. Unless you are a very enthusiastic photographer, your camera and lens is unlikely to provide enough resolution for high quality prints.
Level 3 - the non-specialist photographer
You may find a generalist photographer who offers an artwork photography service, usually at a low cost. The problem is that artwork photography is a very specialised field, and unfortunately many of these photographers do not provide a high quality result. They are often very good at what they do in other fields of photography, but sadly they are frequently dabbling in photographing artwork.
New clients coming to us at Norfolk Art Place often send us files from this kind of photographer. Very often - I would say over 80% of the time - the captures are sub-standard. I have to do the best I can to print them, but often the size I can go up to is limited by the quality of the capture, and the quality of the print is always compromised. Sometimes I have to tell the artist that the image is not printable at the quality level or size they wanted – which is disappointing for them if they have sold the original.
How not to do it
I usually find a combination of the following problems with files from these generalist photographers, and often a number of them at once. (I know that not everyone will understand all of the technical details, but it should be helpful to those who do):
- The camera was not properly aligned with the artwork – corners out of focus. Sometimes the whole thing is out of focus and soft.
- Wrong colour space used – instead of using Adobe RGB or ProPhoto RGB, the images are shot using sRGB, which throws away a lot of the colour information at the shooting stage.
- Wrong lens used – a short to medium telephoto lens is better than a standard focal length for artwork. Zoom lenses should not be used, because they do not have the quality of a prime lens. Wide angle lenses should never, ever be used, because they introduce distortion.
- Poor quality “kit” lenses used instead of professional lenses.
- Wrong aperture used – for various reasons the best aperture is usually around two stops down from the maximum aperture of the lens. I often see artwork captures that have been photographed at f11 or f16, which has degraded the image quality through diffraction.
- Reflective paintings showing “sparkly” highlights on the weave of the canvas – there is no shortcut to using cross-polarised lighting and a polarising filter when photographing oils and acrylics.
- Using a camera with insufficient resolution. In order to give the maximum quality to our clients we use a 100 megapixel medium format camera, which gives superb colour accuracy and resolution.
- Non-calibrated cameras – calibration and the use of custom profiles are essential to capture accurate colour.
- Wrong exposure – artwork photographers do not use automatic exposure and hope for the best! The whites in the artwork have to be photographed so that they fall at a specific brightness level in the capture, and this usually involves shooting a number of frames and measuring which one falls within the narrow parameters. I have seen many underexposed and overexposed files from this kind of photographer, who don’t usually know what they are looking for in terms of exposure and think they can apply standard photography principles. This is particularly apparent when monochrome drawings are photographed, or anything else with a white paper background, as the background usually goes grey. It is a specialised task to photograph white paper and produce a capture with the background at the correct tonal level.
- Post-processing of the file in Photoshop, destroying any colour/tonal accuracy that was there in the first place. Adjusting colour, contrast etc. is quite normal for most forms of photography, and instinctive for most photographers, but it is absolutely the wrong thing to do for artwork capture, where accuracy is one of the main objectives.
- Enlarging the file in Photoshop because it was too small, due to using a camera with insufficient resolution. When as a printer all I am provided with is a badly enlarged file, I cannot go back to the initial capture. In order to produce maximum quality the file should usually only be increased in size at the printing stage, using specialist software, and not when creating a master file. To make matters worse, often the original file was fuzzy, and increasing the size has worsened the problems.
- No colour and tonal reference chart. These are usually included in the frame by professional artwork photographers, or provided separately. Without this a third party printer who has not seen the original artwork can’t accurately judge the correct exposure and tonality of the image without some guesswork.
I recently saw an online advert for an artwork photography service, with a photograph and description of the photographer’s setup. Everything was wrong. The softboxes on the lights were the wrong shape, the tripod head was not suited to the task, an oil painting was on the easel with no cross-polarised lighting, there was no colour reference chart, the wrong lens was being used – I could go on. There was a low fixed price, but you know what you get when you pay peanuts …
Artist clients have often brought paintings to me to be photographed properly, after having previously had them done badly by someone else. This is fine as long as they haven’t sold the original – but of course they have still wasted the money on the original sub-standard capture.
The problem with this poor quality art photography is that the artist thinks that they have had their work captured properly. Only later, when they go to a fine art printer for high quality output, do they discover that their money saving was a false economy. I and other fine art printers will always do the best we can, but – silk purses and sows ears …
The quality of a giclée print of artwork is heavily dependent on the quality of the capture. For an artist, trying to save money on that stage is a big mistake.
Level 4 – professional artwork photography
High quality artwork photography is painstaking, and therefore not cheap!
- Art photographers use specialist equipment to make sure that the artwork is perfectly aligned with the painting. This takes time, even with the equipment.
- We have invested in 100 megapixel medium format digital cameras and appropriate, expensive professional lenses.
- We invest in software designed for artwork photography – we don’t just fiddle with the files in Photoshop or Lightroom.
- We take the time to include colour reference charts and to use polarisation where needed.
- We use software that measures the lighting pattern and compensates for it in the image to even up the lighting (even good quality softboxes on lights create an uneven pattern). This involves extra time for each image, photographing a sheet of white foamcore with the same lighting, and then running it through the specialist software to create the evened-out lighting reference file and applying it to the master image file.
- We take time with everything – setup, focus, exposure test shots, lighting pattern shots, camera calibration, polarisation – everything is slow and careful.
I breathe a sigh of relief when a client gives me a file from a photographer they have used in the past and I see that everything is right – that this person knew what they were doing!
At Norfolk Art Place we use sophisticated methods to achieve the best possible colour and tonal accuracy. We make our own custom profiles, including where appropriate making a bespoke camera profile for the specific artwork. Our system matches a raw file image of the artwork to a lighting pattern shot and photo-spectrometer readings of the painting and a white reference, with the whole thing calibrated to our cameras and lighting setup. It has been an expensive investment, but it produces superb results and colour accuracy.
Because we are fine art printers, we can if required produce the prints as well as carrying out the initial capture. We are in control of the workflow from start to finish, and can provide our clients with giclée prints which have a high degree of accuracy and without lengthy proofing discussions with the artist.
As an artist, please don’t waste money and business opportunities on cheap and substandard image captures. Get in touch with us using the Contact link above, or if you’re not in Norfolk find someone in your area who specialises in artwork photography.
This is quite a detailed article, but I hope it is informative. You might want to grab a cup of coffee before you start reading.
If you are a professional artist, or aspire to become professional, you will want to maximise income from your work. Once you have sold an original, it is gone. However, if you have had it professionally captured beforehand, you can continue to earn money from the work, most obviously by selling giclée prints.
Capturing involves producing a digital file from your artwork so that the digital version can be used for giclée prints, exhibition catalogues, greetings cards, your website, and any other uses and revenue streams you have in mind.
There are two main ways of capturing artwork – scanning and photography.
Scanning
Most scanners are too small for most artwork, and unless they are carefully calibrated they won’t provide sufficient accuracy of colour, tone or detail – and only the very best ones can provide that accuracy even when calibrated. They also usually involve the scanner bed coming into contact with the face of the artwork.
There are specialist artwork scanners. They are very expensive and large. They often use fluorescent light sources which are not suited to accurate reproduction. The results often need adjustment to correct colour errors. The results are sometimes not properly sharp. Some scanners come into direct contact with the artwork, which can cause damage.
There are a number of specialist businesses in the UK that use very expensive artwork scanners and operate them really well, producing excellent output - but invariably at a very high cost to the artist, and usually involving significant input from the artist in agreeing colour corrections.
You may have come across “scanning backs” used by some artwork photographers, such as the Betterlight back. These are used in a 5x4” view camera, and scan the artwork at high resolution. The results can be of a very high quality, but the technology is now old, will not be supported indefinitely by the manufacturers, and many artwork photographers believe that it has been superseded by medium format digital technology. Having compared Betterlight scans to the output from modern medium format digital camera sensors, we decided that a scanning back was not something that Norfolk Art Place wanted to invest in.
We do not use scanning, but we respect those who do use it well.
Photography
There is a wide range of possibilities here.
Level 1 – the phone snap
At one end of the scale, many artists are used to taking photos of their artwork on their phone, to upload to Facebook or to put on their website. This is fine within its limitations, but it doesn’t work if you want a revenue stream from giclée prints. The colour, tone, resolution and alignment will all be inaccurate and literally useless for all commercial use, even greetings cards (unless you are very un-fussy about quality, which most artists are not!)
Level 2 – DIY photography
If your planned use of the image is not critical, you may be able to photograph your own paintings, with a decent camera on a tripod and the artwork on an easel with even lighting (overcast daylight is best). This will be fine for a record of your work before you sell it, and will probably be fine for your website.
However, for critical use, especially high quality giclée prints, this will not work. The colour, tone and sharpness will not be correct, and you will almost certainly not have the painting properly aligned with the camera, so that parts of the image are not properly in focus. Unless you are a very enthusiastic photographer, your camera and lens is unlikely to provide enough resolution for high quality prints.
Level 3 - the non-specialist photographer
You may find a generalist photographer who offers an artwork photography service, usually at a low cost. The problem is that artwork photography is a very specialised field, and unfortunately many of these photographers do not provide a high quality result. They are often very good at what they do in other fields of photography, but sadly they are frequently dabbling in photographing artwork.
New clients coming to us at Norfolk Art Place often send us files from this kind of photographer. Very often - I would say over 80% of the time - the captures are sub-standard. I have to do the best I can to print them, but often the size I can go up to is limited by the quality of the capture, and the quality of the print is always compromised. Sometimes I have to tell the artist that the image is not printable at the quality level or size they wanted – which is disappointing for them if they have sold the original.
How not to do it
I usually find a combination of the following problems with files from these generalist photographers, and often a number of them at once. (I know that not everyone will understand all of the technical details, but it should be helpful to those who do):
- The camera was not properly aligned with the artwork – corners out of focus. Sometimes the whole thing is out of focus and soft.
- Wrong colour space used – instead of using Adobe RGB or ProPhoto RGB, the images are shot using sRGB, which throws away a lot of the colour information at the shooting stage.
- Wrong lens used – a short to medium telephoto lens is better than a standard focal length for artwork. Zoom lenses should not be used, because they do not have the quality of a prime lens. Wide angle lenses should never, ever be used, because they introduce distortion.
- Poor quality “kit” lenses used instead of professional lenses.
- Wrong aperture used – for various reasons the best aperture is usually around two stops down from the maximum aperture of the lens. I often see artwork captures that have been photographed at f11 or f16, which has degraded the image quality through diffraction.
- Reflective paintings showing “sparkly” highlights on the weave of the canvas – there is no shortcut to using cross-polarised lighting and a polarising filter when photographing oils and acrylics.
- Using a camera with insufficient resolution. In order to give the maximum quality to our clients we use a 100 megapixel medium format camera, which gives superb colour accuracy and resolution.
- Non-calibrated cameras – calibration and the use of custom profiles are essential to capture accurate colour.
- Wrong exposure – artwork photographers do not use automatic exposure and hope for the best! The whites in the artwork have to be photographed so that they fall at a specific brightness level in the capture, and this usually involves shooting a number of frames and measuring which one falls within the narrow parameters. I have seen many underexposed and overexposed files from this kind of photographer, who don’t usually know what they are looking for in terms of exposure and think they can apply standard photography principles. This is particularly apparent when monochrome drawings are photographed, or anything else with a white paper background, as the background usually goes grey. It is a specialised task to photograph white paper and produce a capture with the background at the correct tonal level.
- Post-processing of the file in Photoshop, destroying any colour/tonal accuracy that was there in the first place. Adjusting colour, contrast etc. is quite normal for most forms of photography, and instinctive for most photographers, but it is absolutely the wrong thing to do for artwork capture, where accuracy is one of the main objectives.
- Enlarging the file in Photoshop because it was too small, due to using a camera with insufficient resolution. When as a printer all I am provided with is a badly enlarged file, I cannot go back to the initial capture. In order to produce maximum quality the file should usually only be increased in size at the printing stage, using specialist software, and not when creating a master file. To make matters worse, often the original file was fuzzy, and increasing the size has worsened the problems.
- No colour and tonal reference chart. These are usually included in the frame by professional artwork photographers, or provided separately. Without this a third party printer who has not seen the original artwork can’t accurately judge the correct exposure and tonality of the image without some guesswork.
I recently saw an online advert for an artwork photography service, with a photograph and description of the photographer’s setup. Everything was wrong. The softboxes on the lights were the wrong shape, the tripod head was not suited to the task, an oil painting was on the easel with no cross-polarised lighting, there was no colour reference chart, the wrong lens was being used – I could go on. There was a low fixed price, but you know what you get when you pay peanuts …
Artist clients have often brought paintings to me to be photographed properly, after having previously had them done badly by someone else. This is fine as long as they haven’t sold the original – but of course they have still wasted the money on the original sub-standard capture.
The problem with this poor quality art photography is that the artist thinks that they have had their work captured properly. Only later, when they go to a fine art printer for high quality output, do they discover that their money saving was a false economy. I and other fine art printers will always do the best we can, but – silk purses and sows ears …
The quality of a giclée print of artwork is heavily dependent on the quality of the capture. For an artist, trying to save money on that stage is a big mistake.
Level 4 – professional artwork photography
High quality artwork photography is painstaking, and therefore not cheap!
- Art photographers use specialist equipment to make sure that the artwork is perfectly aligned with the painting. This takes time, even with the equipment.
- We have invested in 100 megapixel medium format digital cameras and appropriate, expensive professional lenses.
- We invest in software designed for artwork photography – we don’t just fiddle with the files in Photoshop or Lightroom.
- We take the time to include colour reference charts and to use polarisation where needed.
- We use software that measures the lighting pattern and compensates for it in the image to even up the lighting (even good quality softboxes on lights create an uneven pattern). This involves extra time for each image, photographing a sheet of white foamcore with the same lighting, and then running it through the specialist software to create the evened-out lighting reference file and applying it to the master image file.
- We take time with everything – setup, focus, exposure test shots, lighting pattern shots, camera calibration, polarisation – everything is slow and careful.
I breathe a sigh of relief when a client gives me a file from a photographer they have used in the past and I see that everything is right – that this person knew what they were doing!
At Norfolk Art Place we use sophisticated methods to achieve the best possible colour and tonal accuracy. We make our own custom profiles, including where appropriate making a bespoke camera profile for the specific artwork. Our system matches a raw file image of the artwork to a lighting pattern shot and photo-spectrometer readings of the painting and a white reference, with the whole thing calibrated to our cameras and lighting setup. It has been an expensive investment, but it produces superb results and colour accuracy.
Because we are fine art printers, we can if required produce the prints as well as carrying out the initial capture. We are in control of the workflow from start to finish, and can provide our clients with giclée prints which have a high degree of accuracy and without lengthy proofing discussions with the artist.
As an artist, please don’t waste money and business opportunities on cheap and substandard image captures. Get in touch with us using the Contact link above, or if you’re not in Norfolk find someone in your area who specialises in artwork photography.