A feverdream Photo Documentation Guide

Hello artist friends! Today we are doing something new on our dreamjournal blog! For the first time we are going to be taking a didactic approach to the artmaking process by writing up a tips and tricks guide to artists! This post is concerning how artists can take high quality documentation of their artwork: both the ideal method, as well as a more economic method. This guide is inspired in part by the unveiling of our Curation Program and its initiatives, but also in the spirit of giving artists the tools to share their work in what we think is a more professional manner. 

OUR PREFERRED DOCUMENTATION AESTHETIC

Crop to the edges of your work! Don’t include the wall or easel in your documentation!

For the sake of consistency on the Virtual Collection we use for our Curation Program, we prefer documentation of your artwork forgo any background information distracting from the work. For 2D work, that means cropping to the edge of the work–excluding the wall or the easel your art is on. For 3D work, that means taking an image of your art in a seamless white or neutral colored space. Our admins won’t approve of work that doesn’t fit these guidelines. But that is not the only reason to do this. If you don’t have an interest in joining the program this is still great advice to follow to raise the floor of your personal practice by having the ability to provide excellent images of your work for publication and social media, etc.

HIRING A PROFESSIONAL

An obvious and alternative approach to documentation would be to outsource all the documentation. 

The costly method would be to hire a photography studio to document your work. Many photography studios and some camera rental places offer this service of scanning your work. If your 2D work is small enough, they’ll put it on a scanner bed. If it's larger 2D work they will stitch multiple composite images together to ensure the best quality. We are very sure a studio could document your 3D work as well if they have a cyc wall set up, or a small seamless set up for “product shots” that they could use to place your 3D object in a blank white space free of distraction. 

The economic approach to this would be if you have a photographer friend to offer some sort of art trade or service exchange for them to help you. We don’t recommend you ask your artist friends for free services. It’s much better to see if there is a way you can help them with your skillset in the same fashion you need their skillset. 

But let’s say you want to learn how to do it on your own! We’ll share what we know so you can do that. 

SMALL 2D WORK

First things first, if you happen to work on a smaller 2D scale and you have a scanner you can absolutely use that to document your work! A small EPSON scanner, for example, offers various options to get the most out of it–you can customize the scan to include sometimes billions of colors. You don’t need to be that meticulous but in general the more digital information included in the image the better. Many printers have a scan feature as well, though they are often limited in their specs. 

The economic approach would be to utilize a scanner at your public library. Most libraries already have these tools at your disposal. 

LARGER 2D WORK + 3D WORK

But let’s say you have larger 2D work like paintings, or drawings and there is no chance it’ll fit onto the bed of a scanner. The majority of this advice will be with 2D work in mind, though there are some equivalencies between both processes. 

The ideal way to photograph these works would include having access to the following tools: a DSLR, two lights with diffusers, a room where you can control the amount of natural/ambient light, a staging set-up for 3D work, and Photoshop. A lightmeter is another tool that can help but it’s optional. You will set your work on a wall or easel within the room. Make sure that there is no strong ambient light (especially if it is of different temperature than the lights you intend to use) or natural light seeping in. This can affect your photo greatly. 

Lighting

The main issue when documenting your work is to light it in a way that lets your camera capture the most amount of information without producing a large glare on it. To avoid that you can do two things to help. Firstly, you can save glazing/varnishing the work until after you document it. Or take it out of the frame if it has glass in front of it. Secondly and more importantly, you need to set your lights with diffusers angled in a way so that the main throw of the light is just catching the opposite edge of your work. Refer to the illustrations to see what we mean exactly. This makes sure the light is affecting it but in the softest way possible to avoid glare. It would be at this point if you happen to have a lightmeter where you measure the amount of light in each quadrant of your art to make sure it's similar. You can also put a white balancing calibration card right next to your piece as well. This is so you can accurately edit the light temperature in post! After snapping a photo always be sure to look in the darker parts of your piece because that is how you can tell if there is too much uneven lighting. Blacks will often start to turn slightly purple or blue. You will need to angle the lights until you can eradicate those effects. 

What not to do with your light set up…

…and what to actually do with them

Camera Settings

A few nerdy tips about setting up your DSLR the correct way! The immediate golden rule is to shoot on RAW! Look up how to do this on your specific camera.The reason you shot on RAW is to have the largest image type your camera allows so you have more information within the file. If you have a tripod you can take a longer exposure and not worry about camera shake. If you don’t have a tripod, note the focal length of your camera lens to avoid camera shake. Remember that if it is a 30mm lens you should set your shutter speed to be at least 1/30th of a second. If it is 50mm, it should be at least 1/50th of a second, and so on. Try to take your pictures with no more than 400 ISO otherwise your photo will become more grainy. And lastly your aperture should be near f/5-f/8 if you have enough light. If you have too low an aperture and you aren’t perfectly even/level with the work on the wall/easel, the parts of the work that are angled further from you will become blurred. If you are photographing 3D work with too low of an aperture your depth of field will be too shallow to accurately represent the dimension of your work. If you set your aperture too high you’ll find you’ll need the lights to be so much brighter or you’ll need a much longer shutter speed (which is an issue if you don’t have a tripod!). It’s not necessary to have a large depth of field to photograph flat work anyway, because the area of interest is very thin! Your 3D work most likely isn’t large enough to require a very large depth of field either. 

3D Work

For 3D work mostly everything above applies! You have more liberty with the lighting because reflections or glare isn’t as much of a concern. Place the work on a pedestal in front of a cyc wall or a seamless, utilize that to document your work. If you don’t have one we’ll talk about how to set one up later. 

Color Editing

Camera Raw Edit menu

After you upload you review your documentation photos and find the best one open it up in photoshop. Immediately go to Filter>Camera Raw. Camera Raw is hands down the best place to generally make all the edits you need to your photo. Under Edit>Lighting you can adjust any level. But generally you should avoid touching the Exposure option. If you find yourself needing to touch that to make the documentation seem true to representing the work, you need to light it better beforehand. Your documentation photo should be pretty accurate immediately, but again shooting on RAW allows a lot of leniency to make edits with images that are pretty dark, for example. Under Edit>Color use the white balance eyedropper and click a part of your work that utilizes pure white, or on the white balancing calibration card in frame next to your work. Edit>Effects is something we don’t usually touch. Maybe add some texture or clarity of the photo is slightly soft. Next go to Geometry. Rotate and tilt the painting so that it is perfectly even/level to the screen. If you can’t get it perfect, that’s fine because you are just setting up for the next step so click Done. 

Removing Lens Distortion

Go to Filter>Adaptive Wide Angle. This entire step is to flatten your work and remove all lens distortion. It makes your photo look more scan-like! It will recognize what camera model and lens you are using and should be set to Auto. Click on a corner of your work and hold Shift and drag to an adjacent corner. This will make your work have perfectly true horizontals and verticals. Do this for all four corners. You can also do this for lines within your work or in the background of your photo documentation. If, for example, you painted a picture of a room, drag a true vertical line up and down the trim of the door, or a true horizontal line along where the ceiling meets the wall (this only works if you painted the room straight on and have true horizontal/vertical lines and not at an askew angle). Or if on the wall where you hung your work there happens to be lines that run behind it you can drag those same lines there to help remove the lens distortion even more. If you don’t hold Shift you can drag a line along any line in your painting and it’ll flatten out your work but that’s better to do after tracing the perimeter of your work. 

Adaptive Wide Angle menu

Correcting Aspect Ratio

Once you finish that step, sometimes Adaptive Wide Angle can subtly squash or stretch the image of your work. It is a good idea to create a new layer and make a rectangle with the correct aspect ratio of your piece. Set the opacity of the rectangle to 50% and free transform distort your documentation photo so that aspect ratios of the rectangle and your work match! 

The economic approach would include using what you already have! In this case that includes: your smartphone camera (for this we are going to assume you have an iPhone), diffused natural light, room with white walls and ambient light, a white sheet for 3D work, and a photo editing app (we suggest an app like Procreate Pocket since it’s pretty powerful at only a few bucks). Almost all of these tools can be used like the way the more costly tools above can be used. But some things to consider are that on an overcast day, the diffused lighting is ideal for photographing your work! Just set your easel outside in the shade and angle it in a way that ensures the most even lighting and reduces glare.

If that isn’t an option, you can use a white bedsheet over a window to diffuse the lighting. When that is your light set up, angling the work against a wall in various ways becomes your process. It is again to ensure even lighting and no glare. If the room has a lighter toned paint that can help bounce light around. Use big white pieces of board or paper to bounce light in areas that are too dark. Make sure you put the piece on a little block if you have it leaned on the floor because the color of the floor will reflect onto your work. You can accomplish many of the same effects with your photo editing app. You can adjust levels, curves, and contrast in different adjustment menus and remove lens distortion to a certain degree by using distort transform and pulling the corners of your artwork in the photo to the edge of your digital canvas, assuming the aspect ratio is set to reflect that of your artwork! There might be some proportional changes but if you can take the photo as straight on as possible, it will eliminate most of that.

For 3D work, you can use an ironed white bedsheet like a seamless and create a DIY space to document your objects. You can also use a roll of white butcher paper as well.

DIY seamless setup for 3D work

Conclusion

Lastly, if you have some of the tools and lack others, you can use any of these tips interchangeably to achieve the desired effect! For example, if you have a DSLR or no lights, you can still set up your work in the shade on an overcast day. It works great! Or if you have access to Photoshop but only a smartphone to take pictures, Adaptive Wide Angle will still recognize your camera lens and you can make those adjustments! If it doesn’t you may need to change the mode to Perspective or Fisheye. 

We are allowing comments below, so if you have a question or any tips you’d like to share please feel free to do so!