An artist can have great work, but if your work is poorly photographed and put online un-edited, it will never look ‘great’ on the web.
You know yourself that the images that catch your eye on the web are the crisply photographed and neatly squared up images rather than the out of focus, dark, uncropped, crazy wallpaper backgrounds or flash glared images. Or maybe worse still, you do notice these images and think ‘What the heck?’. Either way, if you don’t photograph and present your art well, it’s not the art that will get noticed.
So here’s some tips in getting your images of your artwork up to scratch.
Taking the photograph:
1. Use a high-quality digital camera—I’d suggest 8 megapixels or higher.
2. Photograph your art work in natural light away from strong sunlight. Outside is good.
3. Fix or prop your paintings against a wall centered at eye level, or place your sculptures on a raised surface.
4. Don’t have your artwork behind glass – it is nearly impossible to photograph as you will always have a reflection, so get into the habit of photographing before framing.
5. If you are photographing sculpture try to place it on a neutral sheet and have a neutral background. It is one thing cropping round a painting to clear a background, and totally another when you try to digitally cut round a sculpture – no fun!
6. Use a tripod so that you can photograph your work with minimal shake and at eye level (or at the level of your artwork).
7. Take multiple versions of any one shot – with digital you don’t have to worry about wasting film.
Preparing your Art for the Web:
1. Upload your digital images to your computer and store them in a file you can easily find.
2. Use good photo editing software to prepare your images for the web. I would recommend Adobe Photoshop, however it is expensive and has a learning curve. For a lighter and less expensive photo editing package you could try Photoshop Elements.
3. Create a folder where you are going to save all your edited photos, so that you can easily find it.
4. Open each image and in turn you want to crop your image so that only the artwork is shown in the photo. For sculptures, if you followed tip 5 above, you will simply need to use your crop tool to get the sculpture nicely centered in the photograph.
With paintings / drawings / prints you will have to select around the artwork using a point to point selection tool, or simply use a rectangle selection tool to select near to perimeter of the painting.
Most often the painting will not be totally rectangular when photographed so choose the ‘skew’ tool to allow you to pull each corner up / down or along until the painting becomes rectangular.
Then choose the crop tool and closely crop the artwork so that you cannot see any background around the painting. Save the image here. This saved version is good if you need the image at it’s largest photographed size, and it is now neatly cropped and squared off.
Next, resize the image to the desired size for the web. If you resize so that the largest side is 500 pixels, then you will have a good sized image.
Next, choose to save the image for the web. This basically will reduce the file size down so that it looks good on computer monitors and downloads quickly. Around 72 dpi is good. Again save the file but this time with a slightly different name or in a different folder. These versions are the ones that you will use on your website, as the files are much smaller than the first saved version.
5. If necessary you can create thumbnails of your larger images – to do this just use the image from step 4 and change the image size to around 120pixels at it’s largest length. Thumbnails are only necessary if you are creating a web page that doesn’t automatically create a thumbnail of an image for you.
6. These images are now ready for you to use on any website or to send to galleries by email. They will download quickly on a webpage or if sent by email, yet will still look great and clear.
If any of the above makes you break out in a cold sweat and decide there must be a cupboard somewhere that needs clearing rather than tackle this, fear not. We at Artdomain can crop and edit your digital photos to look their very best. We do it automatically for artwork exhibited on Artdomain, and would love to do this for non-Artdomain artists too – just contact me at art@artdomain.co.uk and let me know your requirements – we’ll give you a good price. No point struggling if this is just not your ‘thing’. Always better focusing your time on the stuff you are most effective at and delegate the rest!
If you have any comments on the info above I’d love to hear them below.
