princessdeadgurlsupe's art Reviews on Newgrounds

[Truth Patrol]

Wait how do u manage to get such a high quality pic of your art if it isn't digital

LittleLuckyLink responds:

It's not too difficult, but it can certainly be challenging, especially if you don't have access to decent equipment. At the time I created this, which was interestingly seven years and one day ago, I was using an iPhone 5s. For my older paintings before November 2014, I would typically borrow my friend's fancy professional camera, but other times would resort to an old, somewhat decent digital camera. Nowadays, I'm using an iPhone 11, so getting these pictures is much easier, but still requires a bit of work:

Lighting is essential, as you want plenty of exposure, but not too much to the point where it desaturates or otherwise causes the painting to shine. I've always found that photographing my paintings in daylight is ideal- especially if it's a somewhat cloudy day with not too much direct sunlight. Over the years, I've acquired more lighting equipment to more accurately simulate daylight, but it's still just not quite the same. Sometimes, depending on the painting, I'll put a dark or neutral colored sheet or piece of cardboard behind the painting as to sorta help my camera/phone's contrast.

I also usually varnish my paintings with a satin or matte varnish to bring out a bit more color/contrast and reflect the light more evenly.

Making sure the photo is in focus is also important. I usually take like 20-30 photos of my paintings, and then sift through them- sometimes literally pixel by pixel, to determine which shot is the absolute clearest. It's also important to get the framing just right, so I usually have the grid view enabled on my phone's camera to help make sure that it's not crooked. Maybe one of these days, I'll just get a tripod so I don't have to worry about my hands shaking and messing up clusters of pixels.. (Shoot, they're only $15, why haven't I done this yet? uhh anyway)

Finally, a little bit of photoshop or other editing software really comes in handy. I've always tried to treat digital editing with care, as my main intent is to make the photo look like the painting does in real life, rather than to enhance or "fix" it. In the past, with lower-quality cameras, I've had to do more extensive editing which would involve manually adjusting the exposure, contrast, and saturation in what would sometimes be a meticulous spot-by-spot process. Those older cameras simply couldn't capture everything, and I was also still figuring out the whole lighting thing.

Nowadays, I really don't have to do too much except for a bit of cropping and maybe some slight exposure/offset/gamma adjustments. I'm not exactly a huge Apple fanboy and I know that there are better cameras out there, but I'm still kinda blown away by the iPhone 11's camera due to how much it's decreased my workload in the editing/publishing aspect. Making sure that the lighting is just right is still essential to a good photograph though, and it still takes plenty of trial and error for all of my different types of paintings. Photographing my darker paintings is still probably the most challenging, even if I varnish them.

Anyway, sorry for rambling. This is something that I've put a lot of effort into developing over the past 14 years or so. I was actually thinking of going back through and re-photographing some of my older paintings with the knowledge/technology I have now. I've never bothered to get my paintings professionally photographed or scanned primarily because I don't like spending that kind of money if I can try to figure it out on my own. Plus, it can lead to some cool and fun moments, like when a small spider crawled onto a painting I was photographing and I didn't even notice until well after I had posted it online:
https://www.newgrounds.com/art/view/littleluckylink/that-shadow-just-now

It's a bit hard to see, but it's at the very bottom of the canvas, slightly to the left of the center.

Anyways, there are a bunch of neat guides on Youtube that go into much more detail and probably be more tech/device specific. It's ultimately gonna boil down to what works best for someone, and sometimes it takes a bit of trial and error to cook up the correct formula.