How to photograph artwork for prints

Two lights, one on each side, at roughly 45 degrees to the surface and equidistant from the centre. That geometry is what keeps light even across the whole plane and stops the specular highlight from bouncing straight back into the lens. Window light is workable for flat, matte work if the sun is not direct, but it changes hour to hour, which makes matching a second piece later almost impossible.

Do not trust your eye on evenness — it is very good at compensating and will lie to you. Photograph a blank sheet of white paper the same size as the work under the same lights, then look at that frame with the exposure pushed. Any gradient across the sheet is a gradient that will be baked into every piece you shoot on that setup.

Varnished, glazed, or heavily impastoed surfaces are where this gets genuinely hard. A gloss varnish returns a sheen the eye edits out and the sensor does not, and cross-polarisation — a filter on each light and another on the lens — is the only reliable fix.

The sensor plane and the artwork plane must be parallel. If they are not, the piece photographs as a trapezoid, and correcting that in software means stretching pixels — which softens detail unevenly across the frame, worst where the correction is largest.

Centre the lens on the centre of the work, not on the middle of the wall. Use a tripod, use a level, and check the edges in the viewfinder rather than assuming. A longer focal length photographed from further back distorts less than a wide lens up close; somewhere around 85–120mm equivalent is a reasonable place to start for a piece you can back away from.

Without a reference, there is no way to know whether the colour in the file is the colour on the wall — you are comparing a memory to a screen. A physical colour target photographed under the same light, in the same frame or in an otherwise identical frame, gives you something measurable to correct against.

Shoot raw, not JPEG. A JPEG has already made irreversible decisions about white balance and tone, and every one of those decisions was made by a camera that has never seen your painting.

A good DSLR or mirrorless setup, carefully lit and squared, will produce a file that is fine for a website, a submission, and often a modest print. That is a real result and worth doing.

The limits show up in three places. Resolution: a 24–50 MP camera supports a print roughly the size of the original before detail softens, where medium-format capture at 151 megapixels supports considerably larger. Colour depth: consumer bodies capture at 14 bits per channel against 16, which is the difference between 16,384 and 65,536 tonal steps to work with when you correct. And verification: without a spectrophotometer and a profiled chain, "it looks right" is the whole quality standard.

None of that matters for a listing photograph. All of it matters for an edition you intend to sell, a catalogue, or an archival record of a piece that has left your studio.