You can spend six months on a series and lose it in an afternoon of careless photography. The prints that look like your paintings, and the ones that look like photocopies, are rarely separated by the price of the camera. They are separated by light, alignment and a routine you repeat every time without thinking. Here is the checklist to work through when the images are destined for a book, where a stray cast or a dust speck at final size is there for good.
Start With the Artwork, Not the Camera
Clean first. Dust you cannot see on a screen becomes a grey smudge on uncoated paper, and a fingerprint on the margin of an etching is permanent. Use a soft brush and a blower, then a microfibre cloth for frames, and wear cotton gloves when handling prints.
Remove glazing wherever you can. Photographing through glass means doubled reflections and a slight loss of contrast. If a frame cannot be opened, tilt it a few degrees and move your lights off-axis, then check the edges for reflections before you commit.
Before the first frame, write down the title, medium, support, dimensions and year for each work in shooting order. That list saves your designer a week later.
- Clean the surface; never spray cleaner onto the artwork itself.
- Let varnish, fixative and any wet medium cure fully.
- Photograph unstretched or unframed where possible.
- Work in a room with neutral walls and no direct sunlight.
Light It Evenly, Then Leave It Alone
Two lights, one either side, at roughly 45 degrees, at the same distance, with the same output and the same diffusion. Uneven lighting is the most common flaw in artist-supplied files: a corner a stop brighter than the rest is difficult to correct later without noise or banding.
Avoid mixed light. A window plus a lamp gives you two colour temperatures, and white balance cannot fix both at once. Draw the curtains and work with one consistent source, flash or continuous, not both.
Softness matters. Bare bulbs throw hotspots and harsh highlights across oils and acrylics. A diffuser or softbox spreads the light, and angling the units so reflections fall outside the frame keeps glossy surfaces clean. With varnished or glazed work, cross-polarisation — a polarising filter on the lens plus polarising gels over the lights — removes most specular glare. It can deepen saturation slightly, so check the result against your colour target rather than trusting your eye.
Square Up, Lock Down, Shoot Tethered
Alignment
Camera on a tripod or copy stand, lens axis perpendicular to the work, sensor plane parallel in both axes. A spirit level on the camera and a close look at the frame edges will catch skew that makes a rectangle look wrong on the page.
Settings
Lowest native ISO. Aperture in the middle range — often f/8 to f/11 on full-frame, giving depth of field while the lens is at its sharpest. Focus manually at 100% zoom on the centre, then check the corners; some lenses bow the plane of focus, and stopping down a little helps. A focal length around 50–85mm (35mm equivalent) keeps perspective natural, whereas a wide lens up close curves the edges and makes stretcher bars look convex. Release with a self-timer or remote, not your finger.
Shoot tethered if you can. Reviewing at full size on a laptop catches missed focus and stray hairs while the work is still on the wall.
Colour Accuracy Is a Paper Trail
Your eyes adapt; cameras and monitors do not. Photograph a grey card and a 24-patch colour target in every lighting setup, build a white balance or profile from it, and keep that frame with the shoot.
- Place the target flat where the artwork sits, light it identically, and shoot it first.
- Shoot RAW in 16-bit. JPEG discards the colour information you need.
- Calibrate or at least profile your monitor; editing on an uncalibrated laptop screen is guesswork.
- Compare the file with the physical work under daylight-balanced viewing light, not ceiling bulbs.
- Soft-proof against the printer's ICC profile for your chosen paper, and ask which profile they prefer.
Ask before converting. Many printers want a wide-gamut RGB file and will handle CMYK themselves with their own profile. Sending CMYK unbidden is an easy way to flatten blues and oranges.
Capture Detail and Texture While You're Set Up
Beyond the full plate, use raking light — almost parallel to the surface — to show impasto ridges, embossing, plate marks and paper grain. Take those frames on the day; you will not want to rebuild the setup a fortnight later.
Add close-ups of the signature, edition number, deckle edge and any blind stamp, plus one detail frame with a ruler if scale matters. Keep the light direction consistent across the whole project. If raking light comes from the top left for one plate, it comes from the top left for all of them. That consistency is what makes a book of plates look considered rather than assembled.
Preparing Files for Print
Print needs roughly 300 ppi at final reproduction size, so a plate running 200mm wide needs an image about 2,400 pixels across. Work out the largest size any image will appear, and shoot for that rather than upscaling to hit a number.
Supply 16-bit TIFFs in Adobe RGB (1998) unless told otherwise, with sRGB reserved for web and social use. Correct colour at 100% on a calibrated screen, at final size. Then run the pre-flight:
- Crop to consistent margins across the set — no easel edge, no wall creeping in.
- Remove dust spots, sensor marks and stray hairs at 100%.
- Check the histogram for clipping in the lightest areas of the artwork.
- Sharpen last and gently, after resizing; heavy sharpening turns impasto into noise on paper.
- Name files so they sort logically, for example surname_title_year_01.tif.
- Keep one untouched master, and back everything up in two places.
- Send the printer a low-resolution proof set alongside the full-resolution files.
Before the Files Leave Your Desk
Print a proof at home if you can, on whatever paper is loaded. It is a poor match for the final book, but it catches composition wobbles and dust that a screen hides.
Send one or two plates first and ask the printer to check them before you transfer the lot. Confirm in writing how colour will be handled and who is responsible if a plate comes back warm or flat. Once the set is approved and delivered, the photographing is finished, and the book can go back to being about the work rather than about the files.
Photo: Beyzaa Yurtkuran / Pexels
