Digitizing Traditional Art

What do you use to get traditional artwork high enough quality to be printed?

I have a special area of a room setup as a dark room of sorts. I have blackout panels covering the window and a matte- blackout screen hanging from a portable backdrop. The matte is important, as opposed to shiny because of light reflection.

Since I am so accustomed to photography and have completely courses in studio portrait photography lighting, I simply apply those techniques. I use 2 lights mounted on tripods. I used a lightmeter to get an even blend of the 2 lightsources with diffusion filters across the image.

It is important when photographing artwork to angle the lights at a fairly steep angle so that the lights are not causing a reflection back into the camera lens else this will make overly bright spots on the image.

It is also important to ONLY use these 2 lights, don’t let any other light leak into the photograph. Meaning turn overhead lights off and never use the camera’s flash. A lot of artwork, paints, pastel fixative etc. have a glossy or semi gloss sheen that will cause the light to bounce back and cause a white spot that shouldn’t be there.

I ensure the camera lens is pointed at exactly 90 degrees to the artwork to prevent edge distortion. The camera itself is a 24 MPixel DSLR mounted on a tripod. The tripod is critical to avoid camera shake with a high ISO to prevent noise, but a low shutter speed because of the diffuse lighting. The image size is set to record the .RAW image file format, and it is from this .RAW image file that I work.

The file is downloaded from the Camera to my computer where I open the professional photo image editor Aftershot Pro 3. Using this software I have the specific camera lens calibrated to the software so that any minute lens distortion and .RAW file noise is removed. Also I can make small corrections in rotation if I happened to have had the image 1/2 a degree from horizontal.

The monitor I use is a color calibrated monitor so I can adjust for any color distortion caused by the lighting. I look at the art and make the colors I see on the screen, match the actual colors of the painting.

A common correction that every digital camera I have ever used is levels. There is always a very slight pasty film to every digital photograph. In truth, you would never really notice it until after you adjust the image using Levels or Curves in the Brightness/Contrast menu, but once you have seen the difference it makes, you will do it to every photograph you take if you have the ability to do so.

After all the slight adjustments, I crop the image and save it as a .PNG file. I prefer .PNGs to .JPEGs for pure images, but if the image has text in it, .JPEG files tend to handle text better than .PNG’s, but for pure images, .PNG files are better.

And that’s how I do it!