To photograph an artwork well, put it flat and square to a camera on a tripod, light it evenly from both sides with two matched lamps, include a grey card or colour chart in a test frame, and shoot raw at the lowest ISO. Then correct white balance and lens distortion, crop to the edge of the work and stop. The aim is a faithful record, not a flattering picture: a selector, buyer or archivist should see the colours and surface the piece actually has.
The method at a glance
Camera: any camera or phone that can save raw files, fixed on a tripod, sensor parallel to the work.
Light: two identical lights, one each side, roughly 45 degrees to the surface, with everything else in the room switched off.
Reference: a grey card or colour chart photographed in the same light, in the first frame of the session.
Settings: lowest ISO, a middle aperture, manual white balance, manual or locked focus, a self-timer or remote release.
Edit: white balance, exposure, lens correction, crop. No saturation boosts or filters.
Files: keep the untouched raw original, export copies sized to each request.
Cultural heritage institutions work to formal versions of the same principles. In the United States, the Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative publishes the FADGI Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Cultural Heritage Materials, whose third edition (2023) was produced by its Still Image Working Group in 2022-2023 as an update of the 2016 text. An artist does not need museum equipment, but the logic carries over: controlled light, a measured colour reference and a documented workflow.
Prepare the work and the room
Unframe the work if you can. Glazing reflects the room, the camera and the lights back into the lens, and acrylic glazing adds its own sheen. This matters for open submissions: the Pastel Society’s 2026-27 open at Mall Galleries, for example, requires works to be framed with picture glass, so the sensible order is to photograph a pastel before it goes behind glass.
Hang a painting on a wall or a sturdy easel, and check it with a spirit level in both directions. A canvas tilted back on an easel will photograph as a trapezoid, narrower at the top. Works on paper can be laid flat with the camera pointing straight down, held by a copy stand or a tripod with a horizontal arm, using weights only on the margins.
Darken the room. Daylight from a window changes colour and strength through the day, and mixed sources (a warm ceiling bulb plus a cool window) produce colour casts that no single white balance setting can fix. Arts Midwest’s February 2026 guide for artists, Picture-Perfect Portfolio, suggests an overcast day as a free alternative, because “the clouds act as a natural diffuser”. It works, but only if you shoot quickly and keep the reference card in the frame.
Set up the lights
The standard copy setup is two matched lights at about 45 degrees to the artwork, one on the left and one on the right, at the height of the centre of the work. Matched means same model, same bulb, same diffuser and same distance. If one lamp is closer, that side of the image is brighter, and the eye notices it on any large flat colour.
Move the lights further back than feels natural. The further away they are, the more even the spread across the surface, at the cost of brightness, which a tripod and a longer exposure make up for. To test evenness, photograph a sheet of plain white card the size of the work and look for a bright centre or dark corners.
Choose lamps by their colour rendering, not only by wattage. The colour rendering index (CRI) measures how faithfully a source shows colours compared with a reference source; the maximum is 100. Look for a high figure and, if the maker publishes it, a good R9 value, which covers saturated reds and is not included in the headline number. A newer method, IES TM-30, addresses some of CRI’s limits and has begun to replace it among professional lighting designers.
Never use a camera’s built-in flash. It sits on the lens axis, so any varnish or gloss throws it straight back as a hotspot.
Deal with glare and texture
Glossy oils, varnished acrylics, resin and metallic leaf are the hardest surfaces. Light reflected from non-metallic surfaces is partly polarised, which is why a polarising filter on the lens can cut it. For a complete fix, photographers use cross-polarisation: polarising sheet over each light and a polarising filter on the lens, rotated until the reflections disappear in live view. Expect to lose light: a polariser alone typically costs about one to three stops. Polarisers do not remove reflections from metal, so gold leaf will still look dark or bright depending on angle.
Heavy impasto raises the opposite problem. Two lights at 45 degrees deliberately flatten texture so that colour reads cleanly. Take that as your record shot, then make one or two extra frames with a single light raking low across the surface from one side to show brushwork. Label them as detail or raking light so no one mistakes them for the colour reference.
For conservators and researchers, there is a more advanced option. Reflectance Transformation Imaging, described by the non-profit Cultural Heritage Imaging, combines many photographs lit from different directions so the viewer can relight a surface interactively. It was invented by Tom Malzbender and Dan Gelb at Hewlett-Packard Labs and first published in 2001 as Polynomial Texture Mapping. It is overkill for a portfolio, but useful to know about if you work with heavily textured or inscribed surfaces.
Position the camera and choose settings
Put the camera on a tripod with the lens centred on the middle of the work and the sensor parallel to it. Use the camera’s grid and electronic level, then check the result: the edges of the work should run parallel to the edges of the frame. Use a standard or short telephoto focal length and step back, rather than a wide angle up close, which bends straight edges.
Settings that suit most setups:
Setting
Starting point
Why
ISO
Lowest native value
Least noise in flat colour
Aperture
Middle of the lens range
Small apertures soften detail through diffraction
Shutter
Whatever exposure needs
The tripod removes shake
Release
Two-second timer or remote
No movement from pressing the button
Focus
Manual, or autofocus then locked
Flat, plain areas can make autofocus hunt
White balance
Custom, from a grey card
A correct start for every frame
Format
Raw (plus JPEG if you like)
Most room to correct colour
Phones can do this too. On iPhone, Apple ProRAW is available on iPhone 12 Pro and later Pro models with iOS 14.3 or later. It uses the industry standard DNG format, and Apple gives typical file sizes of about 25 MB at 12 MP and about 75 MB at 48 MP (checked October 2026). Apple’s guide explains how to turn on ProRAW under Settings > Camera > Formats. Avoid the phone’s widest lens for flat work, and use a phone tripod mount.
Get the colour right
Before photographing the work, put a reference target in the same light and shoot it. A grey card is the cheapest option: a neutral card, typically of 18% reflectance, used to set a custom white balance in camera or to click on with the white balance picker later.
A colour chart goes further. The best known is the ColorChecker, introduced by McCamy, Marcus and Davidson in a 1976 paper in the Journal of Applied Photographic Engineering. The classic version has 24 patches in a four-by-six grid, six of them a neutral grey scale from white to black. X-Rite spun its consumer calibration products off to a separate company, Calibrite, in 2021, and Calibrite now makes the chart.
Software can turn a chart shot into a correction. The free, open-source editor darktable has a colour calibration module that reads the X-Rite (Gretag Macbeth) ColorChecker 24 and several Datacolor SpyderCheckr charts, computes a profile and reports the remaining error in delta E. Its manual notes that X-Rite changed its pigment formula in 2014 and Datacolor in 2018, so choose the reference that matches the age of your chart. Save the result and apply it to every frame shot under the same lights.
Remember that your screen is part of the chain. An uncalibrated monitor can make an accurate file look wrong, so compare the image on screen with the work itself in daylight before you judge the colour.
Edit for accuracy
Work on a copy and keep the raw original untouched. A sensible order:
Apply lens correction. darktable’s lens correction module fixes distortion, chromatic aberration and vignetting using the Lensfun database, or correction data embedded in the raw file.
Set white balance from the grey card or apply the chart profile.
Adjust exposure so that whites are white but not clipped. Check the histogram.
Correct any remaining keystone with a perspective tool, then crop to the edge of the work. Decide once whether you show canvas edges or the frame, and keep the decision for the whole series.
Remove dust on the sensor or the surface. Leave cracks, drips and brushwork alone, since they belong to the work.
Sharpen lightly, then export.
Export sizes depend on who is asking, so read the brief each time. Mall Galleries’ open calls ask for JPEG or PNG under 5MB, one image of the complete work plus up to two optional detail images (checked October 2026). Keep a large master file and export a copy to each specification rather than resizing the master.
Records, rights and three-dimensional work
Name files consistently, for example surname, title, year and view, and record title, date, medium and dimensions alongside them. Back up to two places. Arts Midwest’s guide suggests an external drive plus a cloud service.
For sculpture, ceramics and installations, the flat copy method gives way to studio lighting: a plain background, a main light, a fill and often a backlight to separate the object. Shoot the front, three-quarter views, the back and details of the surface, and include one view with a scale reference or the object in its intended setting.
On rights, the UK Intellectual Property Office’s copyright notice on digital images, photographs and the internet, last updated on 4 January 2021, states that copyright only exists in work that is the author’s “own intellectual creation”. It considers it unlikely that a retouched, digitised image of an older work is original, because a faithful reproduction leaves little creative freedom. Your copyright in the artwork itself is unaffected. If you hire a photographer, agree in writing how the images may be used, especially for three-dimensional work, where lighting and viewpoint involve more creative choice.
Next steps
Start with one small flat work and one set of lights. Shoot the grey card, shoot the work, edit, and hold the screen next to the original. Once that matches, write down every setting, distance and lamp position, and reuse the setup for the rest of the series so that each image matches the last. For more on presenting work, Creativity’s UK publishes regular guides at creativitys.uk.
