We’ll use the “Extras” pages to post bonus instruction and commentary about related topics. These topics either expand upon materials in the book, or address topics that couldn’t be covered in the book because of space limitations.
All “extras” material © Scott Ligon, all rights reserved.
Extra: Creating a Digital Portfolio
from Physical Artwork.
These are youTube videos I created in my capacity as Coordinator for the Digital Foundation Curriculum at the Cleveland Institute of Art. In the first two, I’m talking about working with the images in Photoshop. In the second two, Cleveland Institute Photographer Rob Muller discusses photographing 2D and 3D artwork. Below the videos you’ll find a detailed tutorial on “Making Digital Files from Physical Paintings.”
Preparing Digital Images of Art, Part 1
Preparing Digital Images of Art, Part 2
Photographing 3D Art, with Rob Muller
Photographing 2D Art, with Rob Muller
Making Digital Files from Physical Paintings
“Sleep” by Laura Sherrill Ligon.
You can see more of Laura’s work at: www.Ligon-art.com
It’s in the interest of every artist to learn how to prepare digital images of their artwork for gallery submissions and promotional materials.
The good news is that digital representations of your artwork offer an unprecedented amount of control in insuring the accuracy and quality of the image.
My wife is a great and prolific painter and not especially interested in computers, so it has fallen upon me to prepare digital files of her work to send to galleries or enter juried shows.
When I started, there wasn’t a lot of information around about how to do this. I devised my own system and it works pretty well. I teach people to do this in various classes. Many artists have told me they found it valuable and use this method with their own work. So I thought I’d pass it on to you.
This project assumes that you are working from an image taken by a simple consumer-oriented digital camera and that you are not a professional photographer with access to a variety of expensive lenses and studio lights. It could also work for artwork scanned from traditional photos or for making digital images from existing slides.
Taking the Picture.
Take your photo at the highest resolution that your camera offers. Now is not the time to save memory.
Use manual settings on your camera only if you are fairly expert in using them. If you are not an experienced photographer with a history of achieving consistent results using manual settings, use the automatic, point and click features on your camera.
You want your photograph to record as much information as possible.
If the camera has given the color a blue or orange cast, if the color is not vivid, if the work lacks contrast, you can fix these things, within reason, in Photoshop.
If you use manual settings, however, it’s easy for a novice to mess with the tonal range until information is missing in various ranges of value. It can happen in Photoshop as well, but you can always “undo” if you make things worse.
You might consider trying manual focus on your camera. Only use manual anything if you’re very sure you’ll make the image better instead of worse. You could take one set with auto settings and one with manual. It never hurts to have too many options. It’s better to get the basic information intact and then do the fine-tuning in Photoshop where you have more control and flexibility.
Get as close as you can to the painting. You will be cropping the photo so that it contains only the image of your painting. The more pixels you devote to the garage door your painting is leaning on, the more you effectively lower the resolution of your image. The bigger your painting is inside your viewfinder, the more pixels will be devoted to your actual artwork and the sharper your finished image will be.
Make sure no part of your picture is cut off, of course, and allow a little room around all sides of the painting in case your viewfinder is not completely accurate.
Your eye level should be at the approximate center of the painting and the painting should not be tilted or leaning. It should be as flat and parallel to the angle of the camera lens as possible. The less careful you are about this, the more likely the edges of your painting will be at a slight diagonal, rather than straight vertical and horizontal edges.
Place your eye against the viewfinder if there is one on your camera, brace it against something, or better still, use a tripod to hold the camera still. If you hold the camera away from you in mid-air and take a picture using the LCD Screen, you are much more likely to be shaky and take a blurry picture.
Never re-save a JPEG! If your image is a JPEG, save it as a Photoshop (.psd) file as soon as you open your image in Photoshop so you don’t lose quality when you re-save.
Straightening the Edges.
You will need to see the rulers for this project.
If you don’t see them on the top and left side of your document window, go to: VIEW>RULERS to access them.
To create a blue guide line, place your curser over the ruler. The cursor will turn into a Move Tool regardless of what tool is currently selected. You can click, hold and drag a blue guide from the ruler onto your page. If it is in the wrong place, select the Move Tool and hold your cursor directly over the guide line. The tool will change into parallel lines and you can move the guide.
You can drag the guide outside the image window to get rid of it. You can get rid of all guides by going to VIEW>CLEAR GUIDES.
If you are accurate enough taking the picture, or have a great lens, you may be able to skip this beginning stage.
Figure 1. The original (not so great) photograph of the painting.
In Figure 1, the picture was taken at an angle and there is distortion. The top part of the image is wider than the bottom. The left side is longer than the right. On each side, one corner is sticking out further than the other.
Drag a guide to a point that is halfway between the two corner points on the left side. In other words, place it halfway between the left corner point that sticks out the most and the left corner point that sticks out the least. Do this again on the right side. Do it again on the top and bottom, dragging these guides from the top ruler. This averages out the visual distortion and helps insure that your painting is in relatively correct proportion when you are finished. See Figure 2.
Figure 2. Placing guides for straightening the edges of the image.
If you really want to make sure it’s absolutely proportional, you can do the math. Let’s say your original is 24 inches tall and 36 inches wide. If your finished image is six inches wide, you would set up this equation:
For proportions, you multiply the denominator (bottom number) of one fraction with the numerator (top number) of the other fraction. This would give you 24 x 6 = 36x. 24 x 6 = 144, so 144 = 36x. Divide both sides by 36 to get a single “x”. 144 divided by 36 = 4. So, 24” x 36” is proportional to 4” x 6”. This should be the measurement defined by your guides. Who said you’d never use fifth grade math?
If you’re a stickler for accuracy or just good at math, you may appreciate this. Your proportions will be absolutely accurate if you do it correctly. If you’re not, you may be glazing over about now. If you fall into this category, just know that if you drag the rule line so it is visually centered between the corner that sticks out the most and the corner that sticks out the least, and you do this on all four sides, you should get very close to the true proportion of your work. It’s likely that this will appear to be a very accurate representation.
Now you’re ready to straighten up those distorted edges. Make sure that VIEW>SNAP is not checked in the VIEW menu. If snap is active and the edges of your picture are close to straight, but not quite, Photoshop may try to line up your selection with the blue guides rather than the corners of your painting.
Choose the Polygonal Lasso Tool from the Tools Palette. Make a selection by carefully clicking on each corner of the painting with the Polygonal Lasso Tool. Click. Stretch to the next corner. Click, etc. If you don’t like a line you’ve made in your selection, hit delete to back up a step. If you don’t like what you’ve done and want to get out of your selection completely before finishing it, hit the escape (esc) key.
You must connect the end of the selection mask to the beginning to make a selection. Then you’ll see the moving dashes around your selection, indicating that it is complete.
Under the EDIT menu at the top, select EDIT>TRANSFORM>DISTORT. Click on a corner, hold down and drag. Your goal is to drag each corner of the painting into the corner formed by the intersection of the blue guide lines.
Drag each corner until it appears straight and lined up with the blue guides. You will see blank gaps in the spaces where your picture used to be. These gaps will contain your currently selected background color. My background color was red in Figure 3.
Figure 3. Straightening the edges with EDIT>TRANSFORM>DISTORT.
Once you are happy with all four edges, you can commit to your changes by clicking on the Check in the Options Bar or hitting the enter (return) key. This allows the pixels to be redrawn so that things are now in the position to which you have dragged them.
Now the edges of your painting are straight enough to crop the image without losing part of it. Deselect your mask using SELECT>DESELECT. Select the Crop Tool from the Tools Palette. Click, hold and drag a selection for cropping. If the crop area is not positioned perfectly, grab one of the little boxes in the corner or middle of each side of the crop area and drag the line until it is where you want it.
Once the crop area is positioned like you want it, click the Check in the Options Bar and you have a nicely cropped image.
Adjusting Color and Value.
Use caution when adjusting the color and tonal range. Your goal is to accurately represent the colors and values of the painting.
I urged you, when in doubt, to stick with automatic settings in the camera. I now offer the opposite advice when working with your artwork within Photoshop. It is especially important not to use the “auto”-anything when working with a painting. The values and colors of paintings are so varied and individual that it is nearly impossible to get good results without using human judgment.
Remember to use your eyes. There are also too many variables for numbered settings to be valuable unless your paintings are all very similar and have been photographed under the same conditions.
Assuming you have a well-calibrated monitor, what you see in front of you should be your final criteria for judgment. You might also find it helpful to have the actual work in front of you for reference. Go to: IMAGE>ADJUSTMENTS>LEVELS.
[ NOTE: You can also access the Levels Panel, and many other image adjustment modifiers in the Adjustments Panel. Adjustments made using this panel are “non-destructive”. Photoshop enables elements, or information, to be placed on individual layers so that they can be manipulated separately. The adjustments are made on a separate Adjustment Layer. You can access the Layers Panel by going to WINDOW>LAYERS. Inside the Layers Panel, there is an eye icon to the left of each layer. Click on the “eyeball” next to your Levels Adjustment Layer to make the layer invisible and to see the image as it was before you made the changes. If you made it worse instead of better, double-click on the layer and then readjust the settings in the Adjustment Panel or simply drag the Adjustment Layer to the trash can at the bottom of the Layers Panel to delete it and start over.
You’ll see a graph representing the range of values in the image. If there is a blank space on the right side of the graph, it means there is no information in the lightest part of the value curve. The first thing to try is to drag the white triangle, signifying highlight values, to the left until it is under the point where information begins on the graph. Move it back and forth a little until you see improvement.
Check and uncheck the preview box to make sure that you’ve helped rather than hurt the original image. See Figure 4.
Figure 4. Adjusting the value range.
This particular painting has a lot of black in it. In this photo the black areas look a little washed out.
I moved the Black input slider (the triangle on the left) slightly to the right until I saw greater saturation in the dark areas but no noticeable loss of information in the rest of the image.
I scooted the triangle representing the mid-range values to the left a little as well, to reveal more information and emphasize the paint strokes a little.
Next, go to IMAGE>ADJUSTMENTS>HUE/SATURATION, or select Hue/Saturation in the Adjustments Panel. If the color has a slight blue or orange cast to it, move the Hue slider slightly, to correct it. I thought the color in this work was generally in the right ballpark but lacked the vividness of the original painting.
Bringing up the Saturation slider to a +6 helped match the vividness of the original work. If you have bright colors in your painting, you may find that you have to routinely boost saturation. It’s hard for a camera to capture accurate color detail and tonal values in really vivid pigments, although digital photographs tend to be more saturated than traditional film. I left Hue and Lightness untouched.
At this point I have adjusted the levels and colors as much as I can without adversely affecting the image and I am still not happy with the lack of saturation in the black areas. Sometimes, adjusting the value and color of individual color channels can help but in this case it did not. It’s often difficult to reproduce dense black lines in color artwork without negatively affecting other color, value and detail.
Here’s a method I like to use in these cases.
Go to: IMAGE>ADJUSTMENTS>REPLACE COLOR. When you move your cursor off of the pop-up menu, it becomes an Eyedropper Tool. Click on a black line in your artwork in an area that doesn’t seem as dark as it should be. This “faded black” is now the sampled color to replace. Fuzziness defines how closely related to the selected color and value something has to be in order to be affected. The larger the number under the fuzziness slider, the more content is selected. Make sure that the “Selection” button is selected instead of “Image”. I pushed the Fuzziness slider to the right until I could see that the black line areas were improved but little else was affected. See Figure 5.
Figure 5. Strengthening black areas, after adjusting color.
Then I moved the Lightness slider to the left until the black line areas looked rich and deep, like they looked in the real artwork. I tweaked the Fuzziness slider again. I looked at the image to see if I could get better results by moving it slightly one way or the other. I settled on 101 for the setting of the Fuzziness slider.
You can use FILTER>SHARPEN>UNSHARP MASK to sharpen the image a tiny bit and define the edges. It doesn’t take very much sharpening before the image becomes artificial-looking and this will be more apparent when you print a physical copy of the image.
I judged that the image was a pretty good approximation of the original at this point and chose not to sharpen it. I saved the image. See Figure 6 for the finished digital image.
Figure 6. Finished image. Value, color and proportion are a good approximation of the original painting.
Save your finished artwork in the Photoshop (.psd) format. Save copies in various formats and resolutions as needed.
When preparing your digital file for art show submission, just SAVE AS in whatever format and resolution that the gallery has requested. Giving them exactly what they ask for increases your chances of being considered for a show.
“If it Ain’t Broke...”
Avoid any attempt to “improve” the art or change it in any way. If you are submitting works to a show, there is an implicit ethical agreement that this is an accurate representation of your work. Most galleries reserve the right to reject the art once they see it in person if it is different than what they see in the submitted images.
Generally, though, artists have worked very hard on their finished paintings and have selected what they feel are their best works to enter into a show. Most artists have a very strong interest in making images that represent their work as accurately as possible. Making digital files in Photoshop is a great way to do this.
In other areas there are greater potential ethical dilemmas to be addressed. People tend to regard photographs as a representation of fact. For better or for worse, digital technology has made photography into a medium where each pixel can be moved around, altered and deleted, to expressive or other effect.
I have a friend that worked for several years at a major news magazine doing photo compositing. My friend was preparing a photo of the Iraq war for publication. It was a photo with a crowd of people running in the foreground, from some sort of explosion. Planes were in the background, which may or may not have been responsible for the explosion.
An art director asked my friend to paint out the planes in the picture. This was not in any way an attempt to change the meaning of the picture or fool anyone. The decision to omit the planes was based on design considerations. In the spirit of Chapter 2, the art director wanted the best composition. He wanted type to flow across the image and the planes got in the way. They detracted from the page layout. My friend refused to paint out the planes and trouble ensued.
His argument was that, when we see a picture in a news magazine, we regard the image as truth. We regard it as an accurate representation of what really happened. He felt that it was unethical to paint away part of the image even if it does not change the basic meaning of the photo. Was he right?
They could’ve easily cropped the photo so that the planes weren’t showing. This has been happening for over a hundred years. But this takes it a step further. This involves actually painting in sky and clouds, so that it appears that the airplanes were never there. It changes the image so that the art director can have unencumbered typography.
As much as I’m sympathetic to an artist wanting to make a great design, I agree with my friend. I would say that, in any situation where the photo was presented as a representation of something that actually occurred (even implicitly), its basic elements should remain intact.
It is a gray area though. I must admit, if the image was of some celebrity at a party, I might not hesitate to get rid of something distracting in the background.
Like any powerful tool, digital art can be used in negative ways as well as positive ways. In direct proportion to increased possibilities, new ethical decisions must be made.
Digital Art Revolution Extra
