Tips on photographing / digitizing art?

Photography
1

Hello, everyone! I’ve reached out to a potential client who is looking for someone to lay out a children’s book. He has artwork for the book’s illustrations, which he’s looking to have photographed and digitized. My wife is an experienced photographer, but I don’t think she’s ever worked with photographing colored-pencil art in particular. Is there anything I should know, or anywhere especially helpful we should look for resources, regarding art photography?

Thank you!
J

2

You would be searching for “fine art scanning”, rather than photography.

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3

Depends on the art, it’s fragility mostly, whether you want to smash it face down into a scanner.

We always get original art photographed by a photographer with a scanback camera. Those things have the resolution to get to the large sizes we often need for wall murals and display images. Might be overkill for a bunch of small art for a book, though probably not, just will be priced less than we pay for the big stuff, likely. Usually pay by the megabyte.

4

I get good results with photographing art and photo prints. So much so that I ditched my flatbed scanner years ago. If your wife is an experienced photographer, she should be able to handle it just fine. Here’s a brief rundown of what I do.

  1. Build shooting surface 12” - 24” off the ground.
  2. Two softboxes, one on each side of art, angled down at 45°.
  3. Use a light meter to make sure light is even across the shooting surface. You don’t want the art to be darker in some areas than in others.
  4. Shoot a gray card for white balance reference.
  5. Shoot a color card such as one available from Datacolor or X-Rite. This combined with the accompanying software will allow your wife to create a color profile to get the most accurate color reproduction of the art.
  6. Put camera on camera stand or tripod and ensure the sensor is parallel with the shooting surface.
  7. Shoot the art.
  8. Process for white balance and color.
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