(take special note of how she angles the camera and the painting) follows with good editing advice too.

I like her instruction on angling the camera, etc. However, in real life, wouldn’t it be better to just scan these tiny paintings?

I like her art.

Before I bought a couple of soft boxes, I found that if I took four photos of my painting, each time moving my painting clockwise 90 degress, and then merged them on Photoshop Elements, I could get rid of any glare and have nice even lighting. I had my easel perpendicular to some south windows and just made sure the sun was not shining directly on the painting.

The soft boxes beat the crap out of doing it that way, though.

Truly the question which never goes away, with a ton of answers, all of which may work, depending on the size of the original painting and the purpose for reproduction.

I prefer photographing outdoors, in natural sunlight, with the watercolor on the driveway, using a good quality DSLR camera. I take 2-3 shots of each painting and use an editing program for cropping, contrast and color correction as needed. One technique of a thousand or so…

Sling paint,
Virgil

That really was a good video and thanks for posting it, theBongolian. It’s funny, I had been told that one should have a dark piece of paper or board to set the piece against so that the camera will take it’s cues from you piece and not average the light in the background as part of the photo image. But she suggests a white background for easier adjustment of white balance. It seems like a clever idea and I plan to try it.

Also, another few tips: based on the recommendation of another WC member, I purchased viribright 60w LED hi-CRI (CRI=color rendering index) bulbs (from Amazon: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B06XTRSMNR/ref=oh_aui_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1) that I put in clip-on fixtures on microphone stands which are extended to be close to the ceiling. I also put a piece of paper over the light to make it more diffuse. All of this seems to have helped my photography of paintings a great deal.

Note that the reason a high-CRI bulb is needed is that ordinary LED bulbs do not pick up the entire color spectrum, and this is what makes photos taken under them seem somewhat washed out and less than satisfactory.

There were a lot of good tips in the Robin Sealark video and I’ve subscribed to her YouTube feed. She seemed very knowledgeable.