Preserving luminosity in photos of paintings

Hi folks: I hope some art photographers are reading this:

 

How do I attempt to preserve luminosity in a photograph of an oil

painting? Particularly the warmer, transparent glazes?

 

If you will follow the link below (semi-large file), you will see

areas of yellow (or at least they resemble yellow). In these places

the color is applied in very thin glazes over bare white canvas. This

causes the white to shine through the color and it positively GLOWS.

Well, online it looks like muddy fingerpainting.

 

And the reds - same thing. There are about eight shades of rich,

glowing reds but it looks like I slapped a bunch of muddy maroon down

in various places. It's my best painting but it's absolutely the

worst online. I need serious help.

 

I use a 5mp digital camera to make 'in-progress sketches' but as far

as luminosity is concerned, I've experienced the same problems with

film so I won't blame the camera for this. I'm sure its the operator.

 

Many thanks for any help.

 

http://www.gloriahopkins.com/assets/images/Picture-329jpeg.jpg

 

MODERATORS: If I have posted this question to the wrong forum, please

feel free to move it!

Btw, if anyone can guess what mountain this is, that would just make my whole day :)

Everest?

I keep thinking of Eiger when I look at it.

Can't help with the big question, but it actually looks like the Grand Teton--done with some artistic license. The smaller peak on the right could be Teewinot then, but again, it's not exact.

Thanks everyone, for reading. I'm happy to say that with the help of a fellow photo.netter, I have figured out and forever solved my luminosity problems. The mountain is Grand Teton, or hopefully it will be when I'm done. Thanks very much and have a great day!

Can you post your solution here for our benefit?

Sure! I just learned it, but I will do my best:

 

1) I created two layers, one for curves adjustments, and one for levels adjustments. On the curves adjustment layer, I found/corrected my white balance. (This made the biggest difference in the painting.)On the layers adjustment layer, I dragged the black and white traingles to the edges of the histogram. I don't remember exactly what that does, but it helped a lot.

 

2) Flattened the image and adjusted the unsharp mask to 50x 20, 0. When I get a little further along, I'm going to retry this with different settings as it seemed a little oversharpened to me. The sharpening, however, brought out some subtle edges that were lost before, so that also helped define my colors a bit.

 

I also learned other things like the best way to photograph my paintings using the existing settings on my camera and available light, how to avoid glare when photographing oil paintings, the use of polarizers, etc.

 

All around it was a tremendous help!

Dave: I got to thinking and your comment about artistic license gave me a good laugh. If all goes as planned, this mountain will be barely recognizable as such. (Btw, check out what I did to Denali.)

I love the Denali painting! And I've found your website(s) helpful as well--thanks for the insights. Enjoy the road trip--I hope you post updates when you can...

Gloria, part of the problem might be the inherent differences between painting in layers or using glazes and alla prima painting. I've found that paintings using glazes sometimes require the viewer to walk around the painting a bit to get the full impact because of the interaction between light, pigment (and, possibly, medium) and eye.

 

It's possible that using a filter (other than a polarizer) or series of filters if making a series of exposures, followed by Photoshop adjustments, could capture the glow you see with your eyes without distorting the colors.

 

However I'd want to read up on studies done by folks who are more interested in and knowledgeable about UV and IR photography, such as Bj�rn R�rslett (Bjorn Rorslett, in case photo.net chokes on the correct spelling), http://www.naturfotograf.com/index2.html.

 

While Bj�rn's use of UV and IR photography is often somewhat surrealistic, it's possible he may have suggestions for applying the techniques to render full, rich, natural colors from the original subject.

My wife is an artist working in water-based media, so I have had many occasions to work with her and some of her artist friends on photographing art works. Water-based media often depend on light reflecting from the white paper through the transparent or semi transparent paint or ink in order to achieve a particular effect so I understand what you mean about glowing colors. The simplest suggestion I can make to try to capture some of those glowing colors is to photograph your painting in direct sunlight. Just be sure that the sun is not directly behind you but instead is offset enough that you don't get a direct reflection of the sun toward the camera. Oil paintngs can be a little trickier than watercolor since you can get specular highlights reflected from textures on the surface of the paint and you may need to experiment with a polarizer.

 

Your camera probably has a decent white balance setting for daylight so taking photos in direct sunlight should facilitate getting accurate colors. Of course if you can do a custom white balance setting from a gray or white card, the results should be even better. It sounds as if you have already received some good advice about how to color correct the digital file so I won't try to repeat that. You may also want to try including a reference shot with a color chart and/or grayscale to facilitate accurate color correction.

Dave: Glad that you liked the painting and the websites. I'm toying with various ways to update my site or have a blog or something. We'll see.... Thanks again!

 

Lex: You're right about the 'walking around' thing. And I agree, the viewing experience with this type of painting sometimes relies on lighting. As you know, paintings often suffer or aren't fully appreciated as a result of unflattering, bad or inadequate lighting. Heard a bad story yesterday on the phone. Bad lighting is better than the bathroom I reckon. Thanks Lex!

 

John your idea about photographing it in direct light is probably a good one if I can avoid the shine. I can't change my perspective too much or it will distort the image so, we'll see. I would be very interested in seeing your wife's work, btw. Does she have a website? Anyway, yesteday when the sun hit the painting through the window the colors nearly jumped off the canvas. I ran upstairs to get the camera but then battery was dead. I will try again today!

 

Thanks again folks, and have a great week.

 

Gloria

Gloria,

When I take photos of my wife's work, we set up an easel in the back yard in a sunny spot. You're right that it is important for the plane of the camera and the plane of the artwork to be exactly parallel and for the camera to be dead center on the artwork in order to get an undistorted perspective. I just make sure that the easel is set up with the sun hitting it at a slight angle and then set up the tripod directly in front of the easel.

 

My wife doesn't yet have a website--it's something she keeps talking about but somehow hasn't gotten around to. Most of her work is fairly abstract. Here is an abstract piece based on a Southwest landscape; it is primarily a collage of rice papers that she hand colors with a variety of watercolor techniques.<div></div>

Hi John! So sorry to take so long to get back to you. I have had trouble logging onto Photo.net recently, and then unexpectedly had to ready our home for a big storm!

 

Thanks for uploading your wife's work! I appreciate your taking the time to do that. Looks NEAT. I like the paper *very* much. I went through a phase where I was making my own paper. The best that came from that period was my own set of Christmas tree ornaments, lol! It was a lot of fun though, and I hope to do it again seriously when I get settled.

 

Thanks again and have a great weekend!

1) Use diffused flash of some sort.

 

2) Use a tripod and shoot multiple shots of the same angle (straight on viewing) while moving the lights about. Move the lights closer and farther back. Change the angles of the lights. Learn what brings out the subtleties of the painting method used.

 

3) Paint the various shots together digitally to get the right effect on the right part of the painging.

 

As an aside, there is also a definite blue cast in the areas of blank canvas. The excess blue light will affect the perception of yellows in the image on a computer and make the yellows duller and flatter (30-255 range rather than 0-255 range).

 

All that said, getting the color balance right and playing with the lighting should solve much of your problem. Consider that you have already noted that color shifts with viewing angle. Hence, multiple lights (3, 4, 5, ...) or combining multiple shots with different lighting should help bring some of that out. But a photograph will not capture such detail at the present time. A video camera might though.

 

some thoughts,

 

Sean