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THIS SECTION ALSO CONTAINS PAGES COVERING :
KEEPING A RECORD Part 1
ADJUSTING THE IMAGE Part 2
SIZING and PRINTING the Image Part 3
Some notes on keeping a record of your artwork -
A Beginners Guide to Scanning, Digital Photos and Editing Software
You will need this to keep a record of what you have done when the pictures have been sold or given away, and to take a suitable image if you need one to submit for entry to an exhibition
This set of notes covers the basics of recording your artwork for the future, and also of ensuring that a photo or scan of your pictures is representative of what you see in real life .
You may need a good image to give a jury or acceptance panel a good idea of the standard of work you wish to submit for exhibition.
Part 2 covers the ways computer software helps you correct a photo or scan so that it is a good likeness of your work
Part 3 looks at getting your images the right size for printing and the printing process
PART ONE
WORK IN PROGRESS
I always recommend scanning or taking a photo of work whilst it is in progress. You never know when you might need to check back on an earlier stage of a picture, especially if things go severely adrift and you need to start again. It will give you a check on what you did earlier that might be done better another way.
There are also people about who might doubt that the work was entirely all your own
( some commercial artists have been known to colour-
challenged. This is not going to be a problem that you, as a beginner, are likely to meet in the very near future, but it may be helpful for you to know that I didn’t start keeping a record of my pictures until I had been painting for several years, and as a result, I have no record of the early pictures I painted which were sold. With digital cameras so inexpensive and so advanced these days, there is no reason why you shouldn’t keep a regular record of your work.
If you already have a suitable camera, it will cost virtually nothing to do, but you will need some skills in making sure that the image you take is a fair copy of the picture you painted SEE BELOW
SCAN OR PHOTO -
If you have a scanner available, you will be able to take an image without the worry of having to get the picture absolutely level with the camera lens. If you are not exactly straight in front of the picture, distortion will result that could give a poor or incorrect impression of your work Scanners also enable an image to be taken after the picture has been framed, though any glass or plastic in front of the picture may well darken or affect the colour balance of the scanned image of your picture and it will therefore need adjusting. If your picture is a large one (bigger than the scanning table of the scanner), you may need to take multiple scans and stitch the images
together to make one image. In this case a photo may be the easiest solution and a photo will usually be the
easiest anyway as most people these days have a camera available.
Points to watch :
1/ try to get good light and do not use flash. A cloudy bright day is better than sunlight 2/ Ensure the camera is exactly straight to the face of the picture otherwise you will get distortion. 3/ ideally use a tripod on your
camera to eliminate shake. 4/ don’t try to take a photo of a framed picture behind glass, it doesn’t work ! You will get reflections of the room and the camera. Either take the picture out of the frame, or scan it
SCANNING
I usually use a scanner for preference, as I have one in my Studio already linked
to the Computer. The software is reliable and preset for artwork, and the files
go straight into the right computer folder. I can stitch large picture images together
as I have the software to hand, and I don’t have to worry about the light. Scanning
requires you to make some decisions about image size and DPI ( Dots per inch -
PHOTOGRAPHY
Convenient and inexpensive, though the results can often leave a lot to be desired if the lighting is not good or the hand is not steady ( and watch out for those reflections off glass ).
A photo will almost always need correction and that is where we come to the most important part of this section. You will need to have a basic knowledge of how to adjust your image so that it is an accurate copy of the artwork concerned. You may also need to adjust a scanned image so these notes will apply, whatever you do.
ADJUSTING YOUR IMAGE
Most digital cameras these days come with an editing programme to adjust the quality and file size of the pictures you take. It is a question of understanding them and making them work.
Firstly NOTE. The software you are able to use depends a lot on the operating system you use on your Computer. You will need to check that any old or free software you obtain can run on your system. If you run a PC with Vista you may need to have an up to date editing programme.
Probably the top of the range software in complexity and cost is Adobe Photoshop and whilst this works superbly well, most readers of this site will not have access to it or wish to spend the money or the time learning how to use it. Adobe, does, however, sell a cut down version of Photoshop, called Elements which is often given away with scanners and with cameras.
You can buy the current Elements 7 over the Internet for around £60 and an older version 5 for around £30. Elements is good and will do most, if not all, of the tasks I list below
Corel Paint Shop Pro has been through a number of lives and is now in a much improved and versatile form and available over the Internet for around £30. I haven’t tried the latest
version, but I have used an older one which was a free disc with a computer magazine and which certainly did all that I required. This is a much more comprehensive piece of software than Adobe Elements, but you may not need all the facilities
Serif software have a photo editor called Serif Photo Plus and often offer an older version free to get you ‘on board’ with a small charge to ‘upgrade’ it to the latest version.
April 2009 the offer was for PhotoPlus version 9 for £9.99
There is a Free version of Serif Photoplus -
editing facilities you will need. Photoplus 9 works fine on Windows XP and also Vista. This is the system I will show here, but if you have another software package, the basics will be very Similar. Just make sure that you can
1/ adjust levels manually and 2/ adjust colour balance manually. If you are using a camera, you may also need to know how to adjust your picture for camera distortion. I will explain what all this means below.
In this second version, the distortion has been corrected, the picture has been rotated 3 degrees anticlockwise,
The image has been cropped and the levels corrected to show the white paper as white and the darker elements in the picture as true darks.
The colour balance has then been adjusted to take account of the artificial lighting in the room.
The image is now true to the actual Watercolour as it was painted
First let us look at a photo of a watercolour of Staithes in
Yorkshire. This was taken using an inexpensive digital camera using artificial light with the picture on a table top.
The picture is distorted by the closeness to the camera lens, the colour is affected by the light , and the
picture is not straight. Not a very good record.
HOW TO USE PHOTO EDITING SOFTWARE
Note -
I am trying in Part 2 to show you how easy it is to correct a poor image in four
basic stages. You may not need all four stages, but you will almost certainly need
some of them The example I show is worked using the low cost but excellent photo
editing programme, from Serif, called PhotoPlus. I selected the Photoplus SE Pro
version -
The software is not unique, you can use a wide variety of similar programmes, but not all include the ability to :
1/ correct distorted images
2/ crop an image,
3/ correct tonal problems (levels) and
4/ correct Colour, manually.
The adjoining page ‘ Adjusting the image Part 2’ explains the method. You may need to read through your ‘Help’ files if you use a different software programme, and it would be best to do the same reading if you buy Photo Plus as the help files and tutorials give you all the explanations you will need.
Since writing this original item in early 2009, there have been developments in software available for nil or little cost.
Some of the programmes worth looking at include :
‘The Gimp’ An oddly named, FREE programme, that is very powerful in the range of tasks it will do.
It is similar to Adobe Photoshop and will need some computer knowledge to be able to use. It compares well, though and as it is free, it is a lot preferable to spending over £500 of a top of the range Photo editing suite.
Gimp has manual editing for all the main needs ( levels, colour adjustment etc ). Long standing software regularly updated
‘Image Forge’ A powerful programme that has a simple version ( free) and a more complex version which has all the bells and whistles. Has been around quite a while and is spoken well of by its fans
‘Photoscape’
Another free programme that looks simpler, though I haven’t tried it out. There is a set of auto adjustments for levels and colour and it is also possible to adjust for distortion ( where the original picture isn’t square on to the camera )
‘Picasa’ from Google is easy to use but very limited in what it will do
There is a list of Programmes on the website ‘BRIGHTHUB’ which also gives a brief summary of what is provided in each package and also gives links to the sites to look at or download a programme if you wish. I know nothing about Brighthub other than it has a useful list and I agree with its reviews of those programmes I have used.
Page last revised February 2011
ART POINTS
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