How to Take Photos of Traditional Art

June 6, 2024 - Published

This is a pretty specific topic, but since my #1 recommendation to beginners is to start with pencil/paper, it's good for them to know how to take photos of their art! If you want to publish your traditional art online, send it to your friends, or just preserve it in a digital format, simply taking photos of it with a phone camera is a very cheap and easy way to get started. However, I often see people struggle to take good photos, perhaps because they don't really have the eye for what makes a good or bad photo. Of course, I will not be asking you to get a better camera since we'll be working with what you have, and there is a good bit that you can do anyway. Let's get into it!

#1: Lighting

Lighting is everything. You can have the best camera in the world, but if the lighting is bad, the photo will look bad. 

I would say that the best lighting you can have for this kind of photo is having the entire area well-lit, so if you have a decent ceiling light, then that should be all that's necessary.

However, if you rely on light from something like a desk lamp, it'll be harder to get a good photo since the light won't be distributed evenly. I have a USB book light I bought from the local bookstore to show some extreme versions of this.

In this photo, you can see that the light is too close! The area closest to the light has details that are completely destroyed (see the face) while others are drowned in shadow. If possible, try to keep the light source far away enough so that everything is bathed in light equally. Even if your light source isn't that powerful, it'll usually be easier to brighten up an evenly-lit photo in Step #3 than a photo that's only brightly lit in one area.

Now that we have your light source nice and far away from the drawing...

...we have our second issue!

#2: Camera Angle

Ignoring the light situation for a second, there is one important thing to know for camera angles: take the photo parallel to the drawing. There's an easy trick to this: since your drawing is (probably) on a rectangular piece of paper, you can line up the edges of the preview to be parallel with the edges of your phone screen!

The reason you should take the photo from this angle is because taking it from any other angle will cause the drawing to warp from perspective. This can be fixed through photo editing, but even that will cause the quality to suffer. 

However, now we go back to the first issue. If the light is coming from above, and we take the photo parallel to the drawing, then the camera will cast a shadow on the photo! The obvious solution is to take the photo from a diagonal angle, but then the drawing will be warped!

What's the solution here?

Well, my strategy is to make the drawing diagonal too! If you prop up the drawing, it'll give you an angle to take a photo without the camera getting in the way of the light.

You can prop it up with whatever you want! If it's a loose piece of paper, you can put it on something like a clipboard and prop that up with some books. I personally had a pencil case that doubled as a tablet holder, so I was rather lucky in this regard.

With a well-lit photo and a good camera angle, you got a pretty good shot! You can publish this as-is, but there's one more step you can take to make it truly look good: photo-editing!

** PRO TIP:
Many phone cameras will include metadata with your photos that can leak things like your location if you post these photos online! If you want to avoid this, the easiest way is to check your camera settings and make sure Save Location is turned off.

#3: Photo Editing

Photo editing is an entire career, and needless to say, we will NOT be going into the deeper parts of it. I will simply be going over some basic functions that beginners should know. 

First of all: cropping! Your phone should have this built-in, and it's important to have a neat-looking photo that doesn't have random background elements. Make sure to rotate it if you didn't take the photo perfectly square, and you can leave the crop a bit wider just to make sure that everything is included. Cropping more of the drawing to make it look neater is an option if you want it to look better on a digital gallery, but if you want to preserve the drawing, I wouldn't recommend cropping any part of it out. 

There is also a good amount that we can do to improve contrast and colors, but I will not be using the built-in phone features since I prefer more control over it. I'll be using the mobile art app I mentioned in my other article, Medibang, which should be available on both iOS and Android. I'll describe the process on my Android phone, but other art apps should be able to do a very similar process, just with different menu navigation.

Press "My Gallery" on the front page, then press the plus icon at the top. Import PNG/JPG, and select your image. Click it in the gallery, and that should open it up.

On the bottom right, there should be a sandwich-looking icon, which is the Layers menu. Press that, then the triple dots on the right, which will open up the Filters menu. The first filter we'll be looking at is "Hue Saturation Brightness," which should be available in basically every art application.

"Hue" refers to the type of color we have. If you don't like the yellow-ish tint and want it to have more blue-ish tint, you're free to change it, but since we have a pencil sketch, we don't need to touch it.

"Saturation" refers to how strong the colors are. For this pencil sketch, we actually want to set it to 0 so that it looks more black and white. If this were a color drawing, we might want to bump up the saturation slightly, since that's often lost when taking a photo of a drawing. Never turn Saturation up too high though, since that'll make the colors overly bright in an unappealing way.

"Brightness" is exactly how it sounds. In this case, there wasn't enough light, so we're bumping that up. Don't put this too high, or else you'll risk losing some of the lines.

Increasing the brightness does make the paper look more white, but we do want to put more definition back into the lines since they're now a bit more washed out. This can usually be done with a common filter called "Curves," or sometimes "Tone Curves," or sometimes "Levels," but... Medibang locked it behind a paywall!! We can use Medibang's "Line Art Extraction" as a workaround which will do the same thing, but note that this will NOT work for something like a traditional painting, since it's purely for line art.

The process will essentially work the same, but Line Art Extraction WILL destroy everything else in the drawing, so make sure to Duplicate the layer first. Open the layers menu again, select your layer, hit the triple dot, and then Duplicate. 

Now that you have 2 layers, select the TOP layer, open the Filters menu, and select "Line Art Extraction." The layer on top will act as an extra lineart layer on top of the bottom layer, which will contain the rest of the drawing.

I recommend doing this part entirely by feel, since it depends purely on how you want the final drawing to look. I opted to increase White Point by a lot since it brings out almost every line in the drawing, and moved around the other two points until they felt right. With this amount of control, you can see why I prefer something like this to a simple Contrast slider.

Press "Set," and you're now ready to save! Press the bottom left hamburger menu, "Export png/jpg files," then choose PNG (has higher image quality than JPGs). You should now have the final piece!

Whether you prefer this type of photo-editing is entirely personal preference, but when done correctly, I personally think it gives a digital sort of professionalism to traditional drawings that's kind of impossible without using something like a photoscanner, which I expect is a lot less common to have access to than a phone camera. Here's a comparison of the cropped drawing before and after we used Medibang:

Pretty neat! Only requires a phone camera and a free app, too.

Thank you for reading! I had this article idea for a while, but only wrote it now that I had a good traditional art piece to use as an example. I have the impression that people aren't impressed by what pencil/paper can do in the digital landscape, but I think that's only because they haven't seen people use the full extent of combining both tools together.

And yes, I did have to take a photo of myself taking a photo.

• Vecderg