How to photograph your artwork

Here are some tips for you that we give people photographing their work. However, even if you scan, some will help

First off, all artwork should be photographed following these simple steps:

1. Use at least a 10-12 MP camera, with a manual focus lens not an auto focus. The higher the MP the camera, the larger the file we have to print from. If you want to offer large prints, you need to use a high MP camera.

2. Mount the camera to a tripod. If you don't have a tripod, use a stack of books, a table, anything. You just have to have the camera sitting on something, not hand held.

3. Shoot outdoors in natural light. Make sure you white balance your camera too, or the colors won't be right.

4. Preview the image to make sure there are no blurry areas, flash problems, etc.

5. Export at the highest possible file size while staying under our less than 25 MB limit.

To preview an image in photo editing software simply use the zoom icon to zoom in on the image until it's viewed at 100% print size. What you will find is that viewing it at 100% you will be able to see if there are any problem areas.

Look all around the image at 100%, the edges included. If the image has no problems, blurry areas, uncropped edges, or areas where there is flash reflecting off the image, then you're on your way to a great image.

Second, you have to determine how large you want your image printed to. Go to the image menu, and click "Resize Image". DO NOT RESIZE THE IMAGE TO BLOW IT UP LARGER IN THIS MENU. That will only result in a blurry, pixelated, problematic image.

We need 100 pixels/inch in order to have a nice image for printing. That makes the math easy as well. Your image menu can be viewed as a pixels/inch ratio, and you can see how many inches wide by tall your image is. You can shrink down the inches in this menu if the image is blurry. THis is shrinking the image to make it a little smaller. You can shrink the image down and it will help the quality of the image, just never blow it up in this menu.

If your image is 1400 pixels by 1000 pixels then the image can be printed up to 14x10. etc.etc.

That's all you need to preview your image. Doing that will help inform you how large your image can be printed to, and whether it's print ready when zooming in at 100% to see it's quality of focus and to see if there are any problem areas.

Save as aRGB or sRGB and under 25mb



Abbie Shores

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