How to Photograph Your Art for Online Display

Your artwork exists in three dimensions. It has texture, scale, and a physical presence that changes depending on the light and the angle. A photograph has to carry all of that into a flat rectangle on a screen — and do it honestly enough that someone browsing online gets a genuine sense of what the work is.

This is not about making your art look better than it is. It is about making sure the photograph does not make it look worse. Most artwork photographs fail not because the art is lacking, but because the photography introduces problems that were never there: colour shifts, reflections, awkward crops, or a background that competes with the piece.

The good news is that you do not need a professional camera or a studio. A phone, a window, and a little patience will get you most of the way there.

Lighting is everything

If you take one thing from this guide, let it be this: natural, indirect light is your best tool. The goal is even illumination across the entire surface of the work, with no harsh shadows and no bright spots.

Find a north-facing window. In Australia, north-facing windows receive consistent, diffused light for much of the day. If you do not have one, any window that does not get direct sun works. Overcast days are ideal — the cloud cover acts as a giant diffuser, spreading the light evenly.

Avoid direct sunlight. It creates hard shadows, blows out highlights, and shifts colour temperature. If sunlight is hitting the work directly, hang a white sheet or piece of tracing paper over the window to soften it.

Avoid mixed lighting. Turn off all artificial lights in the room. Overhead fluorescents add a green cast. Warm bulbs add an orange cast. Your phone's camera will try to compensate, but it cannot correct for two different colour temperatures at once. Natural light alone gives you the cleanest, most accurate colour.

Two-light setup for flat work. If you need to supplement natural light, place two identical lamps at 45-degree angles to the artwork, one on each side, at equal distances. This eliminates shadows from texture and frame edges. Both lights should be the same colour temperature — ideally daylight-balanced LEDs around 5000-5500K.

Setting up the shot

Flat work (paintings, prints, drawings, photographs)

Hang the work on a wall or lean it against one, and position your camera directly in front of it — perpendicular to the surface. This sounds obvious, but even a slight angle introduces perspective distortion that makes rectangles into trapezoids. Your phone's grid overlay helps here. Turn it on in your camera settings and use it to align the edges of the artwork with the grid lines.

Fill the frame. The artwork should take up most of the photograph. You can always crop tighter later, but you cannot add pixels you did not capture. Leave a thin margin of background on each side — just enough to show where the work ends.

Use a tripod or improvise one. Camera shake is the silent enemy of sharp images. A phone tripod costs very little, but a stack of books works in a pinch. Use a two-second timer or a remote shutter to avoid touching the phone at the moment of capture.

Remove reflections. If the work is behind glass, angle yourself so that you and your phone are not reflected in it. Slightly adjusting the angle of the artwork — tilting the top edge forward by a few degrees — can redirect reflections away from the camera without introducing noticeable distortion. Polarising clip-on filters for phones can also help, though they are not essential.

Three-dimensional work (sculpture, ceramics, textiles, mixed media)

Three-dimensional work needs context that flat work does not. A single straight-on shot is rarely enough.

Use a clean, uncluttered background. A plain wall or a sheet of seamless paper in a neutral tone — white, light grey, or warm off-white — keeps the focus on the piece. Avoid patterned tablecloths, busy shelves, or anything that competes for attention.

Capture multiple angles. A front view, a three-quarter view, a detail shot, and a sense-of-scale shot (with a common object nearby, or simply a hand for reference) give someone browsing online a much fuller understanding of the work than a single image ever could.

Mind the shadows. Some shadow is good — it gives dimension. But a single harsh shadow from one side can obscure detail. Soft, even lighting from two sides, or a large window plus a white reflector (a piece of white foam board works well), balances the light and keeps detail visible.

Camera settings and phone tips

You do not need a dedicated camera. Modern phones capture more than enough resolution for online display. But a few settings make a meaningful difference.

Shoot at the highest resolution. Check your phone's camera settings and make sure it is not compressing images down to save space. You want the full-resolution file.

Lock focus and exposure. Tap on the artwork in your phone's viewfinder and hold until the focus and exposure lock. This prevents the camera from refocusing or shifting brightness when you move slightly.

Shoot in RAW if you can. Most recent phones support RAW capture through their native camera app or a free third-party app. RAW files preserve more colour and tonal information, giving you far more flexibility when editing. If RAW is not available, the standard high-quality JPEG is fine.

Avoid the zoom. Digital zoom degrades image quality. If you need to get closer, move closer physically. If you need a detail shot, take a separate photograph at close range rather than cropping a zoomed-in capture.

Editing with honesty

The purpose of editing is to make the photograph match the artwork, not to improve on it. Someone who discovers your work online and then sees it in person should recognise it immediately. If the colours on screen are dramatically different from the colours in the room, something has gone wrong.

White balance. If the photograph has a colour cast — too warm, too cool, too green — adjust the white balance first. Most editing apps have an eyedropper tool: tap on something in the image that should be neutral (a white wall, a grey card) and the app corrects the rest.

Exposure and contrast. Brighten the image if the artwork appears darker than it does in life. Add a small amount of contrast to restore depth, but do not push it far — heavy contrast exaggerates darks and lights and misrepresents the work.

Crop and straighten. Crop to a clean rectangle with consistent margins. Use the straighten tool to correct any remaining tilt. A level photograph reads as professional. A slightly crooked one reads as careless, regardless of the quality of the work.

Sharpening. A small amount of sharpening — 20 to 30 per cent in most apps — compensates for the slight softness that phone cameras introduce. Too much sharpening creates an artificial halo around edges.

Stop there. Resist the temptation to push saturation, add vignettes, or apply filters. These might make the photograph more eye-catching, but they make it less honest. Let the artwork be the thing that catches the eye.

Common mistakes to avoid

Photographing at night under artificial light. Colour accuracy drops dramatically. Wait for daylight.

Including too much background. If the wall, floor, or surrounding room takes up more space than the artwork, the photograph is about the room, not the work.

Using the flash. The built-in flash on any camera or phone creates a harsh, flat burst of light directly from the lens position. It washes out detail, creates glare on textured or glossy surfaces, and kills depth. Never use it for artwork.

Inconsistent lighting across a series. If you are uploading multiple pieces, photograph them all in the same session with the same lighting. A profile full of work shot under wildly different conditions looks disjointed, even when the artwork itself is cohesive.

Skipping the detail shots. Online viewers cannot lean in. A close-up of brushwork, texture, glaze, stitch detail, or material grain tells them something the full-frame image cannot.

Preparing files for upload

Most platforms display images at widths between 1200 and 2400 pixels. Resize your final images to at least 2400 pixels on the longest edge. This gives enough resolution for sharp display on most screens without creating unnecessarily large files.

Save as JPEG at 85 to 90 per cent quality. This is the sweet spot between file size and image integrity. If the platform accepts PNG (which Herehood does), that works too — especially for work with fine detail or text.

Name your files descriptively. untitled-acrylic-on-canvas-60x90cm.jpg is more useful to you six months from now than IMG_4872.jpg, and it helps platforms understand what the image contains.

It gets easier

The first time you photograph your work properly, it will take an afternoon. The second time, it will take an hour. By the fifth time, you will have a system — your preferred window, your tripod spot, your editing workflow — and the whole process will feel routine.

The effort is worth it. A considered photograph respects the time you put into the work itself. It carries the piece across the distance between your studio and someone scrolling through their neighbourhood, and it does so without distortion, without embellishment, and without apology.

Your art deserves to be seen as it is.