elee950021 Loc: New York, NY

You are totally right! Your technique is fine and your conclusion about color accuracy is dead on.

After shooting ten's of thousands of color transparencies ranging from 35mm to 4x5 over several decades of shooting back in the day, I agree you can get very close but not total accuracy.

Stuff we encountered back in the day: consider, the latitude of color transparency film, 1/3 over to 1/3 under normal exposure and if your lens could handle it 1/6 stop. Differing emulsions provided different color palettes, Kodak's 2 chrome films vs Fuji's or Agfa's. For critical use, we bought 100' rolls of Tungsten Ektachrome professional (needed to be refrigerated and color corrected by CC filters, usually 05 or 10 Yellow, Cyan or Magenta), also which was also dependant upon the E-6 processing line. You could also "push" or "pull" the film based on other tests. The type of lighting used: daylight vs tungsten (fluorescent not as readily available as today). We always included the Kodak Grey and Color Scales and/or "Shirley." You basically got what you got or you could reshoot!

Today using digital, things are "easier" NOT! Fluorescent lights are ubiquitous, bracketing of exposure and color balance can be automated while color balance can be shifted, white balance can be in-camera determined, Greyscales and Macbeth color charts can be used to zero in with your software with finesse. However, your paintings may still not be "accurate." There may be some color shifts with some colors and not others. You see it all the time in camera reviews. Macbeth charts do vary with different sensors. Pigments and canvases can and do vary as well. Try shooting "Dayglow" or pastel watercolors or reproducing a good white with (some dark) color in other areas. How about pencil line work?

After several decades of shooting flat art and using color transparencies to be reproduced or judged by juries, I did shoot a few jobs using digital but the time spent isolating ("selections" in software) to lighten or darken or to saturate or whatever was too time-consuming and tedious. I have since avoided art assignments.

I always told the artist or client that a successful art image captures the "spirit" of the piece and not necessarily 100, 90 or even 80% accurate color. Cheers. Ed

Tomfl101 Loc: Mount Airy, MD

Allot of really good technical advise here. Many comments above my expertise in this area but one thing I note from Jim's original statement is he uses 3200K lights. I know we're talking about artwork here but as a portrait photographer I have never been able to produce equivalent skin tones using tungsten balanced lighting vs daylight balanced light. Daylight is always better. I attribute this to 3200K light lacking enough of the blue end of the spectrum. Similarly, shooting in open shade with deep blue skies won't render adequate reds for best quality skin tone. You can color correct all you want and never achieve a full color spectrum if the entire gamut of color in the original light is lacking in the first place. Using strobe lights is your best bet for accurate color as I see it. As others have suggested I recommend using a color checker or 18% gray card to set initial color balance. But keep in mind that color accuracy and archival quality of even the best cards will vary especially with age. However, there will always be the need to tweak color especially to satisfy your artist friends.

DennisC. Loc: Antelope, CA

Another thing to consider is that the color palette is different from one camera to the next. Canon has a different look than Nikon or Fujifilm or Pentax... It can even vary in the same brand from one model to the next, my D850 and D500 are close but more neutral looking than my D810 was.

DrDon Loc: Hingham, Ma

I have seen many comments in the past 2 years of reading this forum every day concerning “calibrating monitors “ but no discussion on how to do it. Who can help?

kymarto Loc: Portland OR and Milan Italy

kymarto Loc: Portland OR and Milan Italy

You'll never get correct color balances with incandescant light sources, since they themselves do not have full spectrums.

E.L.. Shapiro Loc: Ottawa, Ontario Canada

Interestingly you mentioned "yellow". In my work in art reproduction,
I have conversed with many experts in the field of art conservation,
museum curators, photographic and graphic arts specialist that work
mainly in art reproduction and folks who specialize in authentication
of ancient works of art.

Some of the technicalities I learned about paints and pigments is that
hundreds of years ago, artists formulated and produced their own
paints by using many organic substances- minerals, colors extracted
from fruits and vegetation, and other natural elements. Nowadays, many
of these mediums are mass produced synthetically and made from all
sorts of inorganic chemicals. Some of these paints and pigments do
have adverse effects on photographic reproduction. They may fluoresce
under certain quantities of ultraviolet light that accompany flash and
daylight sources. One expert told me, some of these mediums just have
different spectral properties that are difficult to contend with in
photography.

Yellow pigments are known to be very problematic. The may record as
too saturated or if the fluoresce, the resulting blue cast
de-saturates the yellow. Digital sensors are not as susceptible to
this phenomena as film but I still sometimes find it problematic.
So...even if you photograph a painting and all the other color are
correct or acceptable, one color can still be off and may require
local correction which can be a difficult procedure including masking.
Very old works are not usually as difficult to reproduce with better
color accuracy, however, some of those have other issues like
discolored varnishes, cracks, burnishing, dichroic fog, damage, and
other headaches.

This does not work for the impatient photographer!

I once photographed a wedding and in all the images the bride's hair
took on a greenish tint although all the other colors were correct.
It took me 3 weeks to print her wedding album, carefully dodging her
hair with filters. I even called Kodak- I thought I had a defective
batch of color negative film or had some kind of a crossover issue in
my chemistry and got a visit from a senior technical representative.
They had experienced this problem in the past and it was found that
the film reacted strangely to a certain kind of hair dye or tint that
was supposed to produce reddish highlights in the hair but theses
recorded as green! A similar problem occurred with pastel colored
clothing. There was a fad in the 1980s of pastel-colored formal
dinner jackets for the male bridal party. Cretan pink and green shades
recorded as gray after the fabrics were dry cleaned several times.
Since most of this attire was from formal wear rental services, some of the
jackets were dry cleaned more times than others. The larger and
taller sizes were less frequently ordered so they recorded normally.
The frequently ordered sizes had the color shift. These differences
were not noticeable to the naked eye. Thank goodness that fad ended!

Headaches- even migraines!

clixpix Loc: Surprise, Arizona

Hi Big Jim:

If you will be doing lots of art photos, I suggest you find the book titled How to Photograph Works of Art by Sheldan Collins published by Amphoto Watson-Guptil in 1992. Although it deals with film most of the techniques apply in digital as well. It is probably out of print but should be available on the used book market or in a library. I used this book when I was photographing art work in years past.

Just my two cents worth. Good luck in your endeavors!

Bobspez Loc: Southern NJ, USA

My experience is for complete color accuracy digital in daylight does not do as well as Fuji Velvia 50 slide film. Daylight is probably the best light source. With digital, some hue in the spectrum is always off. If you try to correct it, something else goes off. I think the best you can do is film in a room with natural daylight without any shadows.
Bear in mind that when you scan the slides you will have to remove any fragments of dust with something like the Spot Healing Brush tool in Photoshop. It's nearly impossible to scan slides without static electricity causing some tiny bit of dust or thread to cling to the slide.
Once you have the slides scanned and send them to the artists or the contests, unless you will be sending prints, you have no way of knowing how their monitors will display the colors.

jamesl Loc: Pennsylvania

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Use a ColorChecker Passport to lock in the color accuracy.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Factors that my experience teaches me matter greatly in copy work:

> Camera and lighting setup — Others here have pretty accurately nailed the recommendations for that. The camera must be centered and plano-parallel, relative to the art. Lights must be adjusted to between 37.5 and 45 degrees above the surface of the art, and positioned so that the illumination is absolutely even across the art surface. Spot meter a large sheet of gray seamless paper to be certain.

When using point-source quartz-halogen lamps or small direct flash units, polarizing filters are usually required.

When using photo LEDs or photo CFLs in large soft boxes, the illumination is so diffused that the specular highlights and diffuse highlights on the irregular surface of textured paintings become one, and therefore surface textures and reflections mostly disappear.

> When I did copy work professionally, I worked in a black room with no windows and a black drop ceiling. The only light was from the copy rig itself. We wore black aprons and used remote shutter releases.

> Color fidelity of the light source — There are many choices. The full-spectrum, broad spectrum sources are not cheap! Use ONLY light sources recommended for professional photography, video, or motion picture production, and color reproduction will be vastly improved. If one source is deficient in some part of the spectrum, try another, or try a mix. Soft boxes with several E26/E27 sockets allow a mix of daylight photo grade CFLs and LEDs, my favorite sources.

> White Balance — Custom WB is great, but using an X-Rite ColorChecker PassPort and Lightroom to process raw images is the ultimate. You'll probably need to tweak the images slightly in Lightroom.

> Monitor quality — For the best color, you need a computer with a 10-bit video processor and a monitor that supports 10-bit color. However, hundreds of photo labs still use 8-bit monitors.

> Monitor calibration and profiling — NO monitor is accurate out of the box. ALL monitors require regular calibration and profiling to ensure they meet ICC standards.

> Color managed workflow — You simply must work in raw, and convert raw files to 16-bit bitmap images in a wide-gamut color space such as ProPhoto RGB. From there, they may be printed (directly from Lightroom) or converted to TIFF or PSD for further processing in other applications.

> Printer technology — Ink jet printers made for photographic reproduction are the gold standard for museums and professional photographers. The highest end Canon and Epson printers use enough different color inks to produce very wide gamuts of color. Many museums and high end service bureaus use the Epson P-Series and their predecessors.

> Inkjet Printer ICC profiles — ICC profiles specific to the exact Printer/Paper/Ink combination in use must be applied at print time.

> Printer calibration and profiling — To get the best from silver halide printing (which is QUITE inferior to high end photographic inkjet printing), the printer and process must be in control, and a proper profile for the paper in use must be applied. (Personally, I'd never try to reproduce oil paintings on silver halide paper! I worked in a pro lab for 33 years and ran a copy composite department for five years. Digital capture and inkjet printing blow silver halide processes off the map.)

> Print with direct, 16-bit conversion from ProPhoto RGB color space to the Printer/Paper/Ink profile required. This requires a local printer connection to the same computer you use to convert and adjust images.

> Print viewing conditions — Light a gray card on an easel next to your monitor. It should meter EV 9.5 to EV 10 at ISO 100 with an accurate reflected light meter, WHEN your monitor brightness is calibrated to about 105 candelas per square meter. Move the gray card and place a print of your image there, to compare it with the image in Lightroom OR the original artwork.

Once you have everything set up, you can tune your process and create a Lightroom Preset that provides a very close match every time.

NO photographic process is going to be completely accurate. Paintings use pigments and additives that reflect visible light AND UV AND IR wavelengths. Some camera sensors reach into the UV and IR spectra, and the summation of the frequencies we can see with the frequencies only the camera sees can alter the resulting colors. Some pigments fluoresce. Other pigments may be outside the range of saturation (color gamut) that your total system can record, display, or print. Artists need to know this. You can't duplicate artwork exactly, but you can get very close, if you know what you are doing and exercise a bit of discipline.

Bill P

Don't overthink this. I have a friend that does this as a part of his business. He photographs works of art almost exclusively for the artists. They have either of two requirements. Some want to sell copies, usually as note cards, and others want to submit to art shows and galleries for exhibitions. In that case, some still require chromes.

(Heres a tip. If you wnat to do this as a busienss,start as eh did. Find an older print shop that is going out of business, and buy an old process camera. Removve the film back, bellows, lens mount, etc. and replace with a camera mount. Dedicate a single camera and leave it mounted.)

He uses crossed polarization with two strobes, older Norman''s I think. It is something that natural light will never be: consistent. It's quick, easy, and profitable.

As to all the mumbo jumbo, forget it. There is no way you will duplicate things exactly. and, it doesn't matter. If shooting digital, unless you own and calibrate all monitors, it's a fools errand. If all that is required is inkjet copies, nobody is that interested in the minutia. It's likely the artist cant perceive all the fine changes in color and saturation anyway.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

When someone wants to print and sell archival quality, limited edition, hand-signed reproductions of artwork, ON DEMAND, they most certainly do want accurate color reproduction. If a customer is paying big money for a 40" by 30" pigmented Epson inkjet print on Hahnemühle Platinum Rag Fine Art Paper, it needs to be very close in appearance to the original.

There is office inkjet printing, and there is professional, high end, archival quality pigment, wide-gamut inkjet printing, otherwise known in art circles as giclee. There is a vast difference between them. The general public often mistakes one for the other, out of innocent ignorance.

https://www.artworkarchive.com/blog/everything-you-need-to-know-about-giclee-prints

Top art schools such as SCAD in Atlanta (Savannah, too) use Epson inkjet printers to make huge prints of student photos and artwork. So do many museums, service bureaus, and professional photographers. So do many advertising agencies, in-house corporate graphics departments... Others use similar machines from Canon and HP. These are nothing like the cheap printers in the average home office. They can print art board, roll paper, canvas... There are models that can print on fabric and vinyl and metal.

Doc Barry Loc: Huntsville, Alabama USA

I have had to photograph a variety of painting of different types. Lots of good guidance has been given. I'll just make two comments. First, if possible, have highly diffused light with the camera perpendicular to the painting. Second, my best results come about when I use the Expodisc to set the WB. Best to set the white balance by placing the camera where the painting (will be) located. I use a Nikon D810 which I found has better WB than my friend's Canon equivalent. That's my humble opinion anyway.

DLColglazier

I retired from active art conservation treatments at about the time that digital cameras were starting to be serious competition for film. Now, I use digital cameras for some volunteer consulting in general art conservation.
The most basic valuable tool that I have found is the Macbeth or Passport Color checker. I will also add a 10-12 step gray scale in the image. With experience one can tell the quality of the color rendition by looking at the color checker and gray scale cards.
At one point I purchased the color swatches from Munsell and made my own very small checker card for use with photographing small artifacts.
David