Photographing Your Art for Accurate Colour

A collector falls in love with your work online. The piece arrives. The colours are nothing like they expected.

This scenario damages more than a single sale. It erodes trust in your practice and invites returns that cost time, money, and reputation. When selling online, your photographs are the work. Colour accuracy isn't optional.

The good news: you don't need professional equipment to get this right. You need method.

Light Is Everything

Colour exists only through light.

Daylight remains the standard. North-facing windows (south-facing in the southern hemisphere) provide consistent, indirect light without harsh shadows or warm colour casts. Midday works best—morning and afternoon light shifts orange. Overcast days offer naturally diffused light, though slightly cooler.

Artificial light works when controlled. If you're using studio lights, match your bulbs. Mixing daylight bulbs with tungsten creates impossible colour correction problems. LED panels rated at 5000–5500K approximate daylight. Avoid household bulbs—their colour temperature varies wildly and shifts as they warm up.

Two-light setups eliminate shadows. Position matching lights at 45-degree angles to your work, equidistant from the surface. This flattens the lighting evenly across the piece. For highly textured work, you may want slight angle variation to preserve some surface information—but start flat.

Watch for colour contamination. Light bounces. A red wall, a green plant, even your clothing can reflect onto the work and shift colour in ways you won't notice until you see the image. Photograph against neutral surroundings. Grey works better than white—pure white can fool your camera's metering.

Photo by Vitaly Gariev

Camera Settings That Preserve Truth

Your camera wants to help. This is the problem.

Auto settings adjust exposure, white balance, and colour processing to make images look pleasing. Pleasing is not accurate. A deep blue painting brightens. A subtle ochre warms toward orange. The camera interprets rather than records.

Set white balance manually. If shooting in daylight, set your white balance to daylight (or approximately 5500K). If using artificial light, match the setting to your bulbs. Auto white balance shifts between shots—your series of work will lack consistency.

Shoot RAW when possible. RAW files preserve more colour information than JPEGs and allow adjustment without degradation. If your phone doesn't support RAW, disable HDR and any automatic scene optimisation.

Use a grey card. Place an 18% grey card in your first frame under your exact lighting setup. This gives you a reference point for accurate white balance correction in editing. A grey card costs less than a tube of paint and solves half your colour problems.

Keep ISO low. Higher ISO introduces noise and shifts colour. Stay at ISO 100–400 when possible. This means using enough light or a tripod—hand-holding in dim conditions forces your camera to compromise.

Disable in-camera filters. Vivid mode, high contrast, saturation boost—turn them off. You want flat, neutral capture. You can add contrast later; you can't remove processing baked into a JPEG.

The Background Question

Backgrounds affect both colour perception and camera metering.

White backgrounds look clean but cause problems. Cameras meter for the overall scene—a large white area tricks the sensor into underexposing, darkening your work. White also creates contrast that makes colours appear more saturated than they are.

Neutral grey (around 18%) is the professional standard. It won't influence your camera's metering or your viewer's colour perception. Grey seamless paper, available from photo suppliers, creates consistent backdrops.

Black backgrounds suit some work but absorb light and can cause overexposure of the artwork itself. Use them intentionally, not by default.

Whatever you choose, maintain consistency across your portfolio. A collector comparing three pieces from your website shouldn't see three different background tones.

Basic Colour Calibration

Your screen lies. Every screen displays colour differently. The image you see on your laptop doesn't match what your phone shows, which doesn't match what a collector sees on their monitor.

Calibrate your editing screen. Hardware calibrators like the Calibrite ColorChecker range from affordable to professional-grade. They measure your screen's actual output and create a correction profile. Without calibration, you're editing blind.

Include a colour reference in your images. Photograph a colour checker card (like the X-Rite ColorChecker or Calibrite ColorChecker) alongside your work in at least one shot per session. This provides exact colour reference points for correction in editing software. The card doesn't appear in your final image—it's a calibration tool.

Edit in appropriate colour space. sRGB remains the web standard. Working in wider colour spaces (Adobe RGB, ProPhoto RGB) requires careful conversion for web use. If this sounds complex, stay in sRGB—your colours will display consistently across most screens.

View your images on multiple devices before publishing. Check your phone, a tablet if you have one, another computer. Significant variation suggests your editing screen needs calibration or your image processing needs adjustment.

Common Mistakes

Photographing at night under room lighting. Tungsten bulbs cast orange. Fluorescents cast green. Mixed sources create uncorrectable colour casts. If you must shoot at night, invest in daylight-balanced LED panels.

Relying on editing to fix bad capture. Correction shifts colour a few degrees. It cannot recover what wasn't captured. Get it right in camera.

Forgetting about metamerism. Some pigments look different under different light sources. A colour that matches perfectly under gallery lighting may diverge under daylight. Photograph under conditions similar to how the work will be viewed—typically natural light or neutral artificial light.

Inconsistency between images. If your lighting, white balance, or background changes between shots, your portfolio looks like the work of multiple artists. Establish a method and repeat it.

Screen-only editing. You're matching a digital image to a physical object. Have the work present when you edit. Compare screen to surface. Adjust until they align.

The Practical Approach

You don't need a photography studio. You need:

Consistent light source (window or matched bulbs). Neutral background (grey seamless paper or card). Grey card for white balance reference. Tripod or stable surface. Manual camera settings (white balance, low ISO, no filters). Calibrated screen for editing. The physical work present during editing.

Establish this setup once. Document your settings. Use the same method for every piece.

Accurate colour photography isn't about perfection—it's about trust. When collectors know your images represent the work honestly, they buy with confidence. When designers specify your pieces for client projects, they trust what arrives will match what they presented.