Hey, my name is Jeff George, I'm a photographer and I'm here to show you how to take pictures of your art resin artwork. Okay, so here today we'll talk about how to set up the camera, how to set up the lights, other things in the room you're going to have to worry about. And then at the end we'll talk about bringing it into the computer or your phone and what we can do, trying to give yourself the truest version of your artwork, both color wise and lighting wise. Ideally the best environment for doing your copy work is a controlled environment, especially when you're working with art resin you're going to have a bunch of reflections that we're going to have to deal with. So you're going to want to try and figure out how to minimize those, even just making sure those lights are angled so that they don't throw reflections onto other things in the room. So the first step that you're going to worry about is setting up your artwork. You can hang it up on the wall. You can actually have it on the ground as well, just leaning. The one thing you do want to watch though is if you are going to lean your artwork up against the wall on an angle is that the camera stays parallel. As soon as they get out of parallel you'll start to get strange shapes. Your picture will go slightly trapezoid or weird angled. So we're just going to hang it up and get started. Once your artwork's up on the wall you're going to want to set your camera up. Preferably on a tripod it'll just make your life easier if the camera stays locked in one position all the time. So we're going to fire up the screen here so you guys can see what's going on. You want to make sure the camera's parallel and even and some of this can be corrected a little bit after in post but we want to get it as close as we can at this stage. For easy use today we are going to tether up to a computer so everybody can see what we're doing as we go. But this is kind of the first good step. Our next step will be setting up the lights. We're going to use a standard coffee light setting where you have two lights on either side, about 45 degrees throwing an even wash of light for your artwork. Ideally you want two of the exact same light so that they don't cast either different amounts of light or different colors of light. In this case we're using the model lights from my strobes. You can also use video lights, you can use work lights. The important thing is you have two of the same lights. The other important thing to consider is your lights need to be the brightest lights by far. That will give you an even flat lighting. You can use soft boxes. The problem is they create a bigger wash of light and you may get more reflections off of other things. So with our two lights at 45 degrees that's going to give us an even wash of light. So what we want to do is make sure that they are in fact even. And what we can do is use a pencil and just hold it up against the wall and we can see that we have actually this light being a little bit brighter. Its shadow is darker. So what we're going to do is take that light and move it a little bit farther back. And make it even with the first light. Maybe somewhere about there. We'll just check it again and see if those shadows look the same. And now they're pretty much identical. That's perfect. Now that the lights and the camera and everything set up we're going to want to adjust our exposure and our color balance. And you can just use your shutter speeds and apertures and find the point where the artwork looks true. That's a little light right about there looks good. The next step will be your color balance. So you're going to want to find the right setting. It's under white balance generally. There's a bunch of presets for tungsten lights, for daylight, for fluorescence. And you're probably best just to scroll through those and see which one gives you the truest representation of your artwork. That one's pretty good. That one's kind of green, a little bit of yellow. And I think that one looks about right. Of course every camera is different so you're going to have to hunt around on yours to find where the white balance and exposure settings are. But they should be readily available. I generally like to start with the largest item just because it sort of sets your parameters about how much space you're going to need. And if you can start with a dark piece of artwork because you'll much more likely to be able to see reflections in the artwork. You don't want to start shooting and then six or seven shots in. You get to a dark piece and suddenly you realize, oh, you know what? I can see a reflection. They can come from windows. They can come from lights being on. They can even be reflecting off things like your tripod. What you're going to want to do is find a way to minimize those. Whether that's pulling curtains, turning lights off, you can use black fabric to block the lights. One of the things you want to be really mindful is windows. They're going to be your biggest source of reflections. So it may be a case of if your window is behind your camera, you may want to turn the whole set, pick a different wall to hang your artwork on. That way the window isn't directly behind you reflecting on your artwork. Now that we've minimized all the reflections, but one thing we are noticing is that we are getting reflections on the edge. The first step is to identify what that reflection is. If it's your copy lights and you will get this, especially if your artwork is curved, the trick we have learned to deal with this is to take the artwork and rotate it on an angle. So we're just going to pick it up and set it on about a 45 degree angle hanging off of one of the hooks. And now if you notice the highlights that we're running up the sides here are now very small and in the corners. That's probably your best scenario for dealing with that situation. Okay, now that we've tilted the picture, we're now just going to tilt the camera correspondingly so that we have a straight picture again. Okay, we're finally at a point where we can take a picture. And now that we've got the image in the computer, we're just going to open it in Photoshop. You can use whatever photo manipulation software you want. Generally, once everything's up and lit, you're probably going to have some shadows from your lights. We try and deal with that afterwards and post. So we do have the shadows from our lights. And I'll show you three quick ways to deal with your artwork. The first one is you can just crop the image in right to the edges of your frame. And then you can just save that and you're good to go. The second option is you can actually clip out the image so it just sits on a white background. We're going to use the pen tool and we're just going to go corner to corner. Obviously, this will be a lot trickier if your artwork is round or irregular shaped. Corner to corner and we finish it back at the top here. And now we're going to invert, because right now we've selected the artwork. And what we want to do is take the background and we can just delete it. There you have one third option here. Real quick, if you do have Photoshop, what you can do is once you've selected your artwork, you make a duplicate layer. And then if you click on that layer and you can just scroll down and find the drop shadow and that will give you a really nice three-dimensional look to your artwork. Now we have the artwork without any shadows on a white background. If your artwork's small, one of the easier options may be to shoot it on the floor. So we're just going to take a piece of art here and lay it on the floor. Again, you want to set your lights up on a 45-degree angle on either side. You just really quickly do that. That looks about right. And then depending, if you just want to do it with your iPhone, you totally can do that. You want to make sure you're directly overhead so that your picture stays square, doesn't get any trapezoid shapes going. There we go. So in the end, a lot of this is going to come down to troubleshooting. You're going to set your lights up and you're going to realize something's not quite right. It may take you several tries to eventually get something that you're happy with. Okay, so that's what we have for you today. Hopefully you were able to pick up some tips for when you're photographing your art resin product. Thanks very much for watching.