RESOURCES | RECOMMENDATIONS
If you're displaying your artwork digitally, whether that's on Sixteen Online, on your own website, or even just sharing on social media, you want to make sure you are showing it at its best, giving all your hard work the respect it deserves. This sometimes means, you need a little help to get photos of your artwork looking just right, and how you see it in front of you.
In this short overview of our favourite tools to edit photos of your artwork, I'll run down (in our opinion) the top FREE apps for either phone or computer. I haven't included things like Photoshop or Lightroom here, these are your quick, and importantly easy to use editing tools to get the best digital representations of your art. But firstly:
Why do you even need an editing app?
Now I am not suggesting anything crazy. No making new artwork, changing colours to try out different versions type things (although that can be great, and you could certainly play around with that!) I am just looking at how to make a digital image of your work best represent the piece of artwork you have made. So for example, perhaps your photo is looking a little washed out, not quite the colour you see in front of you. Or you want to share a picture on Instagram and you want it to have a white border around it. Or maybe you make works on paper and photographing it on a mobile can allow light through creating an image that looks nothing like the piece you just spent hours on: even this, can be overcome with just a few taps of a button using these apps. But before you get into editing using one of the apps on this list you need a good base image, so how do you do that?
Lights, camera, angle
We would always recommend making sure you photograph your work in the best light you can - think light but not direct (unless you're looking for an "in situation" image, where maybe you like that shaft of sunlight) and think about things like, not creating any shadows or reflections. If you have a high-end camera, then definitely go for that, and a tripod? Brilliant, especially if you are photographing hung work, but your trusty phone can work wonders and these apps can be useful whether your pictures are on your phone or a computer.
So lets get on with it, and dive into some quick highlights of our top three recommended apps to get great digital images of your work.
In a very subjective order we'll start at the number 3 spot with:
C A N V A
If you're someone who likes to put together your exhibition flyers, or is comfortable with graphic design, this might be very familiar to you. Canva has so many uses, and great accessibility to free tools, and it's probably the best computer based option to edit your images.
Cropping images, editing the temperature or tint, or changing the contrast is all super simple to get your pictures looking on screen how they look to the naked eye. Canva also has the added feature of being able to edit certain sections of the image, so if your background feels the wrong colour, but you don't want to loose the tint of the foreground, you have some good control over what you modify.
All the basic features like this are free to use, and all images can be downloaded in PNG or JPEG when you're done. There's a whole host of things you can do on the paid version, so definitely worth exploring if you want more scope with your digital creations.
There's a whole load of videos on YouTube that will talk you through the simple steps to do this if you're struggling, but you can start by following this link www.canva.com/photo-editor/ to get you in the right place.
Up next in second place, an app which always comes close to the top in any photo editing list, we have:
V S C O
The VSCO studio is a mobile app made for photographers offering photo & video editing tools as well as a whole host of interesting community tools if you love the app enough to go the paid route. But just looking at the free features, this app has a good easy to use basic editing tools that can be really useful for modifying your artwork photos. These include options for editing the colours, skin tones, and fade on your images, as well as a delicate sharpening tool that can be useful for bringing out paint or surface textures.
One of the great bonuses with VSCO is there is visually nice area to save your edited images allowing different views and sorting etc. It can be real nice if you wanted to curate a space for your artwork away from your (if it's anything like mine) congested camera roll. This can help you get a good perspective on the finished digital look of your artworks.
And lastly, in Gold medal position, my personal favourite mobile editing app:
S N A P S E E D
Any app which follows my own design philosophy of "keep it simple, stupid" and has an opening screen as fool proof as this, can only be a winner.
Snapseed offers all the basic tools like the others, good colour editing options and cropping and straightening etc but even for FREE this app offers so many more features. Recommended to me by a photographer it has a whole lot of advanced curve editing, some nice abilities to add blurs and textures and other things to explore if you're into it. One thing this app can do for any Instagram addicts out there, is really easily add borders or backgrounds to your work giving you nice white/black backgrounds for your images.
My other personal favourite feature on here (a little niche) is being able to reduce the sharpening and structure which can help to change the way a phone camera has captured the reflected light with artwork on paper. This could also work well in the opposite direction if you wanted to bring out the texture or sharpen up some of the detail, especially if you were low on light when you were photographing your work. The best thing about this app is its access to a plethora of free tools, and how truly easy it is to use.
So that's it, the end of this - somewhat biased - hopefully helpful run down of apps for artwork photo editing. If you want some portfolio quality images for your Sixteen Online profile or you're just looking to get your artwork on your instagram looking it's best, maybe give one of them a go. It can take a little bit of time to hone into your personal style in your digital representations, or to really capture the feel of the real thing, so don't be afraid of trial and error. But in this digitally dominant era it's so important to to put your best foot forward and represent your artwork and by extension yourself well on any digital platform.
Happy editing!
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