When shooting my paintings, I end up loosing some of the range and softness of the colors and values. Everything looks too saturated and "potent".
I'm using a non polarizing light filter on the lens, and on the LED lights, as to not get glare.
>Canon EOS 2000D
>F/8
>4 sec exposure
>100 iso
>55mm focal length
>white balance is set to ambience priority
these are the best setting I figured out with the help of AI.
No amount of Photoshop can save the inaccurate values and exposure.
Right is the photo I took with my phone in sunlight, and it's close to what it looks like irl.
Is the issue the lights not being powerful enough?

>>4444345 (OP)
shoot RAW and fix it in post

>>4444345 (OP)
It's hard to say without actually seeing the painting IRL, but the right looks like you're getting a lot of glare. It looks washed out.

You could try positioning your light source differently, and then use polarising filters to cut reflections. As the other anon said, make sure you shoot in raw. You will lose detail shooting in jpeg. Lightroom or darktable will probably be easier to edit the photos than photoshop. You also probably dont need to be at f/8 if you're using a macro lens. You can probably go to f/7.1 or f/6.3 to reduce the diffraction a little.

this will never be perfect. any digital camera under the $3000 mark is going to simply fail to reproduce entire colors and shaded areas that your eyes saw. photos will always look harsher and higher contrast than reality until you start spending serious money. you can cope with raws, and yes, raws will look better with jpegs, but you will never really get back to reality. reality is borderline inaccessible and becoming obsessed with getting all those fine tonal differences in each photo leads countless people to spend tens of thousands on camera gear.

you can, however, improve color and tonality reproduction significantly by lighting your stuff properly
https://broncolor.swiss/news/how-to-art-reproduction

once you do this and start editing your raws you will still want to upgrade to something nicer. the canon 5ds r and sigma 70mm f2.8 art macro are the cheapest great-tier scanning setup, iirc.

>>4444345 (OP)
Phone auto HDR (its always taking video and then lines up the frames)
vs
single shot

>>4444345 (OP)
holy shit retard people have been shooting paintings since forever just search online how museum curators do it

>>4444345 (OP)
When shooting my paintings, I end up
Everything looks too saturated and "potent".

Rockwell must be jealous of your talent

>>4444345 (OP)
Don't listen to anyone but me in this thread unless of course they agree with me.
I am right, everyone else (unless they agree with me) is wrong. That faggot youtuber you might think is a "good" guy is probably just some faggot shill.


>First
2000D is okay. Not great, but okay.

>Second
You're not shooting RAW?

>non polarizing light filter on the lens, and on the LED lights
What?
Do you mean you are using polarizing filters? If not, what filters are you using?
Also LED lights are usually bad for glare unless heavily diffused because they're just tiny hotspots from LED strips with spacing, no even distribution like a CCFL.

>Photoshop
Stop using Adobe software.

>Is the issue the lights not being powerful enough?
It's a fucking 4 second exposure at base ISO, what more light do you need? Can't you just try and bump it to 8s for 1 stop more or what? Are you fighting ambient lighting and worried your dedicated lighting isn't a high enough ratio to overpower it?
Just turn the room lights off if that's the case and give it more shutter time.

You absolutely must shoot RAW for digitizing photos.
You should also be bracketing shots for art to get a higher dynamic range to merge in post. Not "HDR" like a filter, but actual HDR, capturing more stops and getting cleaner signal. -3 -2 -1 0 +1 +2 +3 in 7 exposures should capture everything without clipping/noise being a problem.


If you really want good colors, you must invest in a colorchecker or other form of tatrget to let you profile the camera PLUS the lighting setup you're using. When changing lights, or even time of day (if sunlight is entering the room) you must shoot the color checker under the lighting as close to the the time you are capturing the painting as possible because it isn't so much a "calibration" device but a relative correction aid that depends on the light.

If you're not shooting RAW what "picture style" are you shooting in in your Canon? Standard is meme boosted colors actually.

>>4444345 (OP)
>I'm using a non polarizing light filter on the lens, and on the LED lights, as to not get glare.
retard
if you want to avoid glare you have to use a POLARIZING filter on the light source and the camera, both rotated so they intersect at 90 degrees

>>4444345 (OP)
Looks more like a lighting issue than anything else, how do you have your lights setup relative to the painting?
Polarizer isn't needed if lit properly

>>4444392
>You also probably dont need to be at f/8 if you're using a macro lens. You can probably go to f/7.1 or f/6.3 to reduce the diffraction a little.
I was told that f/8 is the best for the picture sharpness, that's the main reason. Also not using a macro lens, but I should. It's in by Wishlist.

>>4444407
I'm not a fucking museum, I'm an independent artist, I can't afford thousands in lighting gear
>>4444413
yeah lol
>>4444472
Hey thanks.
I'll try shooting in RAW, I didn't know it was such a big deal.
I'm buying a color checker soon, I had thought about it.
I'm also using the standard lens that came with the 2000D, but I hear macro's are good to shoot artwork.
>You should also be bracketing shots for art to get a higher dynamic range to merge in post. Not "HDR" like a filter, but actual HDR, capturing more stops and getting cleaner signal. -3 -2 -1 0 +1 +2 +3 in 7 exposures should capture everything without clipping/noise being a problem.
I'm retarded, I don't know what you mean. You're saying merging a bunch of photos on Photoshop to make one good photo? lol

>>4444482
>>4444525
>use a POLARIZING filter on the light source and the camera
yes, my bad, I am retarded, that's what I am doing. picrel

>>4444591
>I was told that f/8 is the best for the picture sharpness, that's the main reason. Also not using a macro lens, but I should.
f/5.6 to f/8 is normally the "optimal" aperture for most lenses in terms of total sharpness and resolution.
The issue is at macro distances DoF is fuck all. Like fractions of a millimeter. If you're managing to get enough in focus then yes, you can aim for maximum optical resolution. However, you'd probably want more in-focus which necessitates narrower apertures.

>>4444591
That's a terrible lighting setup for documenting
If you have one light that's not directly overhead, you will always have issues
You wan two lights, at 45 degree angles on both sides, like pixel
Don't have to be fancy lights, don't need a polarizer or anything like that
Just two lights of equal power on either side forming a 90 degree angle together

>>4444472
Dunning-Kruger here, most of this can be ignored by OP and it fails to address the actual issue

>>4444634
dunning-kruger here, this post can be ignored by op

>>4444635
This comment also failed to address OPs issue

>>4444636
this comment has also failed to address op's issue

>>4444658
I'm gay

Now that everyone has that out of their system...
>>4444345 (OP)
Shoot in RAW. Use bracketed exposures like anon said. You want a CPL filter if glare is a big issue but you can likely manage that with better placed lighting instead. If that is not an option use a CPL. Use the focal length with the lowest field curvature and lowest distortion available.
The 2000D came with the EF-S 18-55 f/3.5-5.6 IS II by default so I'm assuming that's what you have. Charts are showing either to shoot at 35mm @ f/5.6 or 55mm @ f/5.6. Use a tripod to position the camera then set focus manually using digital zoom.

>I'm retarded, I don't know what you mean. You're saying merging a bunch of photos on Photoshop to make one good photo?
Correct. The idea is that camera sensors can only record so between max and min values (white and black), so in high dynamic range scenes (the difference between darkest and brightest thing is very large) the most consistent way around this issue is shoot a handful of photos at different exposure levels and blend them to get the best of all worlds. You can get more consistent results using a histogram but a simple method is to:
>first photo, correctly exposed according to camera meter set to evaluative or center weighted
>second, third and fourth photo: 1 stop, 2 stops and 3 stops underexposed
>fifth, sixth and seventh photo: 1 stop, 2 stops and 3 stops overexposed
>use shutter speed to change exposure, not ISO. Don't touch aperture or focus. This is why we want a tripod, so you can shoot at 2 seconds long and it not matter.
In reality you likely only need two stops max either side of middle exposure, not three. Many programs have automatic blending software that can do the stacking.

>>4444670
All of this is just cope for not addressing the lighting. If you fix the lighting, all your problems may go away entirely. Picrel, you can find literally hundreds of examples of this type of lighting as it is the de facto standard for photographing things like art or documents. Everything else is secondary to this.

Dealing with polarization might still be necessary, especially if shooting with highly reflective materials, but you need to fix the lighting first.

RAW can be helpful and would be best practice for fine tuning colors (a color chart can help with this), and if shooting JPG, should absolutely set WB directly (very easy to do).

You absolutely don't need HDR for something like this. Bracketing shots might be convenient for picking an ideal exposure after the fact, but your issues are absolutely not related to a lack of dynamic range. If you want to go hyper autist, then HDR and pixel shift the shit out it sure, but only after you address the lighting first.

>>4444680
>All of this is just cope
No, cameras come out of the box with hideously incorrect colors because people want photos of their kids and family to be neon glowing ken rockwell grade memes on their 40% sRGB TN panel laptop screens from 2004.
For Canon, you have to change off Standard/Portrait to Neutral or Faithful. Even still, these don't come close to RAW+Colorchecker under controlled lights. RAW isn't about editing it is about avoiding overbaked shit and wrong post-processing, which is what cameras do. The better cameras do better JPEG processing (objectively better, as in closer to WYSIWYG) but still not all the way there. Entry level cameras on the other hand are a fucking meme.

He's using a 2000D aka T7, even at base ISO a perfect exposure will still have some visible noise. Bracketing will eliminate that and give him results exceeding what he'd get from full frame at least on the sensor level, the lens is a different story.
Even if he just did a 3 shot burst he'd benefit from blending the layers in the most basic way possible just for noise averaging.

Op here, just want to thank all anons who helped me out :)
luv u

>>4444345 (OP)
>Right is the photo I took with my phone in sunlight, and it's close to what it looks like irl.
>No amount of Photoshop can save the inaccurate values and exposure.
Did you try adjusting the gamma?