How to Photograph Your Artwork With a Phone (So It Hangs Right)

Your phone camera is good enough. What lets artists down is the light, the angle and the crop, and all three are free to fix. The same phone that produced a dull, orange, slightly wonky snapshot will give you a photograph that holds up at full size on a wall.

That matters more in a 3D gallery than in a feed. A thumbnail forgives a lot. A piece a visitor can walk up to does not.

Light: a window, never the flash

The best light for flat work is a large window on an overcast day: soft, even, no hotspot.

Set the work facing the window and shoot from well back. Standing close blocks a wide slice of the light and drops your own shadow across the surface; from a few metres away you block almost nothing. If the room is tight, move the work further from the window rather than nearer, because right up against the glass the edge closest to the window reads noticeably brighter than the far edge.

Avoid these:

• The flash. It fires from an inch away from the lens, so it bounces straight back at you. On anything with texture or varnish you get a white blowout in the middle of the piece.
• Midday sun. Direct sun is hard light. It exaggerates canvas weave, throws the shadow of the frame across the surface, and blows out the lightest passages before the darks have registered. Bright shade outdoors, or an overcast sky, is far kinder.
• Ceiling spots plus a lamp plus daylight. Mixed sources mean mixed colour temperatures, and nothing you do afterwards will fully untangle them. Pick one source and switch the others off.

Check for evenness before you shoot. Look at the four corners: if one is visibly darker than the rest, move the piece rather than fixing it later.

Shoot square-on, or the piece leans

Point a camera up at a painting and the top edge goes narrower than the bottom. That is keystone distortion, and it is the most common fault in artist photographs. In a 3D gallery, where the work sits on a flat wall and a visitor can stand right in front of it, a keystoned photo reads as a badly hung picture.

The fix is boring and reliable:

1. Put the work flat against a wall, or lay it on the floor.
2. Get the lens at the exact centre height of the piece, dead-on to the surface.
3. Turn on your camera’s grid, and keep the edges of the work parallel to the grid lines.
4. Step back and zoom in slightly rather than shooting close with a wide lens, which bows straight edges.

If the piece is on the floor, stand directly over it rather than leaning in from the side. A phone on a small tripod, or propped on a stack of books with the self-timer running, removes the last of the shake.

Crop tight, with a sliver of margin

Fill the frame with the work. Cut the wall, the floor, the corner of your studio table.

Leave a small, even margin around the edge of the piece rather than slicing into it. A hairline of background makes it obvious that you have captured the whole work, and it gives you room to straighten the image afterwards without losing a corner.

A Galerra gallery hangs each image at the proportions of the file you upload; nothing is re-cropped for you. A photo with a strip of studio floor along the bottom hangs as a piece with a strip of studio floor along the bottom, and a portrait piece cropped into a square hangs square. Crop properly once, and every room you put it in is right.

Glazed and framed work

Glass reflects you, the window and the room. Three things help:

• Photograph the work before it goes behind glass whenever you can.
• If it is already framed, shoot in a dim room with a single window light coming in at an angle, and wear dark clothing.
• Move your own position rather than the piece. Reflections shift fast; a step to the side often clears the worst one.

Shooting through non-reflective glazing is easier but softens detail slightly, so focus carefully and check at full zoom.

Colour: make white read white

Phones guess at white balance and often guess warm indoors. The result is a photograph where the paper looks cream and every colour has drifted with it.

Tap to set exposure and focus on a mid-tone area of the work. Then, when editing, adjust the temperature until a part of the piece you know is white or neutral grey actually looks it on screen. Everything else falls into place once the neutral is neutral.

For work where colour really matters, put a grey card in one frame as a reference and crop it out afterwards. Plain printer paper is a weaker stand-in than it looks: most of it carries optical brighteners that read blue under daylight.

Do not over-edit

Straighten, crop, set white balance, nudge exposure, and stop.

Filters, heavy contrast and saturation sliders all sell a piece that does not exist. A buyer who sees the real work after an enhanced photo feels misled, and a teacher marking a documented portfolio wants the piece, not a treatment.

Compare the photograph with the piece

Hold your phone next to the actual work, under the light you normally see it in. Does the photograph look like the thing in the room?

If the darks have gone flat, the whites have gone grey, or the colour is off, the comparison shows it instantly and the photo alone never will. Reshoot rather than edit your way out of it.

Then upload

Shoot at your phone’s full resolution and let the upload do the reduction: Galerra resizes each file to 1800px on its long edge and saves it as a JPEG, and iPhone HEIC files are converted for you.

From there the gallery is built around the images automatically. In the in-viewer Edit panel, under Artworks, you can set each piece’s real width and height in centimetres, so a small drawing reads small and a large canvas reads large next to it.

Ready to hang them? Create your gallery, or read how it works first.