THE PICS I TAKE OF MY DRAWINGS R OUT OF WACK, COULD IT BE THE IN DOOR LIGHTENING, I MUST GO OUT SIDE, CAUSE IM USING A 7 MEGA PIXIL CAM, NEED HELP IN THIS AREA, THANX ANYONE

Hi,

I take black and white pictures, outside, on a stand. I then use picassa to recrop and tune until it looks like what I see in real life. Don't be afraid of the last part, since you're trying to make it look like what you see.

You got some great advice from Nathalie. Do you use a flash with your camera? Do you have a macro or an icon that looks like a flower on the camera settings? I had better luck with my point and shoot digital cam, than with my digital SLR. but I am still learning all the capabilities of the SLR.
I, also use Picasa to tweak the pics. It is free and not very complicated to use.

to get the best quality from paper to computer ...is scanning .. scanning really looks best if done well ..lighting is everything when taking quality pictures ...I know indoor lighting can yellow and darken that drawing and without a program to lighten it back up .. you could spend alot of time trying to get it right .

Hi Kim,

I tried to scan, and the quality was not right. It looked cold to me and also needed adjustment. How do you do it?

I think its important NOT to use "auto" settings when trying to photograph drawings and paintings.

Auto-exposure assumes that the metered area averages out to a mid-grey (somewhere between 12% and 18% reflectance) and sets the exposure accordingly - this is why photos of pencil-drawings tend to look dark, as if they are on grey paper, instead of white - basically, they are underexposed, so you need to increase the exposure or aperture, or set "exposure compensation" accordingly, on digital cameras; or spot-meter on an area which really is mid-grey.

Auto-white balance assumes that the colours in the scene average out to presets (usually, again, to a neutral grey) which are typical of snapshot photography - if your painting has an unusual colour-mix, your camera will do its best to balance it as if it was a typical scene, thus throwing your colours severely off-kilter!

The way to get round this is to realise that what needs to be white-balanced for is the colour-temperature of the lighting used to illuminate the artwork. Most cameras have a group of presets, for indoor/tungsten, sunlight, and overcast, among others - the simplest approach is to select the preset which is closest to the lighting conditions.

Don't allow it to do an auto white balance on your coloured drawing or painting. If you want to do a custom white balance, then you need to do that on a white or neutral-grey card placed in the same position where you will then be photographing your artwork.

Dave

the camera you are using sounds fine ... its not so much the pixels you count on for clarity that just determins the size of the image .. but the lense is what you want .. a very good quality lense ...they sell you on saying its 7 pixels ....but look for lense quality .

scanning can be tricky ....most new scanners will scan nicely ...the older one unless they were a very nice model scan poorly .

before i scanned mine i took pictures of them .. first started doing it in the shaded area then went to a white light not yellow and that worked great .. the I got my scanner and that was even better ....but now my camera plugs in to my PC so now I get very good pics .

Hi Blondie72......I find scanners and camera's can be frustrating... especially when I try to make my drawings look as original as possible after I upload them. I found learning about scan settings and resolution makes the world of a difference....I found this link and tutorial to be very informative..

http://www.fotofinish.com/resources/center.../resolution.htm

....hope I helped.



best of luck, Brian.

Here is a decent guide I found on Ebay a while back. He moved his guide to his own site at www.camerajim.com

http://www.sigma-2.com/camerajim/cjgartwork.htm

Hope this helps!

Tony