Art Photography: How to Photograph Your Art and Illustrations

1. Introduction: Art is a beautiful thing, and I think that the way in which we view it is just as important as the work itself. A good photograph of artwork should really emphasize the artist's work and add to the story that they're trying to tell or emphasize the visuals that the artist is expressing. It shouldn't distract from it. My name is Sean Dalton. I am a lifestyle photographer from San Francisco, California, and today I'm going to show you guys how you can capture beautiful images of your art for social media. Today I'm in Chiang Mai, Thailand with the amazing artists and fellow Skillshare teacher, Charly Clemens. Today we're going to be shooting some of her beautiful artwork and capturing some images that she can use on her social media accounts, on her website, and just for her general online presence. We're going to start things off with the basics. We're going to cover things like gears, lighting, styling, composition, inspiration. Then we're actually going to let our creative sides out, and we're going to do a live action photo shoot that you guys can follow along with. We're going to be shooting some of Charly's work here in her little studio as well as outside, taking you guys through our entire workflow so you can see how we create these beautiful images. I'll also provide you guys with some awesome inspiration and where to find inspiration, so when you go out and shoot your class project, you'll know exactly where to start. In this class, we're going to be focusing on capturing three different compositions, and I'm going to be shooting each composition with both my iPhone and my main camera body, the Sony a7 III. Those three shots are; the flatly, the straight up shot or basically just straight up on the wall in front of you, and the detailed shot. These types of shots work for both printed work or work that's on actual paper as well as digital work. So if you want to photograph your iPad screen and show your digital work, we're going to be doing that as well. We're going to be capturing the shots, like I said, both here in the studio as well as outside to give you guys a good mix, and to show you guys that you can pretty much shoot anywhere. Basically this class is just for anybody that wants to take better photos of their art. Maybe you're somebody that knows absolutely nothing about photography, and all you have is an iPhone or maybe you're somebody that has shot your work in the past or you dabble in photography and you have a proper camera. No matter who you are, this course is basically for anybody that just wants to capture better images of their artwork for use on social media. Capturing photos of your artwork shouldn't be hard and my goal with this course is to just give you guys the knowledge and information that you need. So when you go out and capture photos of your artwork, you can capture beautiful images that you can use to success on your social media accounts or on your website or wherever you want to use that online. With that said guys, it's time to get started. I really hope you take the time to enroll in this class. We've got a lot of really good information to cover, and if you do decide to enroll, then I will see you in the very first lesson. Let's get after it. 2. Class Project: If you've seen any of my other courses, you know that I absolutely love to do class projects. In this course, it's certainly no different. This course has a class project and the class project for this course is to capture one photograph of your artwork using one of the techniques that you learned from this class. Whether that's the flat lay image or the straight-up shot or a shot that you took outside of your art work, or even just a simple white background shot, which we're going to do later on in this course. Well no matter what that is, go ahead and capture one of those photos of your own artwork and post it here in the class project. I really want you guys to get creative with this. There's a lot of different things you can do here, and I want to see how you guys, which I'm sure you're all amazing artists, I want to see how you create something beautiful. If you guys need some inspiration, well, later on in this course we're going to be talking about inspiration. But I have included a Pinterest board that I created with some of the inspiration that inspired me for the shoot that we're going to do today, and you can find that in the link in the project description. With that said guys, I really hope you take the time to complete this class projects. But before you do that, let's dive into the course content so you know exactly what to do. 3. Equipment: Alright guys, so now we're going to take a few minutes to talk about equipment. I think this discussion bring up anxiety in some people, they think, oh, I don't have a good camera to shoot with, all I have is my smartphone. Well, that's totally fine. In fact, what we're going to be shooting every image in this course with both an iPhone and my main camera body, the Sony A73. So if you don't have a main camera, a big camera, that's totally fine, just use your smartphone, it's going to be perfectly fine for this course. However, those that do want to use a DSLR or a mirrorless camera, we're going to cover that as well. So my main camera body is the Sony A73. It's a full-frame Sony mirrorless camera, and it's a very good camera. I'm shooting on it now that's why I'm not holding it in my hand. So I'm going to be shooting the course on that camera and I'm going to be shooting with a 35-millimeter F1.4 prime lens. Now, if all of that makes no sense to you, that's totally fine. The only thing you really need to focus on when you're shooting with a DSLR or a mirrorless camera is the focal length of your lens. When you're shooting a flat layer, you don't want to have a big zoom lens on your camera because then you're not going to be able to just stand above the artwork, you're going to have to like fly up in the air and somehow zoom in on the artwork, it's just not practical. So having a somewhat wide-angle lense is going to be your best bet for shooting flat layers, for shooting detailed shots and for shooting the straight up shots, which we're going to talk about later in this course. So I recommend anything between a 24 millimeter and a 35-millimeter lens for those shots. Actually the iPhone, which really popularized the flat lay photograph is a 28 millimeter lens, which is right in the middle of between 24 and 35, so it's absolutely perfect. So any lens with enough focal length is fine if you have a newer starter camera and it has a 18-55 millimeter lens on the front, that's great, that's all you need. So moving on from cameras, one of the things that you might want is tripod. Tripods are really helpful, especially when you're shooting alone. I'm not going to be using a tripod today because I have Charlie with me and I'm going to be shooting the work and moving around, I like to kind of change the compositions up a little bit but if it's just you and you really are alone and you want to focus on styling everything and making sure it looks really good, I totally recommend a tripod. It's even better if you can get a tripod as a bar that sticks out, and then you can hang your camera to look upside down. I don't have that, but like I said, I'm not using a tripod today, so that's totally fine. You can pick up super cheap tripods on Amazon or on eBay, honestly, it doesn't matter. Yeah, you can buy a really expensive tripod, but it's not going to make that big of a difference. Any cheap tripod is totally fine, and also you can even get a small tripod for your phone. I have this little one from Manfrotto which I love, and then it has a little phone clip and it's great for vlogging or for shooting things on your phone like still-life or like these photo-like shots we're doing here today. Another really cool tool is this little clamp thing that Charlie has and actually films some of her work on here for social media. It clamps to the end of a desk and then you can just hang your phone and it's really good for flat layers or just recording yourself. This one's pretty cheap, it's not the best, but you can get some really good ones on Amazon or eBay, like I said. So I highly recommend something like this if you're shooting alone, if not, not too much to worry about and certainly not necessary. Now, the next few pieces of gear I'm going to talk about are all related to lighting. As we're going to get into later in this course, lighting is super important. Don't worry, we're going to be shooting everything in this course with natural light but there are some tours that you can use to help shape that natural light to make it even softer and make it even better and just make it look better for your photographs. So the first thing I recommend, and I recommend this for pretty much everybody because they're super cheap, they're compact and they're really good, it's a five in one reflective set which are everywhere, most camera shops will have them and you can get them online. They're super cheap and they're awesome for both defusing lights. So when the sunlight is like entering your studio and it's just way too bright, you can use the white reflector to help soften that light or if you don't have enough light, you can put it on the other side and help reflect some of that light coming into the room back onto your artwork and it's a really good tool. Now, what's so great about diffusers is you don't actually need one of these to get the job done. You can diffuse sunlight with something like a white sheet. So a sheet from your bed that's white, that's transparent, the light's going to hit it and it's going to actually make that light source bigger and when the bigger the light source, the softer that light source is going to be. So a sheet from a bed which you can hang in front of a window, or if you have white curtains in front of your windows that are transparent, that's absolutely perfect. If you don't have that, you can actually tape some printer paper, to your window so that will help diffuse the light before it hits your little scene. Then another thing I recommend is a white poster board and these are awesome reflectors. They're really going to help bounce that light around and help you create a nice little well-lit scene. So those are some of the things that I will recommend for your lighting set up. I'm going to show you guys how I would use these in the shooting section of this course, but I just wanted to bring them up now because those are some of the things that you might want to use. But in terms of actually just getting this course done, all you really need is a camera, an iPhone or a camera, and some artwork and the desire to capture something awesome. But that's gear out of the way, guys, let's move on to some of the settings, some of the camera settings or smartphone settings that you can use to capture some of these images. 4. Camera and Phone settings: Now I want to talk about camera settings, and this is relevant for both smartphone shooters and for those of you that are shooting on a proper camera. For shooting using a smartphone, the only thing that you're really going to need is to enable the grid on your phone. You can do this for both iPhones and Android phones. For you iPhone users, go ahead and just go to Settings, Camera, and then enable that Grid. That's all you have to do. For Android users, it's pretty much the same process just go to your Settings and enable the Grid. The reason why the grid is so important is because it really allows us to evaluate where everything is in our frame and it also makes sure that our phone is perfectly level when we're shooting those flat lays. That's important because we want to make sure our phone is nice and level when we're shooting the flat lays to ensure everything just looks as good as possible. The basic camera apps on the iPhone and Android phones are going to be totally fine. They're going to do everything that you need them to do. That's especially the case with the flat lays. Now, once we start getting a little bit more creative, or we're doing the straight up shots, or we're taking photos of artwork out in front of us, then you might get to a point where you want to have a blurry background, to give it that artistic look into blur the background behind it, and really put the focus on the artwork. Some of the new iPhones have a 50 millimeter lens that has this thing called portrait mode and Android phones have this as well. It allows you to basically blow the background behind your image, and that gives it a really core artistic look. If you don't have a newer iPhone with that third camera lens, that's totally fine. You can actually use an app called Focos, and that's spelled F-O-C-O-S, that's for iPhone. For Android, you can use an app called AfterFocus. These apps will basically allow you to blur the background behind your image without having that third lens, so it will give you that really core artistic look without having the extra lens. Now once again, you're not going to want to be using these apps when we're shooting flat lays, because with the flat lay we want everything nice and in focus. But if we're trying to get creative and we want to blow the background with the straight-up shots, totally fine. You can use these apps to get that creative look. Now for those of you that are shooting with your DSLR or your mirrorless camera. Camera settings are going to play that big of a role, and actually auto is probably going to do the trick most of the time with these photos because it's pretty straightforward and you're not really stressing your camera too much. But as a photographer, I always shoot in manual and I do want to give you guys some tips for capturing the best photo that you can. I'm just going to be going over the basics here, but if you really want to understand the ins and outs of exposure in photography, I highly recommend checking out my photography essentials course. It's my best rated course on score share, and I think you'll love it if you are interested in learning more about photography. But for this course, I just want to focus on a few simple principles that will guide you for the shoot. The three things you want to worry about when you're shooting these types of photo is, number 1, you want to make sure your aperture is set to a value that's going to ensure you have nice, crisp, sharpness throughout your frame. You're going to want to make sure your shutter speed is set above 1/150th of a second, anything above that is fine. Reason being if you go below that, we'll then you're going to have camera shake and your photo, you don't want blurry photos. Then the last thing is just to keep your ISO as low as possible to ensure that you have the best image quality that you can. With aperture, you want to set your aperture anywhere between f/4 and f/8. Most lenses are sharpest around there, and that's going to give you the best step in the field throughout your frame to make sure everything is nice and in focus. Now, if you're shooting a straight-up photo and you want to have the background blurred, well then you're going to want to open up your aperture as wide as possible. You can do that by setting it to its maximum aperture. That might be a four, that might be f/2.8, that might be f/1.8, or so my lenses, those can open up to f /1.4 and that will really create a nice blurry artistic background. For shutter speed, like I said, I always recommend setting it to 150 of a second or anything faster than that. You can use shutter speed to balance out your exposure. Once you set your aperture and then you set your ISO to 100, then you can just adjust your shutter speed to ensure that you have a balanced exposure in your image. You will know that you have a balanced exposure in your image, if your light meter lines up in the middle. If you guys don't want to shoot in manual, you can just simply shoot in aperture priority mode, that little a mode on the camera. Then you could just say your aperture and the camera will do the rest, and most likely it's going to be perfectly fine. With camera settings that pretty simple, but know that they are going to change with every environment that you go into. So make sure you're really paying attention to them if you're shooting with a DSLR or a mirrorless camera. The last camera setting I want to go over is white balance. White balance is essentially what the camera understands true white to be. If your white balance is off, the colors are in your image are going to look a little bit off. They might look really warm. They might look really bluish; you want to make sure your white balance is set to a value where it's going to look the best, and most of the time, auto white balance is going to be totally fine. The camera is really smart, it's going to see the white points in your image and it's going to set your white balance to a value that looks the best. If you don't want to use auto white balance, I recommend using daylight or cloudy, and then you can just go ahead and adjust the white balance and editing, which I'm going to show you how to do later on in this course. Just to reiterate, if you're shooting on a smart phone, make sure you have that grid enabled, and then you can check out some of those apps for getting that blurry background. If a shooting on a DSLR, first make sure your aperture is set anywhere between f/4 and f/8. Make sure your shutter speed is above 1/150th of a second, and then make sure your ISO is as low as possible. That's all you need to know to capture some awesome photos. In the next lesson, we're going to talk about what constitute a good photo. What are the three factors that contribute to an image being beautiful? Let's go talk about that now. 5. Anatomy of a Good Photo of Art: Before we start shooting with Charlie today, I want to talk about some of the factors that contribute to a beautiful photo of arts or just a beautiful photo in general. These three concepts are universal among all of my photography courses. I talk about them in pretty much everything because they really relate to every type of photography. These three factors are: lighting, styling, and composition and if you can nail all three, you're going to have a fantastic image. Let's dive into them one by one and go over why they're so important and then when we're shooting later on in this course, I'm going to be talking about them in specifics to our shoot, so then when you go out and shoot, you know that you're hitting all of the bases that you need to hit to make sure your image is going to be a good one. At the top of the list is lighting and lighting is really such an important piece of the puzzle and that's simply because cameras capture lights. When you take an image, the cameras are actually reading the light waves and recording them on a sensor and that's what creates your image. Lighting is something that's so often overlooked by new photographers, but it's actually the thing that I found that really separates the best photographers from new photographers. It's not their composition, it's not their creativity, it's their technical understanding of light. The king of all light is natural light, light from the sun, and the reason why it's so good is because it's bright, it's widely available, unless you live in the poles, which I'm sorry about, but for the most part, it's widely available, it's beautiful, it has lovely colors, and we can really manipulate it in a way that works best for us. However, not all natural light is created equal and direct sunlight is often way too harsh to be shooting photos in, unless it's the look that you're going to be going for. But in this course, we really don't want that direct sunlight. It's just too bright and it's going to cast a lot of shadows in our work, it's going to skew things, and it's just not going to make our art look very good. Thus, our main goal with this course is to look for nice, soft, diffused natural light. You can diffuse natural light by using some of the things that I've talked about in the equipment section of this course. When shooting our artwork, we want to make sure that our light is as even as possible. If the light is not even and balanced, then one side of our artwork might look really bright and the other side might look really dark, and we don't want that. We want to make sure our art is as unbiased as possible and it's presented in a way in which the artist really wanted it to be presented. The best way to ensure that we have nice even lighting on our work is to shoot indoors, in a bright room, and near a window. A room that's white is going to be the best because that light is going to enter the room and bounce around and really create a nice even lighting scenario for you. If you're in a dark room, well then you're going to want to get closer to the window and then you're going to want to use something like a reflector to help reflect that light back onto your little scene where you're going to be capturing your art. Another thing I recommend is to always turn the lights off in the room, turn off the man-made lights in the room and that's because they're often going to cast weird colors in your image. If you have artificial light coming from the lights in your ceiling or a lamp and then natural light, they're never going to be perfectly balanced and it's going to be really hard to make sure that you have a proper white balance in your photo, so you can display the colors accurately. I always recommend turning off the lights in the room and just using the natural light that's available to you. That's the basis of lighting. I wanted to introduce the topic here, but we're really going to discuss in depth when we actually shoot. I'm going to break down the lighting environment of the studio, I'm going to shape the light, and it's all going to make more sense when we actually do it. The next major concept that I want to talk about is styling. Styling refers to pretty much all of the things in your photograph and how they are arranged in accordance to your main subject, which in this case, is your artwork. When we're shooting indoors in a controlled studio environment, we really have a lot of control over styling our scene. We can add everyday items from around the house to help enhance the story or the image that your artwork is trying to portray. You can use things like pencils, paintbrushes, tape, ribbon, even cups of coffee, or even a smartphone. Pretty much anything that's going to add to the story that you're trying to tell in your artwork can be used as a styling object in your photo. As I said before, when you're looking for objects for styling, you don't need to go out and go shopping for this. Oftentimes, you have things laying around the house or even outside, if you take a step outside and there's some leaves or something like that or some grass, you can use that if you think it's going to add to your scene. But usually, mostly just everyday objects are going to be the best for your photograph. Really, anything can work here. I just want you to keep thinking about the question, how do you want your work to be portrayed, what kind of objects do you think are going to enhance your work? Another major topic of styling is going to be the background and this is relevant for flat lays or for the straight up shots, which we're going to talk about soon here. The background is going to play a massive role in the scene and the background is totally part of the styling because there's going to be objects, there's going to be textures, there's going to be colors, and they're going to play an important role in your image. For this course, I went to the local art store and I picked up a bunch of different poster boards. I got a blue one, a pink one, and some white ones, and I also got some really cool fabrics. Then we also just took some stuff that was lying around the house to use as potential backgrounds. Backgrounds are really going to add so much to your photograph. I mean, your artwork is sitting on something and so that something should emphasize the art. I think, colorful poster boards are really cool, especially if the colors are going to complement the colors in your art. Shooting outdoors is also a great way to mix up your styling because you can introduce a lot of really natural things into your photographs. Even if you're just putting your art down flat on the ground, in a grassy area, or even on dirt, if you think that's good for your photograph or maybe you're holding it in front of a bush or whatever that might be, shooting outside can really introduce a lot of interesting stylistic aspects into your photograph. I always recommend doing that as well. One last thing before we move on to composition and that is, I understand that not everybody is going to want to have a styled image, some people just want to take a one-to-one, super straightforward, unbiased photograph of their artwork. In other words, something like a scan of their artwork except they're just using a photo to do it. Well, you can do that by just placing your artwork on a white background. Make sure you have really even lighting and then photograph that image, crop it, and you're pretty much good to go. It's going to look like a scan. I'm going to show you guys how to do that in the shooting section, but I just want to say, you don't need to style your image if you don't want to, it's totally a subjective thing. Last, but certainly not least, is composition. Composition essentially refers to how you orient all the objects in your frame and then how you capture those objects with your camera. When you're shooting arts, especially 3D art, there's a lot of different ways to capture that art. You can shoot it from many different angles and portray in many different ways. But when you're shooting 2D art, art that's flat, such as an illustration or a painting or a watercolor, in my opinion, there's only a few different ways to shoot that work effectively. As I stated earlier on in this course, there's really three compositions that we're going to be focusing on in this course. Those are the flat lay, the straight up photo, where you're taking it basically straight on like it's hanging on a wall or on a desk, and then the detailed shots or getting close and showing some of those details and those detailed shots are great for supplementary shots for B-roll shots, I like to say. After you have your main photo, you might have one of those to show some of the details, really emphasize certain parts of the artwork. The flat lay is one of the most classic forms of shooting art and that is essentially, when you're looking down on the art, the art is laying flat on the floor or on a desk and you're looking down upon it and shooting it that way. The flat lay is so good because it really allows you to style things in a really unique way. You can get super creative with it. It's also very easy to get the lighting setup for a flat lay and you can also adjust the background in a way that really enhances your image. Flat lays are such a classic form of photographing artwork and we're definitely going to be focusing on those in this course. The straight up shot, like I said, is when the photo is straight up in front of you, such as on a wall or on a desk like behind me, these photos would be straight up and this is also good for showing artwork in a setting. If you wanted to show your art hanging on a wall or in a natural setting, that you might be in every day such as the studio, that's a really good way to portray your art in an everyday setting. Now the reason why these types of shots are so good, the flat lay and the straight up shot, is because when we view a piece of artwork, that's how we want it to be viewed. The artist painted it with a straight-on view and that's how it should be viewed with a straight-on view. They're both going to be really accurate representations of that artwork. Of course, the last shot that I mentioned is the detailed shot and like I said before, that's really getting close up to your subject and capturing different pieces of the artwork that you want to emphasize. If you take your first shot and it's a flat lay and you capture everything nice and bright, maybe you're posting on Instagram, you can swipe to the right and then your second shot, it's going to be a detailed close up of the face of the subject or whatever your illustration or your painting is and you get really close on showing some of those details. You can also use this to show some of the details behind your creative process. If you're painting, maybe it's taking a close-up shot of your paintbrush as it's hitting your canvas or something like that, so you can get creative and you can show a little bit more of your process, and I think the detailed shots are really good for that. When shooting detailed shots, I like to work my way around the piece of art and just take a bunch of different photos of different things and then later on, we can go and crop them and make sure that they're really emphasizing the art in a way that we want them to. But now that we've talked about all three of these concepts that constitute a good photo, lighting, styling, and composition, I want to take a look at five photographs of art that I really love, that have inspired me, that I think are really good. I'm going to break them down, why I think they're good, and then hopefully this will be some inspiration for you as well, for when you go out and shoot. Let's do that now. 6. Example Images: A Breakdown: The first one I want to show you guys is this beautiful video actually from Lauren home, home, sweet home. It's a video, but it would actually work just as good as a photo and I just thought it was so good I wanted to share with you guys. So as we can see here, we have her painting a little poster here and then the overall setting is perfect. Starting off at the top with lighting, the lighting is nice and even its bright. Her art is displayed very well. It just looks really, really good. So she's done a really good job here with the lighting. But where this scene really shines is the styling and the composition. As you can see, she has all these interesting little object, she has bread, she has cookies, coffee, a plant, a pencil, then little stars and then even a little badge, and it just looks really cool. It's so interesting and it does actually add so much to her little painting here. If she was only just painting on a green piece of paper, it might be a little bit boring because we have all of these other things in the frame, it just makes it so, so interesting. In terms of composition, I love how she kind of twisted the paper a little bit, turned it, so it's tilted. That just looks really good and everything is just fitting in the frame really well. So fantastic job in this image. I really love it. Next up is this really cute little flatly shot by Art Arena Vikt which I found on Instagram and I just love it so much. This might be because I love Christmas, I love the holidays, and I love her art here. It's just, it's so moody, it's so emotional. I love it. But in terms of the overall image, the lighting is very good as you can see her art is well lit, and then for the styling, she's photographing it on a dark wooden table that's really allowing her work to pop. It's really allowing those reds to pop. It's not distracting. Then she just has a few objects on the table that add to the scene. She's got some mistletoe, she's got some green Christmas tree plant there, and then some art supplies. Then she also has her hand in the frame, and hands are very emotional thing. We are human beings, we see hands, we like hands. If you notice a lot of the best portrait photographers, they will have their models touching their face or something like that and that's because hands look really good. I love how this artist has done this here. They've done a really good job, and overall, I think it's fantastic. Composition, possibly it could be changed a little bit. It's kind of close up. Maybe it could be improved, but it's doing what it needs to do and it looks really good. So I like this image, definitely some inspiration for me. Next up is this shot by Forest Culture Design and I love this artist. There's not only an amazing artists, but they're amazing photographer as well. As you can see here, this is a straight-up short. These shots are hanging on the wall, and they're organized in a way that's really interesting and allowing for a really awesome composition. If they were next to each other, there would be a lot of empty space on the wall. It wouldn't look very good, but the way they are organized here, our eyes just naturally navigate from the left of the frame to the top right of the frame where we should have other artwork, and then it navigates around to the other aspects of it. It's very well lit. I like how the artist positioned these pieces of paper on the wall, on a dark gray wall, which looks really good. So the color is good, they're really allowing it to pop, and then those pops of green in the corner really emphasize the greens that we see in the illustration here. So it just looks really good, I love the color palette and I love the art as well. So major inspiration for me for my straight up shots and somebody to think about while I'm shooting later today. The next one is a flat layer by a photographer that I've always really looked up to, and that's Stefie Reads. Stefie is amazing at styling and lighting. She is the best photographer I know at styling a scene and really incorporating objects that really, really add to her scene. As you can see here, we see a small little piece of art in the middle of the frame, and then it's just surrounded by all of these things that just add to it. First of all, the subject matter of her painting there is really nice and moody and then it's enhanced by all the moodiness that we see in the frame. She has some yarn, a little pumpkin, a candle, a leather notebook, some plants, a book, and the styling is really spot on and all her images are really well styled. I also really like the lighting in the scene. We have one light source and it's very, very soft and there's also a lot of very creatively used shadows here. So she used one soft light source and perhaps in a dark room, but it was enough to make sure that she had her main piece of art here in the middle of the little house, nice wooden well-lit. Well, all of the other things in the frame are casting interesting shadows that really enhance the style of the image. So I really like how organic she is with her styling and how natural it just looks. Now this is an image from my good friend Cat Coquillette, who is another top teacher here on Skillshare and I'm sure that you've probably seen her work. I love how simple, but how well this short works. As you can see, this was taken outside in front of a bush, and it's very, very simple. Cat just held it up in front of a bush with her hand and took it with her iPhone, straight on, super simple, nothing fancy, but it really works. The lighting is fantastic, it's nice and soft, it makes the colors really pop, and then the styling is really where this image shines. The greens really make that white piece of paper pop, and that allows her artwork to really shine. I also love all of the little bracelets that she has on her hand. That is definitely part of the styling, and that definitely looks a lot more interesting than say, a naked hand. Then lastly, the composition, which is a simple, straight up style composition, looks really good and it just works. So big props. Cat has a few of these types of images on her page and I think they're all really good, and they're definitely some inspiration for me when I'm [inaudible] shooting later outside. Last but not least, this is a shot that I really like from Letters Hoppe, and it's a shot of her iPad here, as well as some other papers in the background that really add to the scene. So this is digital art, this is of an iPad, and we're going to be shooting some of that today with Charlie because she does digital work through procreates, so I wanted to show that. So as you can see here, we have the iPad in the middle. The scene is well lit, pretty simple lighting, everything is nice and lit well. With digital art, we're not too stressed about ensuring that our light is really good. We want to just make sure we don't have reflections on the iPad, which is pretty simple to do, and as you can see there's no reflections here. So lighting wise, looks really good, styling wise, fantastic job in this image, fantastic use of color. So as you can see in her illustration here, the color palette is kind of soft, it's kind of pastelly, and that's really enhanced by the colors that we see in the scene around the illustration. So the pink notebook, the mint green, or [inaudible] green notebook off to the right even further, the full background is blue and then there's some white in the papers as well as some pink pastel pencils and there was an orange one there as well, and they really compliment the colors in the image. So simple composition, simple flatly, but works really well and I love how the artist did this here. I also really like how this artist used some B short, some detailed shots. So if I swipe to the right, you can see there's some detailed shots of some lettering you can see here which are beautiful. I love this, it is a really good example and I think it's a fantastic image for Charlie's shoot today because we're going to be shooting some very similar color palettes to this one, so I'm excited to see this. It's really going to help when we are shooting later on. Now after this, we're going to do one more short lesson on where to find some inspiration for your shoot, which I think is super, super important before you actually start shooting. So let's talk about where you can find some inspiration, and then we'll go shoot. 7. Inspiration!: So if you're an artist, I'm sure you're very well versed in inspiration. I'm sure you have a lot of inspiration in your life already. I'm sure that you put a lot of inspiration into your work. But I do want to highlight some of the inspiration sources that I found for this course in regards to styling and framing your photograph of your artwork.So I think the best place to find inspiration for your shoot is just to start with the artist that you already look up to. So other people that are really killing it in the game, they're really putting out stuff that you really like. Go check out their Instagram or their Facebook or wherever they're posting content and look at how they're presenting it. Often times people are going to present digital scans of their artwork, but sometimes they might post a release stylized photograph of their art. I think that's the best form of inspiration because you already really are drawn to their work. So if you see them presented in a unique way and they're really stylized way that could be some massive inspiration for you. So always start with the people that you look up to most and then you can go from there. So I found a lot of inspiration for this shoot today by browsing different hashtags on Instagram. I was browsing hashtags like flatlay, illustration, watercolor, and then I would go through, find an artist that I like and then I will just scroll through their feeds and look for images that inspired me. Once I found an image that inspire me, I would go ahead and save it and I actually created a small collection on Instagram of saved photos and I titled it art inspiration. So all of the images that have inspired me for the course today, they're all saved there and that's been a massive resource for me and exploring which direction I want to take with Charlie when we shoot later today. So I definitely recommend browsing various hashtags on Instagram, finding artists that you like, and then saving those posts that you like into a separate folder where you can see them later before you shoot, right before you shoot you pull it out, you look through them and then you can see those to give you inspiration for your shoot. Other forms of photography can serve as inspiration for you as well, doesn't necessarily have to be a photograph of a piece of artwork. I think hashtag flatlay is a really good example of that. Not every flatlay photo is a photo of a piece of artwork. In fact, most of them aren't. Often times it's food, often times it's products or whatever that might be, It's not a piece of art and that's okay because I think a lot of really good flatlay photographers do such a fantastic job of styling and they really know how to incorporate objects that add to the scene, to the mood of the photograph and those can serve as really important forms of inspiration. When you're looking at these photos and you're looking for inspiration, think about those things. Think about lighting, styling competition and really break those down in every image that you see. So the other form of inspiration that I found for this course was Pinterest. I found so much good stuff on Pinterest, and I actually created a special Pinterest inspiration board for this course that I'm going to share with you. There's a link in the description of this course and in the course project you guys got to check that out where you can see some of the photos that inspired me for this course and hopefully some of these photos might inspire you as well for when you do your class project. But that's it for inspiration guy just wanted to touch on it. I think it's super important and it's really going to help you when you go out and shoot later. So find those sources of inspiration. Really evaluate them, break them down based on their lighting, their styling, their composition, and then use that inspiration for your own shoot. But now it's finally time to shoot guys, let's get this stuff packed up and shoot some really cool photos with Charlie. Let's do it. 8. Shooting in Studio: All right guys, we've talked about a lot of different stuff in this course and now it's finally time to shoot. I'm here with a lovely Charlie Clemens, my very good friend. Hey, guys. She's also a very successful teacher here on Scotia. I'm sure you recognize her. You should check out some of her courses.Today we're going to be shooting some of her work. We have both digital work and some of her printed work. Charlie is a digital artist, so we are going to be shooting her iPad. We're going to be shooting her iPad, some of her work displayed on the iPad, as well as just some plain shots of her iPad that we can superimpose photos on later in Photoshop. I'll show you guys how to do that. It's super simple. We're shooting in Charlie's studio today, which is this lovely room here in Chiang Mai, Thailand. I'm sure you can already see the natural light is amazing and that's one of the reasons why we chose it. Obviously, this is where Charlie's creative spaces and it's very authentic to her work. So we wanted to shoot in a place that meant something to her. We had access to a lot of the things she uses when she goes through her creative process, as well as the light. The light is very nice. We have this massive window here with natural light pouring into the scene. It just looks really, really good. As you very well know, lighting is one of the three components to capturing a beautiful photo of artwork or just a beautiful photo in general. Because we have good light, we're definitely going to get some good photos today. Once again, we're going to be capturing three different compositions today. The flat lay, the straight up still live shot, and some detailed shots as well, which we're going to work in throughout the process. But we're going to start things off from the top with the flat lay. We have a lovely setup here with awesome light. I'm going to show you guys how we set it up, and then we're going to take you through the styling process before we capture some really cool shots. So let's get after it and let's take some cool photos. Okay guys, so this is the setup for the flat lay here. As you can see, we took the table which was where I shot the rest of the course in the corner back there and we moved it right next to the window here. Well, actually it's a door and that's why we're shooting through the door here but, the reason why we did that is because the natural light is coming in and it's really nice. It's about 10: 30 in the morning right now. The sun is on the other side and it just looks really nice. The light is nice and soft. If it was later in the day, the sun would be facing us and it would be way too bright and it would not look good. One thing to reiterate, when you're putting the table next to the window, it's very helpful if you have some type of diffuser. So if you have some white curtains, those are going to look really good in your scene because it's going to help soften that light even more and make sure you have nice even light. The other thing we're using today is a white poster board. I picked this up for like a $ at the local art store. It's awesome because it'll allow us to take the light that's entering this room and reflect it back onto the work to make sure we have nice even lighting. We're going to be positioning it on a chair because it's just a lot easier so Charlie doesn't have to hold it. So we can just push this chair up right here and have the board right like that. So that's essentially our lighting setup for the flat lay here. Once again, that's one of the most important pieces of the puzzle. But of course, styling is the second piece of the puzzle and with these flat lay shots, we really need to make sure we're styling it correctly and in a way that compliments the artwork and compliments the colors and everything else. I did say that I wanted to shoot some white background shots and that's very, very simple to do if you just want an unbiased photograph of your work, basically like a photo that's going to look like a photoscan. You can do that by just placing a white poster board below your art and capturing a few photos that way, and then cropping it later.That's going to give you the most even light, it's going to look the best. So let's do that real quick. Then we'll style everything and make some really cool style flat lay shots. So we actually have another poster board here, a white poster board. I'm going to place this one on the bottom of the scene here. Thank you, Charlie. These poster boards are amazing because they are nice and white and they allow the light to reflect even better, no shadows, you can see we're putting one of Charlie's artworks here on the table, and then we're just going to reflect light back onto it. So in order to get the flat lay shot, I need to make sure I'm high. I have a little stool here and I'm going to step on the stool. That's just going to position me right above the artwork, and that's the best angle for these unless you want to put it on the floor, but you need to be getting up high for this. Then I'm just going to line up the shot, once again I have the grid lines on and that's really going to help. I'm going to set my aperture to around 5.6, and then I'm going to adjust the rest of my settings to make sure that they look good. Then I will just line it up and capture the shot. I'm shooting on daylight white balance right here. I'm doing that because it'll just be easy for me to correct the white balance later in editing. That looks pretty good. Now, I'm also going to shoot some with the iPhone because iPhones are crazy nowadays, they look amazing. Once again, I'm using the grid lines to make sure everything is nice and balanced. Now that we've got the white background, we're going to do some style shots and this is where the beauty of the flat lay really comes together. We're going to get rid of white and we're going to use this nice four wooden table. I don't know what you call it, but it looks really nice. It's got a nice texture and it really compliments Charlie's artwork well because it's pretty simple, right? Yeah, it's pretty neutral. We have a bunch of different stuff here. We have yarn, all the stuff that you guys saw that was like kind of arranged on the bed. We can just start putting it around the photo or on the artwork here, and just kind of experimenting. When it comes to styling, there's no right or wrong. When I'm shooting the composition here, I'm just going to have the photo, the artwork in the middle of the frame and I'm going to align it with the grid lines because that is just going to make sure it's the best representation of the art as possible. If you're hitting it from an angle, it's not going to look good. You want to hit it from straight on top. So anything you want to really display in the show Charlie? So my favorite color is pink, as you can see my artwork, I have a lot of pink objects that maybe I could try and balance out or bring out the pink a bit more. So I'm quite big with color. Obviously, this pink on this side, I could bring out a bit more pink here, and play around with that. Again if you have any colors in your artwork that you want to bring out, maybe you could try and find objects with similar colors. Color is very, very important and you guys can't see me but I'm shooting here, I'm up above. I'm shooting both horizontally and vertically. One of the things with shooting for social media, we're just going to style as we talk here. One of the things when shooting with social media is you want shoot vertically because you're going to be taking up more real estate on your viewer's smartphone. A lot of content is digested via smartphone nowadays. So if shooting vertically, it's going to take up more real estate on their page. So square is also really good, horizontal, not so great for social media, but very good for websites. So if you want to improve your portfolio, shooting horizontally is good as well. I'm going to be shooting both horizontally and vertically today. As you're shooting these flat lay too, you can also shoot some detail. You can just get really close to the work and move your camera a little bit closer. One thing to consider is the minimum focusing distance of your camera. Some lenses will get really, really close, some lenses won't. In the iPhone, it lets you get pretty close. So you can get pretty close and then you can even crop it more later to make sure you're really focusing in on some of those little details that you really like. But now let's try to experiment with some different colors. We have some different colors here. Let's try this blue. Yeah, so the blue and the yellow like obviously are complimentary colors, so they look really, really nice together. Maybe the orange scissor is a little bit too much for this. I'm going to take those out there. Awesome. Let's try some different work here. Let's take this out, and we have some other work that I think would look really nice with the blue, some pink. These are smaller photos, but I think they look really cool if we could just put them next to each other. Have it like that? There you go. Do a closer crop. Awesome. Do with the iPhone here. So now we're going to shoot the iPad here, we're going to keep it on the blue, and maybe one of your works will complement that. With the iPad, it's tough because it's an LCD screen, and cameras, they don't always do well with LCD screens. Some of the newer iPads, they get brighter, they might look a little bit better. This is an older one, but it still looks really good and even if it doesn't look great in the end, maybe the colors are off, we're going to superimpose a photo onto the screen, which is so easy in Photoshop, so i'll show you guys how to do that as well. We can just follow our same process here. Just style, put different things in the frame. I like how there's a cactus in the work, so we have a cactus we can put in there as well. Love these. This will be easy to crop into a square later as well. Now we have a different work here and it's vertical, and we're going to orient the iPad vertically and that's good for social media because we want to take vertical photos. Let's mix up the styling here. Once again, it looks dark and it's tough to get these iPads, the brightness, on point. I think it's going to look a lot better when we superimpose the photo on, in Photoshop later. The most important thing when we're shooting a mock-up is to make sure that we're using our grid lines to make sure we have a really nice balanced composition. If the camera is slightly tilted, it's going to create discrepancies in the size and it's going to be difficult to make them mock-up perfect. Make sure you're using those grid lines and make sure it's all lined up nicely. We've shot our flat layer and now it's time to move on to the straight-on-still-life type of shot that we talked about earlier, the second composition. Charlie and I had been, we've taken a little bit of time, we've put together a little bit of a scene here. As you can see, we have probably my favorite piece of Charlie's work here on the wall. We built a scene around it. This is the focal point here and you can tell by the colors this is some really nice bright yellow. There's not a lot of other yellow in the scene, but there are some complimentary colors. The green looks really nice, it really compliments the shade of yellow here and then everything else is neutral, which is nice. We build the scene around it and I just really love how this looks. The art, in a situation like this, it's going to look a lot more natural than a flat layer. It's going to be in a situation that is just more realistic. As Charlie was telling me earlier, if you're trying to sell your work, it's better to photograph it in a setting like this because this is how people are going to be displaying it, if they buy your work. They're going to be putting it in their room, on the wall or on a shelf or something like that. This is definitely a realistic and natural way of displaying your art. It's awesome because you can show a space. You're highlighting a space and the artwork is the focal point of that. I'm going to step around and I'm just going to take a bunch of different shots, both straight on, I'm going to backup, I'm going to come up close, and i'm just going to really mix up the different compositions here but always remembering that this is the focal point here, the artwork as the focal points. I'm trying to make sure that I'm highlighting that. In terms of lighting, we have this big window here on the side and it's pouring in a lot of natural light. While it is a little bit dark in this corner because this room isn't white, and if it was pure white, it's actually an off-white color, if it was pure white it would reflect light a little bit better, as well as if the sun was in a slightly different position, it would spill in and just create better light. What we have here is still very nice. I think it's important to note that the lighting is not always going to be perfect in every scenario that you're in and that's totally okay. You can still get amazing photos like you'll see in situations where the lighting isn't 100% perfect, but it's still really good. We have all the lights turned off in here so we only have natural light spilling in. One shade of light, one color, and it looks pretty good. Charlie brought up a really good point in terms of styling is, when you're styling a scene like this, It's important to have a variation of objects in your scene. So we have tall objects, short objects, big objects, little objects, as well as a variety of different colors, and that is really going to add a lot of visual interests in the scene. It's going to allow your eyes to naturally navigate throughout the scene and it's just aesthetic. It just looks good and our brains can really comprehend what's going on, and it creates a nice balanced scene as well. Enough talking, I'm going to do some shooting here, i'm going to shoot it at a variety of different angles, starting first, up-close and capturing it with everything around the scene. I'm just going to keep stepping back and taking more and more photos. I can also step around the room and take it from different angles as well. With these there's no right or wrong, you can experiment with it. I'm also shooting a mix of horizontal and vertical photos here. We'll just get some iPhone shots as well. I think that's it, guys. We took a ton of awesome photos today. We got some flat layers, we got some straight up still live shots, and we got we mixed some detail shots in there as well. Those detailed shots will be good for maybe the second or third photos in an album on something like Instagram. We are just focusing on some of the things that you really like in a piece of art. Charlie, what do you think? Do you think we've got some good photos? Yeah, we did and I just want to say that not everyone's artwork is the same. Just because we've styled it the way I like to style it, everyone is different. Just take the tips that we've talked about today and use it in your own work. Maybe have more moody work or dark styles. So switch it up like that but for me, I love color, i love bright lights, so yeah, it's perfect. That's a really good point. Everyone's different, everyone has different inspiration, everyone has different goals. Whatever that looks like for you, whatever your creative process looks like, it's going to be awesome. I'm excited to see it, and once you do create your photos, I would love to see those in the course project. Charlie and I are going to check those out and I want to give you guys some dark feedback on those as well so please take the time to do that. With that said, guys, we've got a lot of awesome photos, so now it's time to start editing. I'm going to head back to my studio and we're going to sit down and we're going to edit the photos on both my computer and on my iPhone. So let's go do that now. 9. Shooting Outdoors: At the end of the last lesson, I did say that I was going to go edit, but actually I want to take a few minutes to show you how you can shoot outside and how you can capture some really good photos outside. You might be thinking, Sean, why are you standing in the middle of a random street? I'm standing in the middle of the street because I was driving down this road and I found this plant and thought it was perfect. I absolutely love the color of this plant and I think it compliments Charlie's work really well. Charlie has two of these small illustrations, the pink ones that we were shooting earlier, and the colors really just go well with the screen. We're going to capture a few shots of those here real quick, and my friend named Neline is here to help me. I'm just going to have Neline hold the art work up in front of these plants and I'm just going to capture a few photos. But before we do that, I do want to talk about the lighting and when you're shooting outside, the most important thing is to have, once again, even lighting. If you're shooting in the middle of the day, it's going to be very hard to get this even lighting. You're going to have a lot of shadows, you're going to have a lot of bright areas and it's just not going to look very good. But if you're shooting in the afternoon, like for example, right now it's about 4:30 PM, the sun is starting to set, the light is really nice, so it's actually a really nice time to shoot. If you go look behind me, you can see the lighting is very flat, it's very simple, and that's because we're shooting in 100 percent shade. If you are going to shoot in the middle of the day, make sure you either shooting in full shade or in full sunlight, so then you don't have a bunch of crazy shadows and everything is just going to be nice and evenly lit. But I definitely recommend shooting either early in the morning or in the afternoon, and it's even better if you can shoot on an overcast day because an overcast day means the light from the sun is going to be very nicely diffused. If the light is still a little bit harsh, well, you can use the diffusers that we talked about earlier on in this course to help soften that light. The lighting we have here is really nice and I'm super excited about how these photos are going to come out. Neline's going to hop over here, we're going to capture a few shots, and I can't wait to show you guys this. In terms of camera settings, I'm shooting with a 35 millimeter lens, F1.4, the same lens I was shooting with before. But instead of stopping down my aperture to like F4 or F5.6 to get more sharpeners to the frame or shooting wide open at F1.4. I'm doing that because I want this to be nice and blurry and the artwork to be nice and focused, and it gives it that really cool artistic look. Nice. One thing I really love about Neline's nails is her nails really match the color of the artwork. When you're holding up our work in front of a plant or wherever you're holding it in front of, you could be holding it in front of a forest or something like that. Whatever is on your arms, your hands, can really add to that scene. I really like that Neline's nails are the shade of blue, it really compliments Charlie's work well, and I think it looks really cool. We can capture these with the iPhone as well so I'm going to do that and I want to use portrait mode to help blur the background a little bit. Once again, if you don't have portrait mode on your phone or if you don't have a newer phone that has a third lens that's going to blur the background, you can use one of those apps we talked about earlier, focus for the iPhone and after focus for android phones, that's going to give you a really cool artistic look behind your image and I highly recommend trying those out. But now that we've captured these straight-up shots with the photos in front of this really cool plant. We're just going to head across the street here and capture a few flatly photos with the photos straight on the ground so let's go do that now. We're across the street here because there is some grass. We're in like a really random area, and I think that's something to take away from this lesson, is you can find cool places to shoot your artwork outside, literally anywhere. You could be in the middle of a desert and there might be a single bush. But as long as you crop everything out, it can look like your photo is in a jungle. We're just going to capture a few flatlays of Charlie's work here on this grass. I like this grass because it's like wild grass, it's very thick and it has a lot going on. Then there is also some leaves here and they add some nice color. I'm just going to take our basic flatly here like we were doing before and capture like this. Just move things around a little bit. We do have a few more pieces of art here that we can just put down and just shoot them all together. I'm just styling it with the things that we have available to us, which in this situation is leaves. I really like these photos here, I think the colors are looking really nice. Because this grass is pretty dark green, it's really allowing these lighter colors in Charlie's illustrations to really pop and really come out, and I think that looks really nice. Once again, we'll capture a few with the iPhone here. For this, I'm just going to use the normal iPhone camera here and get close. Awesome. Now you can just arrange these however you want, there's no right or wrong here. But that's about it for shooting outside guys. I just wanted to show you some of the techniques that you can follow for shooting outside, where to find good lighting? Where to find even lighting? As well as just give you some general inspiration on where you might want to shoot when you're outside. I hope this lesson was helpful for you, but now it's finally time to edit so we're going to head back to the studio, we're going to sit down on the computer and we're going to edit a bunch of photos from today, so let's go do that now. 10. Editing & Creating Mock-Ups in Photoshop: Guys, well it's finally time to edit. We've captured a ton of good photos in this course, and now we're going to sit down and do some editing. I'm going to be editing both on my computer using Adobe Lightroom and Photo shop, and I'm also going to edit a few photos on my phone for those of you that are using your smart phone to edit. For those smartphone editors, I do want you to stick around though to see this computer editing session because a lot of the principles I'm going to talk about here, you can do the same exact thing on mobile. I want you to stick around so you know some of those editing concepts. In terms of editing on the computer here I have seven photos. I have the basic white background photo, which is like a photo scan. We have a flat lay here, another flat lay, we have a straight up shot here. One of the outdoor shots, a detailed shot, as well as an iPad shot. I'm going to show you guys how to open this up into Photoshop and actually superimpose the original digital file onto the iPad screen, because if you can see here, there's some weird discrepancies but we'll get there. Starting things off with the white background shine, this is for those of you that want to capture, like I said, a photo scan and you saw how we shot this, it was pretty simple. Now when we're editing this, we basically just want to do a few very basic things. The first thing we always want to do is make sure that our image is nice and straight and cropped. What I'm going to do is click this box here, I'm going go one-to-one, that's going to crop into a square. I'm going to do a basic straightener and then I'm just going to crop it a little bit. But there's a magical tool in Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Lightroom Mobile that makes this process of straightening your photo so simple. You scroll down here to Transform and you click "Auto", and it will just detect all of the different angles and completely straighten it, it's amazing. From there, we can just go ahead and crop our photo a little bit more. If you want to maintain the white background you can, hitting "Enter" or you can crop it all the way in, and there we go. That's pretty amazing and then all we really want to do now is just to touch it up. This is a raw photo, which means that it's not going to be very high in contrast, very high in saturation. We can easily change that by going to the basics, dragging up the white here until we get it to a point that we like and then doing the same thing with the black. That's already so crazy pops of color there, so here's the before, here's the after. Then another thing I always recommend is to adjust the white balance, so we have white here or if we went back before the crop we have all this white here. What you can do is click this little dropper, select a white area on your image, any pure white area and click, and that will basically change the white balance. It will detect the colors in your scene and adjust the white balance and actually, you should be doing that first before you crop it like this, but we still did it, so we're good to go. Then we'll crop it, we have a good white balance, we've added the colors and that's basically it. It's pretty simple for editing these white background photos, but things might get a little bit more complex when we edit a photo like this. Here, this is one of the flat lays that we shot, which I absolutely love because it has multiple pieces of Charlie's work in here. We styled it really well, we lit it really well, and for the most part it looks really good. But of course, you can see that it's not straight, the photo has tilted, my angle was off, but that's okay. We have a few tools to work with us and the first thing I'm going to do is click this here and I'm going to crop one-to-one first. I'm going to drag it in here so we only have the lines, there's no objects in here. I'm going to hit "Enter" and that's going to crop it and then I'm going to go down to Transform, click "Auto" once again, so we straighten everything and then we'll go back to the crop, go up, and then do As Shot. What we did there was we just completely straightened the photo. If I were to click "Auto Transform" before we cropped everything out, it would've taken into account the pencil, the ruler, all these different things and it would have made it really unstraight. So it's a lot easier to crop it first to the photo, then hit "Transform", and then we'll get a nice even crop. But first things first we're going to adjust the white balance here and we do that by clicking the dropper once again, highlighting over a white area on the image and clicking and that will sample the colors. This is making it a little bit less warm, I actually think it looks better a little bit warmer so I'm just going to leave it. I'm just going to undo that and leave it back where it was, I think that looks better. After that, we're going to move down and adjust the contrast by going to the whites and then going down to the blacks, and then I also like to adjust the shadows. Maybe bring those down, enhance the contrast even more, just kind of playing around with these basic adjustments here. I think the highlights are at a good place, I don't think we need to adjust those too much. But it's amazing what just a few basic adjustments can do to making a photo looks so much better, I think that looks really good. But one thing I do notice is that this side of the image is a little bit darker than this side and even if we're trying really hard to get even light, it's difficult to make it perfect every single time, but that's okay. In Lightroom we have this really awesome feature called a Graduated Filter here in the middle and what you can do is just drag from the left side over to about right there, midway. Reset it, and then we can just increase the exposure a little bit and that's just going to help balance our exposure on both side of the frame. Look at that, now it looks absolutely perfect and there's not a whole lot else I would do to this photo. If you did want to change some of the colors, there's something I do want to highlight here, and that's the HSL slash Color sliders here. These are incredibly powerful tools to ensuring that your color in your artwork is exactly how you want it to be. Hue refers to the shade of the color, so if I click this, click on the shade of yellow here and drag up, it'll actually change the hue of the color that I'm sampling, which in this case is yellow and orange, you can see there on the right. Saturation refers to the pureness of the color, so if you want super pure yellow, you drag up and if you want no pure yellow, basically black and white you drag down. Luminance refers to the brightness of the color, so the brightness of the yellow and the darkness of the yellow there, yellow and orange. In this current image, I think the colors look pretty spot on so there's not a whole lot I would do, but I just wanted to highlight those because that is a really good resource. But that's basically how I would edit this photo. It's pretty simple, just following these basic adjustments here and then at the end, if you just wanted to crop it a little bit more, say you want to crop it into a square for social media you can certainly do that as well. Now before we jump onto this next photo, I'm going show you guys an editing hack and that's where you basically copy the settings from a previous edit and paste it onto a new one. We'll go back to this image, I'm going to hit Command C, and that's going to bring up this Copy Settings panel. I'm going to select every single thing except Transform, Crop, and I'm also not going to select Local Adjustments. I'm going to hit "Copy", I'm going to go to the next photo, and I'm going to hit Command V, which is going to paste those settings right onto our photo. It looks great, everything looks really nice. Once again, we have this side a little bit dark, so I'm just going to drag it over a Graduated Filter here and just increase the brightness there good to go, hit "Enter", and then we're done. Then if you wanted to crop it, you totally can. I think this image will look better with the slight crop, maybe right around there and I think that looks pretty good. Now you don't want to be copying settings too much if you're shooting in dramatically different lighting environments. But because these were shot in the exact same place and the camera settings are pretty similar, we can just copy the settings over and paste them and chances are, it's going to look pretty good. Now moving on to this next photo here, this is a straight up shot that we took in Charlie's room. I really loved this image, I love the way we styled the scene, I love that the bed's in here. It's just a realistic lifestyle environment. For an edit like this, what we're going to do first is straighten the photo, doesn't need a whole lot. Let's just do a little bit of straightening here, that looks about right. I'm using the grid lines here to make sure that this image here is nice and straight. After that, we're going to go into the basic adjustments here and make sure our white balance are on point by selecting this white here. Then I'm going to go into the whites, I'm going to drag those up a little bit. Drag the blacks down, add some nice contrast, and that already looks pretty amazing. It's amazing what just a bit of contrast can do to an image. I do want to brighten it a little bit. I want to make sure this is nice and well-lit, looks nice, and then just fine-tune, once again, these basic adjustments. But for the most part, these edits are really simple. We just want to make them pop a little bit. The camera does such a good job of detecting all the colors and representing them in an accurate way. But just by enhancing the contrast a little bit, maybe in increasing the vibrance, or even sometimes, you're lowering the saturation. Whatever that might look like for you, it's just kind of finding that balance in your edits and going from there. So I think this looks pretty good. There's the before, there's the after, before, and after. So now, let's move on to this outside shot here, and I really love the shot, love the colors, love the composition; it's pretty simple, but it's really nice. So first thing I'm going to do is crop to a four by five ratio. This is the best aspect ratio you can use for Instagram because it allows you to take up the most real estate on someone's screen. So I'm going to crop up a four by five, I'm going to hit enter, and then we're just going to go through our basic progression here. I think the white balance looks good, I'm not going to edit that, going to increase the exposure a little bit, increase the whites a little bit, go down those blacks a little bit, and then the shadows here. I like to really bring the shadows down here because we have this area, and I think it would look good if it was dark. So I'm going to drag this down quite a bit. But now I want to highlight this feature here called the tone curve. It seems a little bit confusing because it's basically dictating all the different tones in your image, and it's a line, and you can really go crazy and come up with some really crazy lighting scenarios here. But I'm just going to show you a really basic formula here that's going to add contrast to your image and it's also going to make some of the black areas nice and soft. I use this in pretty much all of my photographs. First thing I'm going to do here is create a point. I'm going to drag it down, next, I'm going to come into the middle here and just put that back where it was, then I'll drag the highlights up a tad here. So basically it looks like an S here, and I'm going to go to the corners and I'm going to drag this left-hand corner up, and you can see what that's doing to the blocks here. It's really softening out those blacks and that's what I want. I think it looks really good. Then we'll do the same thing on the highlights here. We'll drag that down and that will help soften out those highlights. So once again, this is what you call an S curve because it looks like a little S, and it really does work well on a lot of photos. It kind of softens out the tones, but it increases the contrast in the mid-tones, and then, it really softens out the blacks and the whites, so it looks really good. After you adjust the tone curve, I always like to come back to the basic adjustments here, and just once again, I fine-tune things. Let me bring those whites down a little bit, bring the blacks down, increase that contrast and just kind of jumping between the two. But for the most part, I think that looks pretty good, so we'll leave that there. Now I'm going to come down to the HSL sliders here, and I want to play with the colors a little bit because I think we can adjust the screens, maybe to a different shade or something like that. So we'll click hue here, we'll go to the green slider, and then we'll just kind of adjust it. I think it looks cool if it's a little bit warmer by dragging it to the left. Then maybe you can also desaturate it or saturate it if you want to if you really want to go for the saturated look. One thing I want to mention with this editing here is, it's so subjective, and you can really take the lead here and do whatever you want with your photos. If you want a super stylized look, you can go for that. But if you just want to get some really basic edits and make the colors pop like I'm doing here, you can do that as well. But overall, I think this is an edit that looks really good. Of course, you know, you can spend more time on it, but for the most part, I really like how this photo came out. So now we'll do a quick edit of a detail shot, and this is pretty self-explanatory, I just wanted to put one in here because I just wanted to highlight the importance of cropping here. So I'm going to go to the crop panel here, I'm going to go to one-to-one, and I'm just going to drag this in, maybe on her glasses and her bubble here. Just highlighting those pieces because I like them. Detailed shots of digital printed work might not be as interesting as, say if you're hand-lettering or you're illustrating on an actual piece of paper or a piece of canvas or something like that. But it is still really interesting. Now we've cropped it, and then we'll just go ahead and do some basic contrast adjustments. Pretty simple, pretty straightforward, not a whole lot you need to do here, but nonetheless, I did want to put this in here. The most important thing is just making sure the colors and the lighting is nice and on-point. So that looks pretty good. But now I want to show you guys how to superimpose an original digital file onto an iPad screen here. So we shot Charlie's iPad screen here, and this is actually not a mock-up, this is the actual LCD screen. For the most part, it looks pretty good, but that's actually because I went through and I edited this screen here. You can see I elected the screen, and then I increased the exposure, I increased the temperature a little bit, the highlights, the shadows, and the blacks. It does look pretty good, but trust me when I say that a mock-up will look a million times better. I'm just going to show you how to do that real quick. So what I'm going to do here is right-click this image and I'm going to click "Edit in Adobe Photoshop 2020". What that's going to do is just open this image here, which I've already pre-edited, by the way. I've edited all the different tones just to make sure the iPad and the surrounding area looks nice and good and looks the way I want it to, and then we'll open it up here in Photoshop. Once we have the image here in Photoshop, it's actually pretty simple to do this. The first thing we're going to do is make a selection. So I'm going to zoom in on this screen here as close as I can, I'm going to slide down here, right-click this lasso tool and then click the ''Polygonal lasso tool''. I don't know if I said that correctly, but that's okay. Then I'm going to scroll up here to the corner, and I'm going to make a click right where the black meets the image here. You could go all the way to the end, but I find that this black border just looks better when it's included in the image. So we'll click there, and then we're going to drag all the way down here to the bottom and make another click here, and we'll just do that for all four corners here. All right, there's the fourth corner. Now we've made this selection here of the screen, and it's not perfect, but we'll get there. So after we've made this selection, we're going to go to our finder here. We're going to find the photo that we want to superimpose, which is our original digital file that Charlie sent me, and we're going to hit ''Command C'', we're going to copy it. Or you can just go ''Edit'', ''Çopy'' here. Now we have our selection here, we're going to click ''Edit'', ''Paste special'', ''Paste into''. Just ignore this. What this is going to do is paste our original file into that selection that we made, which is awesome. Now that we have this in here, we can ''Command T'', which is transform. You can also just go to ''Edit'', transform, ''Free transform'', and then we're just going to resize it to make sure it fits the dimensions of the screen. So I'm going to hold ''Shift'' and drag this corner up here and then I'm going to even it out with this side here. Shift just basically keeps your aspect ratio true. You're not distorting the work, and then I'll hit ''Enter'' then I can just drag it to where I want it to be, but I think it's looks really good right there. Now, for the most part, this looks really good already. We don't really have to do too much because we made a really good selection earlier on. But if you did want to refine it and you wanted to make sure it's nice and even, you can do that by simply clicking this layer here, this little layer mask, and then once again hitting ''Command T'', and that's going to bring up the transform module, then you can right-click and hit ''Warp''. Warp is going to allow you to adjust all the different parts of the image without adjusting the other parts of it. So basically it'll allow us to adjust the corners and make sure they're all nice and perfect. So we can just move between all these different areas here, the corners, and there's also points on the side here that you can adjust, but this side looks pretty good. So we'll go up here to this corner, make sure it's nice and straight, nice and even. We just want to make sure the black border is even all around the image, and yes, there is a little bit sticking out here, but I don't think it looks bad, I think it looks totally fine. So if the original image is sticking out a little bit, that's totally okay. This is also a slightly easier process if you don't photograph the screen with the image on it. So if you just photograph a blank iPad, this process becomes pretty simple. But I just wanted to show you guys the difference of photographing an image on the iPad versus doing a mockup like this. So now that we've done this, and for the most part it looks pretty good, we could probably spend more time on it, but I like the way it came out. We can just hit ''File'', ''Save'', and that will just save it right back into Photoshop here next to our original. So you can look at the difference here. This is the photo that I tried to edit, and this is the original digital file. So Charlie's colors are just so much more accurate here. So that's why I always recommend doing a mock-up instead of just trying to edit the LCD screen because cameras just don't photograph LCD screens well, there's a lot of weird frequencies going on and it just doesn't look that good. So I highly recommend you guys get Photoshop and just do these mockups. If you are a digital artist, you can get Photoshop and Lightroom for ten bucks a month, and they're some of the best editing programs, I use them for basically every photo that I ever edit. You can't go wrong with these softwares, especially if you're going to be using them together. But now that we've done these basic edits here in Lightroom and Photoshop, let's jump onto our iPhone here and edit some of the shots that we captured earlier using the iPhone. 11. Smartphone editing: All right guys. We have a few different photos to edit here on the smartphone and the first app we are going to be using to edit is Adobe Lightroom on mobile, because it's amazing. Just like the desktop app, you can do so much with this app and perhaps my favorite aspect of this app is once again, straightening all photos. Now, we can follow the same workflow we used on the desktop version of Lightroom on the mobile version here. By going to Crop, we'll go here to one-to-one square. We'll crop it in a little bit. Hit ''Okay'' and then we'll slide over here to geometry. Click ''Off'', and then click ''Auto'', and that's gonna straighten our photo. Looks nice and good, and then we can just go back here to Crop. Finished cropping our square, so it's nice and perfect. There we go, and then we'll just go and do some of the basic adjustments, the contrast to once again, so this is for that white background scan type of photo here. We can go to Light and then follow our basic editing pattern in here, whites, blacks, and this image here was shot on the iPhone. Everything you see here, all the images I'm going to be editing here on the iPhone were all shot on the iPhone. That's pretty much it. It's really simple edit and it looks like an actual scan. You can see how detailed that is too, so really good. I love this app and you can do some pretty amazing things with it, and you can edit other photos on here as well if you just wanted it to do some basic adjustments here, such as this photo here, go in, and adjust the whites, the contrast, all that, the saturation here. But when I'm editing on my iPhone, sometimes I like to add filters and that's where apps like VSCO, Snapseed or even Instagram come in, and VSCO is an app that I've been recommending for a very long time. It's an app that I've used to edit on my phone from the beginning days when I was just starting out with photography. I always recommended in my courses and that's because it has really amazing editing filters that look really good. Now one thing I want to say before you just slap a filter onto your work here is, filters are really going to change the color of your art. You want to be careful what the filters that you're using and I recommend using filters that are not going to be super invasive on the colors of your image. With VSCO, my favorite filter among all types of photography is A6 and you can see when I put on A6, it doesn't change the colors of Charlie's images too much. It keeps things pretty even and pretty realistic, and then we can just tap it again and change the strength here. I think it looks good all the way up. I'm going to leave that. The other reason I really like the VSCO is because you have all these different editing options and a lot of these editing options we have in Lightroom, you have here, and is a much simpler app to use in my opinion. We can just go through and do these basic adjustments here and get it to the point that we want it. We can increase the saturation here a little bit. Maybe increase the contrast of tag , and then I also really like to add the fade here, so you can fade it a little bit. If your blacks are really deep, you can fade it and you can also add grain, and I think grain looks good. I like adding some texture to my image so you can add a little bit of grain there and then you can also add a little bit of a vignette. Just to bring those corners and really keep the focus on the work. There's the before, there's the after, and this looks like it was shot on a proper DSLR. But it was shot using portrait mode on my iPhone, which is just crazy. I definitely recommend using VSCO if you are going to to be editing some of these lifestyle photos on your iPhone. If you're doing the white background, photoscan shot, it's easier to do that in Lightroom because you can really balance things out and I always recommend editing your flatlase in Lightroom as well because you can make sure your image is perfectly straight and that's really important. If you want to start editing in Lightroom and then open it up into VSCO, you can do that. But, Lightroom is great for straightening and some of the basic adjustments and apps VSCO are great for really getting a stylized edit, and that's why I love apps like this. But that's basically it for the editing guys. I really hoped that it was helpful for you. If you think that there's anything that you'd like me to touch on more in terms of editing, feel free to leave a discussion here. I'm totally open to making extra YouTube videos or extra lessons for this course that I can add onto the back that will touch on some of the things that you guys think I might have missed. Please let me know if there's any specific thing that you want to learn more about and I'm happy to touch on that subject at another time, but that's it guys. Let's move on to the next section. 12. Next steps: All right guys, we've made it to the end of the course. We've covered a lot of different material. Just to recap, we've covered the anatomy of a good photograph of art, lighting styling, composition. We talked about inspiration. We talked about gears from the things you might want to use to capture these shots. Then we actually went out and shot and edited those photos as well. I really hope that all of that was helpful for you. But before you go, I just wanted to hammer one point and that's everything I've talked about today, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's the right way. When you're creating something like a photo or an illustration or a painting, there is no right or wrong. I really want you to push the boundaries when you're shooting and get creative with it. Challenge some of the things that I taught in this course and really put your own spin on the photo that you take. I'm super excited to see those. I want you guys to take those photos. Go ahead and post them in the class project, and I will check those out. Also, if you guys have any questions, go ahead and leave those in the discussion section of the course. Questions, comments, whatever you just want to say, "hey, what's up?" Go ahead and leave those in the discussion section. I will check those out. Last but not least, if you guys enjoyed the course, it would mean the world to me if you left a short review. That's super helpful for me as a teacher going forward so I know what I can improve on and just create better content for you guys in the future. If you guys want to keep learning, I highly recommend checking out my photography Essentials Course. This course covers everything you need to know about photography. It'll really give you a solid foundation. It's only 90 minutes long. That was the focus of that course, was to cover everything you need to know in a short period of time. It's jam-packed, it's awesome. Feel free to check that out if you want to master the essentials of photography and also if you want to learn more about mobile editing, I have a class on that too which basically covers everything you will ever need to know about editing on your smartphone. I highly recommend checking that out. But hey, thank you guys so much for sticking around and listening to me talk for all this time. I really appreciate you being here and I hope to see you in some of my future courses. I'll catch you later, I'll talk to you very soon and I hope you have an absolutely awesome day.