How to photograph your artwork with a phone

Light: soft, even, and one kind only

• Use daylight from a window, out of direct sun. An overcast day is ideal.
• Turn off room lights. Mixing warm bulbs with daylight gives uneven color that's hard to fix.
• Turn off the flash. It creates a hot spot and glare.
• For glossy or varnished work, light it from both sides at about 45 degrees, so reflections bounce away from the camera.

Setup: flat and square

• Hang or tape flat work to a wall, or lay it on the floor and shoot from directly above.
• Hold the phone parallel to the work. Turn on the camera's grid and line the edges up with it.
• Step back and zoom in slightly, or use the 2× lens if your phone has one. The wide lens bends straight edges near the frame.
• Steady the phone with a tripod or a stack of books, and use the self-timer to avoid shake.
• Take work out of glass frames where you can. Glass reflects everything in the room.

Camera settings worth knowing

• Tap the work to focus, then press and hold to lock focus and exposure.
• Lower the exposure slightly if whites look blown out. Detail in highlights is hard to recover.
• Avoid portrait mode, beauty filters, and heavy built-in effects.
• Shoot at your phone's highest resolution.

3D work, textiles, and garments

• Use a plain background, such as a large sheet of paper curved from wall to table so there's no visible corner.
• Take a straight-on view, then two or three angles.
• Add one close-up of surface, texture, or construction.
• Include one shot that shows scale, with a hand, a person, or a simple object for reference.

For garments and collections, the same rules apply. See fashion portfolio websites for how collections are usually structured.

Editing: correct, don't improve

• Crop to the edge of the work, unless the edge matters to the piece.
• Use perspective correction to square anything slightly skewed.
• Adjust white balance so white paper looks white.
• Compare the photo with the original, side by side, in the same light. Match it; don't make it brighter or more saturated than it is.

Editing should make the photo faithful to the work. It should never change the work itself.

Files and details

• Keep the original files untouched, and edit copies.
• Export as JPEG in sRGB, the standard color space for the web.
• Name files so they sort and make sense, for example surname_title_year.jpg.
• Write down title, medium, dimensions, and year for each piece as you go.

Those details become your captions. If you'd like help deciding which pieces to show and in what order, start with a Portfolio Review. And for how a site can hold series, sketchbooks, and statements, see art portfolio websites and photography portfolio websites.