The Best Picture Style for Photographing Art

This is part of a series of posts on how to photograph art.

If the photographs of your paintings seem too contrasty or the colors are too saturated, it could be the "Picture Style" setting on your camera. The "Picture Style" is what Canon calls the function that makes adjustments to the photo before it saves it to the memory card. Other manufacturers use different names for this setting, see the table at the bottom of this post for more information.

While the preset you choose may seem like a minor detail, it can have a dramatic impact upon the appearance of how your paintings appear online or in print. A collector may complain if the colors in the original painting don't match the colors of the photo they saw online. Choosing the most appropriate preset will also reduce the amount of editing that has to be done in Photoshop.