While many artists strive to master digital art as a medium, there are many who find a lot of pride in making work the old fashioned way. But even if oils are your medium of choice, there are several reasons you need to have some fluency in Photoshop or a similar software.
You NEED Reproductions of Your Work
The primary reason you’ll need some skills in Photoshop is to create high quality reproductions of your work. What if your studio catches fire? Even if you loose the original paintings, you’ll be able to stretch out the money earned by your paintings on the web. Even if they’re destroyed or sold.
You’ll Make More Money
NOBODY should settle for only selling their paintings once.
Thanks to the internet, artists have more flexibility than ever when it comes to selling copies of their work. Many artists dream of having their work in a gallery and selling to an audience of oooing and aweing spectators, but this is only a small portion of your art’s earning potential. Creating digital prints and reproductions may not sell for as much as the original, but they have the potential to have an infinite volume produced.
Rather than simple taking of photograph for your instagram of the framed final piece, you need to scan your work and create a high quality digital replica. Utilizing Photoshop to archive your work digitally allows you to make a plethora of products with your art on it.
Legends like James Jean create limited edition runs to build hype and keep that sense of scarcity. Let us say an original painting sells for $1000, but your 200 piece, limited edition prints sell for $50 each. That means your limited edition prints sold for 10 times the amount of your original print! And if the demand is there, you can always make a 2nd edition run.
You Can Publish a Fine Art Book
In the same vein as making reproductions, creating a curated art book is a great way to spread out the value of your work over time. Many people who can’t find the will power to pay $50 for a single art print might be able to pay $50 to have 100 pieces of your work in the form of a book.
There are many viable vendors who can print custom orders of books or even books on demand for artists who know how to work on the world wide web.
The Tools You’ll Need to Master Inside of Photoshop
Photomerge
This is how you take a 10’x10′ painting and scan it with one scanner! If you have a camera, you’ll notice the maximum size you can usually print is around 18″x24″, but what if you want to reproduce your large scaled art at its original size?
Photomerge uses an algorithm in the background to manipulate multiple scans or photos into one large document. Navigate to the photomerge tool, then select all the scans or photos your are compositing. Click ok and watch the beach ball spin. Its a little taxing on your computer’s graphics processor, but totally worth the wait to have that large, crisp scanned image as a backup!
File>Automate>Photomerge
Color Balance and Levels
Sometimes your scanner or printer just doesn’t handle the colors in a way that reflects the original piece. Don’t get frustrated. There are several ways to work around this.
Before you ever touch the original colors, consider your hardware. Apple computers tend to have nearly perfect color perception. But if you have a cheaper monitor, that may be the source of your color problems. You can calibrate a cheap monitor with some semi-affordable tools. You could also buy a true color monitor, but those are pretty pricey. If you can’t afford either of these options, you can always put the file of a thumb drive and do a high quality test print for less than $10. There are also online art printing services you can use for testing at a similar price.
Image>Adjustments>Color Balance
The levels tool is similar to the color balance in the way that it shouldn’t be touched until a test print has been reviewed. Adjusting levels lets you get control over contrast in an image and can help give your painting a bit more depth if there were details washed out in a scan or photograph.
Image>Adjustments>Levels
Crop Tool
This tool is essential for framing your photomerge composition into its original frame and aspect ratio. Never size your artwork upwards. This distorts the quality and will pixelate your original paint-strokes. Always Bring the edges inwards, never stretch the picture outwards.
There is special software like Gigapixel AI that claims it can upscale work tremendously. Some of the work output with this software is really amazing, but it still tends to have a unique sort of digital artifacting that are undesirable when making high quality prints.
Clone Stamp, Smudge, and Healing Brush Tool
The Clone Stamp allows you to sample another section of the painting and very specifically copy it. Its almost always best to turn down the hardness of the brush so your samples look more realistic.
The Smudge Tool allows you soften an area of a painting. Its also good for blurring sections you want to feel out of focus. If you feel your image is too flat this can create a sense of more depth. It’s sort of like a camera focusing on one object and not the rest of the photograph.
The Healing Brush is made to remove spots and blemishes from human faces, but you can also use it for removing accidental artifacts like stray brush hairs that stuck to your painting. So it’s a lot like the clone stamp except that you don’t need a sample to copy. Photoshop does all the work.
These three tools go hand in hand. They are for removing stray hairs and artifacts that shouldn’t have made their way into the photograph. Don’t over correct so much that you destroy any likeness to the original painting. You want to keep those original brush strokes in tact!
Keep it Simple
If you’ve never used Photoshop, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the infinite palette of features and tools to choose from. Try not to deviate from these few tools mentioned for now. These fundamentals are the bedrock of your Photoshop expertise. Get them right!
Try Adobe Photoshop here.
Here is a free Photoshop alternative called Gimp. It is almost the same, but all the names are changed for the features I described above. So it will take a little more exploring to master.
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