IN DIFFERENT LIGHT - 100,000 Trees

As artists we are basically painting the light that falls on a subject and trying to create the most pleasing color which is also affected by light. As artists marketing via the internet, it is crucial to display our art on screen in the best light. Unless we use correct lighting while painting and correct light when the work is displayed in public and online, we will always struggle to sell. It's a constant battle.

As a Christmas gift to myself, I purchased an artists lamp which has several settings and I wanted to take it for a test run. The first setting is a warm light, which I find useful to toggle on to see how a painting would look in a traditionally lit room (room light). There is also a setting for cool light which is quite bright and I thought it was just a brighter version of the daylight setting recommended for painting, but I was wrong.

The next step was to photograph a painting under the different LED lights and natural daylight, to see which appeared more accurate. My studio has no windows so I didn't have to worry about anything affecting the light from the lamp. I had to agree that the daylight setting, if a little dull, did seem to represent the colors of the paint more accurately. The bright cool light setting seems to overemphasize some colors and almost makes them fluorescent, which is not good. The warm light setting mixes with the complimentary colors of blue and purple paint and makes them look brown or black, also not good.

Camera images top left to bottom left clockwise -  LED Room light - LED Cool light - Morning natural daylight - LED Daylight

Scan Images clockwise top left to bottom left - Morning Daylight - LED Daylight - LED Room light - LED Cool light

Next I tried out the photo scan app I introduced to you the other day, Google Photo Scan. The diffences are small until you start to analyse it. Overall the scan images have nearly eliminated the problem that in my studio I can only place the light on one side. Natural morning daylight is still the best but the LED daylight scan comes a close second. I thought the scan app would perform better than the camera in natural daylight, but the camera still comes out on top. The Camera produced much crisper images for printing.