Sharing your traditional art can sometimes be a pain. In this journal we will talk about one way to digitally share traditional work, by taking a digital picture of it.The basic idea is simple, take a picture of your work in order to share it with othersThe easiest photo to take is to just quickly take it inside with a cell phone. Oftentimes the weather isn't so great, or its night time, and a cell phone is all that you have; besides, this picture doesn't look TOO bad right?But even if you don't have a fancy camera, not forcing your phone to compensate for a dark indoor setting will immediately help your photos turn out more nicelyBUT what if you have a fancy camera?using a dedicated camera will further improve your photographsI use an Olympus E-PL1, which is a hobbyist camera, if you have a fancy DSLR camera you can expect even better resultshowever if you want to accurately display what your art naturally looks like...as these photos reveal sunlight is not white, the photgraph to the right has had its colors intensified revealing the color of the shadows. An effect called rayleigh scattering causes longer wavelengths of light to scatter in the atmosphere, causing direct sunlight to be more yellow, and indirect light to be more blue (this is why the sky is blue!) As a result, in direct light shadows appear to be blueif you want to display the true colors of your artwork, you'll either need to take pictures on an overcast day (when sunlight is white!) or you'll need to use an image editing program to bring out the true colorsEditing photos to have more natural colors and lighting in photoshop is very easy as the auto contrast/tint/color usually does a good jobhowever sometimes it is necessary to manually edit colors within image --> adjustment --> colorbalanceExperimentation is key to finding out how to properly use the tools, keep the preview box checked and move all the sliders to find what they do, press cancel to revert to where you were without changing anythingOnce again the goal here is to bring out the natural colors of what you are displaying, there are many artistic things that you can do by editing the colors of a photo, but in this group we want to display what you can do without computer helpNot everyone wants to buy/steal photoshop, a great free substitute is paint.netHowever the automatic editing tools are not as good as within photoshopTo manually edit the colors and brightness to better reflect how the object naturally appears open Adjustments --> curves and use the RGB mapIf your original picture was taken in white light then you wont need to separate the red green and blue curves, the photo above was taken while a cloud passed in front of the sun...however if your original photo is taken in NOT white lightSuch as this photo which was taken in direct (yellow) sunlight it may become necessary to separate the color curvesNote how the blue and green band are moved to a higher level than the red band, this is to compensate for the yellowing effect of direct sunlight and to restore a more natural looking white lightTaking the time to crop and resize is also important, a danger of transferring your traditional medium to digital with a camera is in the perspective shift that a camera can create, be sure to hold the camera square to the artwork. Editing the image for size can drastically reduce the time it takes for the image to load without dramatically reducing the quality of the image. Most people do not have screens larger than 1920 by 1080 pixels.Creating a properly cropped image displayed with true colors is a small step to take to display your hard work!Thanks for reading!Tridgeon art team