If you're trying to take photos of your art, there are a few things to do:
- Try to get the light as consistent as possible.
- Use your photo editing app to crop the picture nicely.
- Use your photo editing app to make the picture 'pop'.
Doing these will help your art look a lot cleaner.
Getting the light consistent makes the next steps a lot easier. So here's a couple tips on that:
Don't have your camera between the art and the light source. If you do this, there'll be a big ugly shadow over your piece that's hard to get rid of. When I take pictures of my art, I'll adjust the sketchbook and my camera in all sorts of ways until I get it lit as consistently as possible.
Having a larger, softer light source can help prevent bumps in the paper from showing up as little shadows in your photo. If you have a small light source, you can aim it at a white wall to get a wider, softer light source!
Cropping the picture nicely and removing the unnecessary parts of your image can help it look a lot better. It also means you don't need to correct the light and colour of those areas you've cut off!
Making your picture 'pop' is a hard one. But here are some things that can help:
Try to make the lighting consistent. On the iPhone image editor, adjusting the Brilliance setting can do a lot of this for you. If that doesn't work, see if there's a Shadows slider on your image editor -- making the shadow areas lighter in general can get rid of a lot of that inconsistent lighting. If the shadows only appear near the corners of your image, a Vignette option can make specifically the corners a bit brighter. It takes some adjusting to find the right balance.
Increase the contrast. Or basically, try to get your light areas brighter and your dark areas darker. When your camera takes a photo, it usually avoids making any areas super light or super dark. But this can make drawings and paintings look pretty dull.
In your image editor there's probably some way to adjust only the really bright areas -- on the iPhone image editor that's called the Highlights setting. Making the light areas even brighter can help hide some erased lines and also make the lighting look more consistent. You'll also want to make the darker areas darker -- on the iPhone image editor that's called the Black Point setting. Dragging that down will make the greys darker and help the black areas look more consistent as well. If you don't have those settings, you probably have a Contrast setting that will do both of the above things at the same time! Using that setting along with Exposure and Brightness settings can help you make the dark areas sing and the bright areas look sparkling.
But try to avoid having any areas as pure black -- that can look pretty weird.
Fixing the white balance / tint and tone. etc