Lighting for prints

Flag: ⭐️ Modified: February 14, 2026 7:58 PM Created: September 17, 2025 3:27 PM Master Type: Notes Hide: No Starred: Yes Status: Unassigned

I do this all the time for a museum. Others mentioned scanners, which are good and work, but if you have a lot of photos, they are slower. The camera takes a bit of time to set up, but once you are set up, as long as you’re shooting the same size material, it goes pretty quick. A macro lens is better in general as you won’t really come into situations where you’ll worry about minimum focusing distance, the plane of focus is usually more flat (many lenses made for portraits actually have a field curvature to the plane of focus which is often why the corners don’t seem as sharp… it doesn’t mean distortion, it means what we think of as a plane of focus is actually a curve), and they’re just usually sharper in general. That said of the lenses you have the 24-70 f/2.8L should do pretty well depending on the size of your photos. Maximum magnification is 0.21x, which means on a full-frame camera the smallest area that can fill the frame is 6.75 x 4.5” which really means it would be fine for anything 4x6” or bigger, you probably want to leave a little bit of a boarder so you can crop in manually to get as much of the photo as possible, Even if they have some 3.5x5” photos, on a 30MP you’ll get decent images if you crop in. The 5D Mk IV can photograph a 16.8x11.2” at 400PPI, 8x12” photos at a little over 500PPI, and that 4x6” size would be 995 PPI. In reality 400PPI is pretty good for photos, doing much more and you’re mostly just getting the grain.

If you can use either a tripod or better yet if you can find a used “copy stand” which basically mounts the camera kind of like a reverse enlarger pointed down at a table made specifically to photograph. Set up at one height for a batch of photos so once you get going you can pound on them. If you have something like a Kodak Gray Card, shoot that first so you can use that to white balance all of your RAW files. Somewhere between f/5.6 to f/8 will likely be the sharpest for the lens (stopping down to f/8 is edging on diffraction but you’ll probably gain a little sharpness still in the corners, partly due to that field curvature I mentioned). If you’re processing your photos in Lightroom or Capture One Pro, you can also benefit by shooting a white card that fills the entire frame before shooting your photos. This can be used for flat field correction in Lightroom or an “LCC” (lens and color cast calibration) in Capture One. This will remove any unevenness in the lighting since you are only lighting from one side it is likely that one side will be brighter than the other, and this will mitigate that. If you’re not using a program where you can flat-field/LCC, then just make sure the light is always coming from the top of the photo as that will visually make more sense… but usually we’ll have two equal lights on either side (usually soft strips) for flat copy work. Just note the flat-field shot is only good as long as the camera, light, zoom, and aperture all stay in the same position/setting. If you move the camera or the light or change the aperture… it will be correcting for a condition that doesn’t exist, so you should shoot a new white card at that point (if you move the camera to accommodate larger or smaller prints, shoot a new white).

When you open the files in your RAW processor (I’ll assume adobe camera RAW or Lightroom for now as it’s popular, but you can figure equivalent settings in other programs), do the flat fielding if you’re doing that. Then pull up the image of your Kodak gray card and change the profile to either “Adobe Neutral” or “Camera Neutral” this is a flatter profile and good for doing reproductions, it will make landscapes and portraits look blah but it’s more accurate for reproducing flat prints). White balance on the gray card patch, the read the brightens of the gray patch adjust it so that the Lab value of it is 50 (right click on the histogram to change from RGB to LAB values). Sync those settings to the images of the photos you took (or save as a preset and apply them)… you may want to look at those setting on the first image and see if you need to adjust the white/black sliders or add any sharpening before syncing across all of them). Then all you have to do is crop, add metadata, and rename. More info on Lightroom’s flat field correction to even lighting: