Advice for pictures of my artwork with EOS Rebel T7

[smarc]

I need to shoot some high-quality photos of my paintings and I am an absolute novice when it comes to photography. The requirements I'm given are at least 300 dpi, under 5MB, 1000px wide/72px per square inch. I have an EOS rebel T7 and I've just been bumbling through it. Any advice?

[Peter]

One time only or will you continue to take pictures of artwork?

For one time only I would use a grey card, tripod and taking the picture during a cloudy day. Around 50-85 mm.

If you continue to take pictures of artwork I would go for two Speedlites (Canon 600EX-RT) and one trigger (ST-E3-RT) and a color checker.

I use two 580EX II with two older Odin flash triggers standing 45 degrees from the painting. I use 85mm on a fullframe and f/8.

After I have taken all the pictures I take a last picture of my SpyderCheckr.

I load my raw files in darktable and color calibrate the SyderCheckr picture in the module Color calibration module.

I then copy its style to all other pictures with ctrl+c ctrl+v.

With all pictures of paintings I now add a base curve for Canon in Basecurve module, activate Lens correction module and fix perspective in Perspective and rotate module. Crop if needed with Crop module. At last I add a small amount of sharpening.

[Waddizzle]

Get out there and learn how to use the camera.  

Use P mode, save in RAW and JPG formats.  Download the image files to a computer and the Canon DPP4 to edit them.  Get out there and learn how to use the camera.

[rs-eos]

Some of the requirements you were given are conflicting (e.g. 300 dpi vs 72 dpi).

Definitely agree with Peter's advice.  In addition, it can be very useful to use either a polarizer filter on the lens or even polarizing gels on your lights.  But, this is all getting quite advanced.

What lens do you have with your T7?   Knowing that, we can at least recommend some basic things to try first.