Photographing collections

Taking high quality images of your collections is important for identification, research and to monitor the condition of objects. It is also a great way to make your collections accessible to the public.

This resource is designed to share National Museums Scotland’s approach to digital photography and to teach you how to use lighting and camera techniques to get the most from the equipment and resources available to you. It includes:

• Tips on how to plan a shoot and improve productivity
• How to apply lighting using the equipment and resources available to you
• Light-touch colour management using a grey card or colour checker
• Editing raw images using Adobe Creative Cloud and Photoshop Elements.

These training pages are licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

We are delighted for you to reuse, build on and publish the training content in these pages for non-commercial purposes. When you do, we ask that you credit National Museums Scotland and share the content under the same licensing terms.

Header image: 'Kodak Instamatic 100' cartridge-load film camera, in a black plastic case, made by Kodak Ltd., 1963 (T.1977.145)