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A gallery owner in Savannah said my digital pieces felt flat, and it changed how I export everything
Last month I showed a print of my digital painting at a small gallery in Savannah and the owner told me it looked like a screenshot, not a finished piece. I had been exporting my work straight from Photoshop at 72 dpi with no color profile, so I switched to 300 dpi, sRGB, and added a real grain texture on a separate layer. Has anyone else gotten feedback like that, and did changing your export settings fix it or was it something else in the process?
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harperg7617h ago
300 dpi versus 72 is a real difference when ink hits paper, so that part of the fix makes sense. The color profile matters too, since a print shop or gallery is working in a different space than your screen. But the "screenshot" comment usually is not about dots per inch at all. It is about the image having no surface, no tooth, nothing for light to catch. A gallery owner in Savannah is looking at work under track lighting and comparing it to oils and pastels hanging nearby, where texture is the whole point. Adding grain helps, but a single texture layer over the top can read as a filter if the brush strokes underneath are still too clean. What fixed it for me was building the grain into the layers as I painted, so the marks had some tooth from the start.
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