How to photograph tattoos without glare

Why tattoos glare in photos

Glare is light that reflects straight off the surface of the skin and into the lens. It shows up as bright white patches that cover line work and wash out color. A guide from Newell, a maker of photo accessories, points out that fresh tattoos are harder still, because the skin may be red and moist, and fresh pigment and skincare products make reflections even more noticeable.

Phones add a second problem. Sarah Lee, a tattoo artist in South Africa writing for Body Artifact, finds that phones naturally overexpose photos of tattoos and can make the image look garish. Overexposure flattens black and grey work and turns any shine into pure white.

Both problems are easier to fix before the shutter than after it. Editing can correct color, but it cannot bring back line work that a reflection has covered.

Set up the light before the camera

Soft light from in front and to the sides does most of the work. Body Artifact recommends two softboxes in front of the client, one just to the left and one just to the right, positioned slightly higher than head height to reduce reflection and glare. Painful Pleasures, a tattoo supply company, suggests a diffuser or softbox over a flash, polarizing film over studio lights, or indirect natural light if you are shooting on a phone without extra gear.

Then move the skin, not the light. Body Artifact's trick is to tilt the tattooed surface slightly down, which reduces direct reflection from the light source into the camera. Check the screen after each small adjustment rather than after the whole setup.

Clean up the background. DermNet's guidance for clinical skin photos is to use a plain grey, green or blue background and to remove extraneous objects, and the same rule keeps a tattoo photo about the tattoo. A bare wall or a sheet of colored card is enough.

Cross-polarization for glare that will not go away

A polarizing filter on the lens alone cuts some reflections. Cross-polarization goes further: one polarizer sits over the light and a second sits over the lens, rotated 90 degrees to each other, so light reflected straight off the surface is blocked while the color under it still reaches the camera.

Dermatologists use the same setup to document skin and nails. In a 2023 paper in Skin Appendage Disorders, Göktay and Erdem describe building one from linear polarizing film, which they note is easily found as sheets in different sizes, and report photographs devoid of any glare. A 2020 note in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology by Bae and Ju describes a simple cross-polarized setup for a smartphone.

Two details decide whether it works. Newell's guide explains that the film on every light should face the same direction, because if one film is rotated 90 degrees relative to another, no single position of the lens filter can suppress the reflections from both lights. After that, rotate the lens filter while watching the screen and stop where the shine is weakest.

Polarizers cost light. PolarPro, a filter maker, puts the loss at about 1.5 to 3 stops for a lens polarizer depending on the angle, and film over the light takes more. Newell's advice is to raise the light output first, then open the aperture, raise the ISO or use a slower shutter if that is not enough.

Camera and phone settings that help

Choose a normal focal length and square up to the skin. Body Artifact puts the ideal focal length for tattoos between 35mm and 50mm. DermNet's guidance is that the lens should be lined up with the subject, which keeps the proportions of the design true instead of stretching one side of it.

On a phone, take exposure off automatic. Apple's iPhone User Guide describes tapping the screen where you want to focus, then dragging up or down next to the focus area to adjust exposure. For a tattoo, drag down until the brightest skin keeps its texture. Touching and holding the focus area until AE/AF Lock appears keeps focus and exposure fixed for the next shots.

Turn on the guides. The same guide shows that Settings, then Camera, then Grid and Level puts a grid and level on the camera screen, which helps you frame a limb straight and repeat the framing later. Under Settings, Camera, Preserve Settings, the Exposure Adjustment switch keeps your exposure setting from resetting each time the Camera app opens.

Stencil, fresh and healed: one piece, three photos

It helps to photograph a piece at three points: the stencil once it is placed, the fresh result at the end of the session, and the healed tattoo weeks later. Each answers a different question afterwards: where it was placed, how it looked on the day, and how it settled.

Give the fresh piece time. Painful Pleasures advises letting a fresh piece bleed and cool down and giving it a good wipe before shooting, and Body Artifact waits 30 minutes to an hour after finishing. Painful Pleasures also recommends coordinating with the client for an after-shot a few weeks after the tattoo, so potential clients can see how your work holds up.

Keep the setup the same across all three. The International Skin Imaging Collaboration's standards for photographing skin, set out by Finnane and colleagues in JAMA Dermatology in 2017, cover lighting, background color, field of view, orientation, focus and depth of field, resolution, and scale and color calibration, so that images taken at different times can be compared. For a tattoo, matching the background, the light position and the distance goes a long way toward making the healed shot comparable with the fresh one.

Keep the three photos with the piece rather than loose in the camera roll. In InkCarte, each session on a piece can hold photos from the camera or the photo library, and each photo can be labeled stencil, fresh or healed, so the stages of one piece stay together in its session history on your phone.

Common tattoo photo mistakes

Relying on the ceiling light. Room lighting is rarely soft and rarely where you need it. Use softboxes or window light instead, placed in front of the client and just above head height as Body Artifact describes.

Cropping too tight. Painful Pleasures warns against overcropping so the photo only shows the tattoo, and suggests showing where it sits on the body and how it works with other tattoos. Take one close shot for detail and one wider shot for placement.

Mixing film directions. If some lights are polarized one way and others another, part of the glare survives whatever you do with the lens filter. Check a test shot at full size before the client leaves.

Correcting color past reality. Light can alter the color of a finished tattoo, and Painful Pleasures notes you may need to adjust it back to its truer hue, while keeping the photo close to real life. A photo that looks better than the skin sets an expectation the healed piece cannot meet.

Frequently asked questions