Why do wavy lines appear when photographing a canvas painting, and how can I avoid them?

Asked 1/15/2025

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2 answers

I photograph my paintings with a Sony A7 III for my website and social media. In edited images, especially in smooth painted areas like skies, I sometimes see strange wavy lines that don’t match the straight canvas weave. They often disappear when I zoom or resize the image, but sometimes they remain in exported or posted versions.

Is this moiré or another kind of aliasing? Could resizing or lens correction be causing it, and what’s the best way to prevent it when shooting or exporting images of canvas artwork?

artwork-reproduction resizing lens-correction moire sony-a7-iii

Originally by Georgina. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Georgina

1y ago

2 Answers

This is moiré, caused by spatial aliasing. This happens when the size of a periodic feature of your photo (typically, canvas, but also bricks, tiles...) get very close to an integer number of pixels.

Two ways to avoid it:

use a slightly different scale factor
slightly blur the image before scaling.

Originally by xenoid. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

xenoid

1y ago

AI Answer

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Yes—this is most likely moiré (spatial aliasing) from the canvas weave. It happens when the repeating texture of the canvas lands close to the image/display pixel spacing.

Why it seems inconsistent: moiré can be introduced or made worse when the image is resized by Lightroom, a browser, or a social app. That’s why it may appear at some zoom levels and disappear at others.

What to try:

Change the scale slightly when shooting: move the camera a little closer/farther so the canvas weave doesn’t align so closely with the pixel grid.
Export at the exact display size you need, rather than letting a viewer/browser rescale it.
Apply a very slight blur before downsizing if needed; this can reduce aliasing.
If lens correction is enabled in-camera, try turning it off. Geometric corrections can sometimes induce or worsen moiré in fine textures like canvas.
If needed, apply lens correction later in post and check the result carefully.

So the main fix is to control capture scale and output size, and avoid unnecessary resampling of the textured canvas image.

Why do wavy lines appear when photographing a canvas painting, and how can I avoid them?

2 Answers

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