How to photograph a comic for grading

Light and setup

Use daylight from a window or a single diffuse lamp. Mixed color temperatures (warm bulb plus cool window) make paper look dirtier or cleaner than it is, and a raw grade has to read page quality from the interior shot. Never fire a direct flash into gloss. Glare hides color-breaking stress, stains, and spine ticks — the defects that actually move a grade.

Lay the book on a clean, contrasting surface. A busy patterned tablecloth camouflages chips. Keep the camera parallel to the cover so the book is a rectangle, not a trapezoid. If the top of the cover is narrower than the bottom, you are shooting at an angle and creases foreshorten. Turn off beauty filters, portrait mode, and HDR. Those flatten a crease into a soft shadow and make a tired book look pressed. Upload the original camera file. A screenshot of your gallery (status bar, 6/15, nav buttons) compresses the cover twice and wipes the sheen that shows tape pull.

• Fill the frame with the book; do not crop corners or the right edge.
• One book per shot. Stacks and boxes belong in a different photo.
• Shoot the required sides before any optional close-ups.
• Use the original photo, not a screenshot of your camera roll.

Required shots

Front cover: the full front, square, including all four corners and the entire right edge. The right edge is where riffling and box wear show. Back cover: the full back, including the barcode area — stains and chips hide there. Spine: three close-ups using the staples as landmarks — head through the first staple, first staple to last staple, last staple through the foot. Include each staple in the frames it belongs to. A little overlap at the staple is expected; the grader counts each tick and split once. A cropped single beauty shot of the spine cannot support a high grade.

Optional full-height spine: stand the book on its edge from head to foot so roll and total split length are obvious. Corners: one tight close-up of each cover corner — top-left, top-right, bottom-left, bottom-right. You cannot show all four in a single frame. Fill the shot with that corner so blunt, crease, chip, and color break are readable. Interior / paper: open the book and photograph a typical spread in even, neutral light. Page quality is a hard ceiling. If you only send a pretty cover, the estimate has to assume worse paper than you hoped.

Camouflaged wear — say it if you can see it

Tape pull, adhesive haze, and scuffs on green, black, or navy covers often blend into the printing. In even light they look like paper grain. In hand they are obvious: a dull rectangle, a slightly lifted film, a sheen that does not match the rest of the field. The grader will sweep the cover for those marks, but a photo taken straight-on under mixed indoor light can hide them.

If you can see it, write it in Defects to look for — location and what it looks like — and add a close-up in Noted defects. Tilt the book under raking light so the patch catches. Collector-named defects are treated as present when the photos are inconclusive. That is conservative grading, not a slight. Do not assume a green-on-green scuff will announce itself in a gallery screenshot.

• Tape residue and tape pull often show as a dull or glossy rectangle, not a white tear.
• Color-matching abrasion on green or black fields is still a handling defect.
• Name the mark and shoot a raking-light close-up. The extra slot is for this.

Optional but useful

A dedicated Noted defects shot of any stain, tear, writing, tape pull, or chip you care about keeps the estimate from guessing. Staple rust and tears should already be visible in the three spine close-ups — include the staple in those frames. If a signature or dedication is intentional, say so in the ignore notes. The grader will ignore it when told. If you do not say so, writing on the cover is treated as a defect.

Take the photos you would want a conservative stranger to see — not the flattering angle you would post. When a category is missing, the estimate assumes the more serious plausible reading. That is the point of the checklist: enough light, enough angles, no benefit of the doubt.