When viewing a reproduction of a painting in textbooks and online, important visual information, including surface texture, can be lost. Providing an experience to viewers that can convey some of this lost information without significantly increasing the necessary equipment and training possessed by a typical studio photographer would enrich education, documentation, conservation, and presentation of artwork for the public. A modified photometric stereo technique coupled with the rendering software mental ray packaged with Maya ® is presented as a means of capturing surface normal maps and diffuse color information used in the rendering of realistic attributes of paintings. mental ray’s ability to realistically render two different paintings with different gloss properties was evaluated by comparing the proposed capture technique and a previously published technique that employs cross-polarization, demonstrating that traditional imaging is a viable technique for generating input data for computer graphics rendering software.