Here's a few things I learned from watching professional photographers take archival shots of artworks. Dramatic treatments were rarely sought. Fidelity in reproduction of the objects' color and surface was.
These guys were very concerned w. color accuracy. Whenever possible, they used the whitest light available. Most often, as bright as they could. They hated working under most florescent lights, and there were major problems w. most old fashioned tungsten incandescent light sources. Direct sunlight was not really desirable, and clear blue skies were also problematic. One fellow had painted his studio windows a grey w. a slight green tint to balance too yellow - too blue from sky light. A common trick w. all sorts of lighting was to use very white sheets of paper to reflect the light onto the object.
Inserting a small card (usually produced by Kodak) into the focus that had a white to black series of samples, and several specific color frequencies was standard. Once digital systems entered the process, this remained very important. If one fed the image into an image processor, one could sample the pure white, and see what color impurities it had. One could also work thru the grey to black samples to determine if the contrast balance was good. And, depending on the camera and the light, certain grey ranges would not be neutral.
Glare and overlit areas were a bane. The light almost always was passed thru or bounced of diffusers. The studios were painted mat black. The items were often placed in a neutral grey surround that would not show as either white or black under proper lighting. Some photographers were sufficiently picky that if they were shooting something reflective, like a piece of silver, they would insert the camera lense thru a sheet of black paper so no metal glint from the camera showed on the object.
Sometimes, when showing very fine surface detail was desirable (such as one might find on a carved stick) a strong raking light was used, but there would be enough back fill that the shadow would not come out completely black.
There are any number of articles on how to achieve effective lighting, and add drama and subtlety. Check those out. Typically, you will want to have at least 2 light sources, the key and fill, but if the key is broad enough, and there is something of to side of the object, the reflected light can substitute for the fill.
Myself, all I have is a very inexpensive Canon camera. At low light levels, it completely looses color accuracy, and the image becomes filled w. static. I use a Mac, and the included image viewer, called Preview, does an adequate job of correcting moderate amounts of color and contrast imbalance. I don't have any really white light available, some some color tweaking is usually needed. I also have Photoshop Elements, the hobbyist version of Photoshop.
I used to have both Photoshop and Corel Photopaint, but those are way more than I need 95% of the time. There is a pretty good low cost package called WinImages. I tried GIMP some years ago, but at the time it had a very difficult interface.