A number of you have expressed interest in how I made the 'pack-shot' image that I posted in my main PLAY Album for today's date: http://365project.org/vignouse/play/2017-01-05 so here is a 'making of' post.
The classic way of doing a pack-shot for publication and/or advertising is to use a light tent with illumination from at least each side and from underneath: it's a technique that dates from film days before we had digital image manipulation. I have a light tent and had thought that I might try an 'advertising' shot with this bottle of Boss men's cologne. However, before I went to all the trouble of setting up the light tent and the lights, I thought I would first try a quick shot followed by a quick and dirty edit to see if the shot had 'legs'.
Here's the quick shot with the cologne bottle placed on the edge of our bathroom washbasin - this is the raw image that I then imported into Lightroom. A number of edits followed: a crop; a conversion using a Kodachrome 64 preset in Nik Colour Efex Pro4; some clone stamp work, dodging and burning and levels adjustments in Photoshop and, finally, some tidying and finessing.
I was sufficiently happy with the final result to decide that it wouldn't be worth setting up the light tent and lights... so I got a quick win!
Hope you find this back-story interesting and informative and that it will encourage you to experiment yourselves.
Absolutely fascinating! I really appreciate your background story. It is so helpful to know the different edits folks use to achieve a certain look. Thank you, and great work!
Quick question, how long did it take you to do the edits in LR? The final image was excellent. You're probably really fluent in LR and it take someone who wasn't a lot longer, but it'd be great to have a rough idea.
I'm especially impressed with the color changes. I don't have Efex, and I find color correction to be difficult. I never seem to get all the "gray" out.
@houser934 Thank you Kathyryn: the Nik software suite is now free so no reason not to have it but you can do everything in LR with a little time and effort. The only reason I used Colour Efex Pro here was to get a quick idea of what might be possible. If I had realised that I would actually go on to use this image, I would have set it up rather differently! In fact, my original intention was to do this in B&W - this was an afterthought.
@houser934 Try reducing the Shadow and/or Black content of your image after you have boosted the colour depth and donł't forget to adjust the colour luminance value to match... that should get rid of any residual 'grey'.
Very interested in this image - am I understanding correctly - there are two methods for getting white background - either computer editing or white light box and a series of lights?
@bfairfield If we're talking about photographing small objects as here, then the proper way is with a light-box - a quick and dirty edit can do wonders, as you saw, but it wouldn't stand up to professional scrutiny. My picture would have been improved had I stood the bottle on a piece of curved white card and then edited that image but it started life as just a quick test-shot. There are loads of tutorials available on the web... try googling for the aspect that interests you.
@vignouse thanks, yes, I'm beginning this study - and see what you mean about a plethora of info on Internet about what I am calling hi-key photos or perhaps I'm mixing terms -
January 11th, 2017
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