jhyphen
January 1st, 2007, 12:55 PM
Greetings and happy new year. I'm a new member and new to Photoshop Elements, though I'm rounding the learning curve pretty fast.
Here's my backstory: I collect movie props (mostly custom commissioned replicas), and I like to share pictures of my collection. I have a website at www.jhyphen.com. My theme is that I want catalog quality "beauty shots" of each piece against a pure white background.
A couple of years ago I commissioned a professional photographer acquaintance of mine to take pictures of what I had at the time. The results are uneven, because he simply adjusted the quality of the picture against the existing white paper background. Some of the images are spectacular, and some are so-so, with washed out details and uneven shadows.
Over the past few months, I've decided to learn to do this myself. I upgraded from a 2.6 mp Olympus to a 6.0 mp Canon PowerShot SD600 camera (not much for pros, but I'm an amateur pointer/shooter). I bought a nylon light box (Photek Digital Lighthouse) and two small lamps, and experimented for weeks.
So I got pretty good at taking sharp pictures against a white sweep. But the background never seemed as pure as I wanted. After a little research and fooling around, I determined that the best way to achieve the result I wanted is to take the pictures in the light box, and then Photoshop the prop out of the image and into a pure white background.
I read all the tips and tricks I could, and bought a good book on the subject (The Digital Photographer's Guide to Photoshop Elements by Barry Beckham).
I've used all the tried and true image extracting techniques, including magic eraser, background eraser, regular old eraser, magic wand, and my favorite, polygonal lasso. I find that most of the techniques leave something to be desired, often because they bleed into the prop itself. The lasso is the most effective way I've found, but it is tedious and painstaking, especially to mask out curves and other nonlinear shapes. Nevertheless, a little elbow grease has yielded results like the following:
http://www.jhyphen.com/miscellaneous/test/testphaser1.jpg
I would like to know what other people do. Some of my props do not lend themselves to such a good result with the lasso or any of the other tools.
One idea I'm batting around is to use a chroma key (blue or green screen) background, like they do for special effects in the movies. The high contrast might make it easier to use the magic eraser, etc.
Anyway, I know that the subject has been covered before, but I wanted to get into some more advanced discussion, and see if there's anything I missed.
By the way, if you visit my website, these are the three items I photographed myself:
http://www.jhyphen.com/collection/view_details.asp?id=20000145 (warning, prop from Pulp Fiction with nasty language)
http://www.jhyphen.com/collection/view_details.asp?id=20000146
http://www.jhyphen.com/collection/view_details.asp?id=20000092
The other pictures in the gallery were taken by the pro photographer. Call me biased, but I prefer my own efforts in terms of crispness and presentation. In any case, thanks for reading, and I look forward to sharing techniques.
John
Here's my backstory: I collect movie props (mostly custom commissioned replicas), and I like to share pictures of my collection. I have a website at www.jhyphen.com. My theme is that I want catalog quality "beauty shots" of each piece against a pure white background.
A couple of years ago I commissioned a professional photographer acquaintance of mine to take pictures of what I had at the time. The results are uneven, because he simply adjusted the quality of the picture against the existing white paper background. Some of the images are spectacular, and some are so-so, with washed out details and uneven shadows.
Over the past few months, I've decided to learn to do this myself. I upgraded from a 2.6 mp Olympus to a 6.0 mp Canon PowerShot SD600 camera (not much for pros, but I'm an amateur pointer/shooter). I bought a nylon light box (Photek Digital Lighthouse) and two small lamps, and experimented for weeks.
So I got pretty good at taking sharp pictures against a white sweep. But the background never seemed as pure as I wanted. After a little research and fooling around, I determined that the best way to achieve the result I wanted is to take the pictures in the light box, and then Photoshop the prop out of the image and into a pure white background.
I read all the tips and tricks I could, and bought a good book on the subject (The Digital Photographer's Guide to Photoshop Elements by Barry Beckham).
I've used all the tried and true image extracting techniques, including magic eraser, background eraser, regular old eraser, magic wand, and my favorite, polygonal lasso. I find that most of the techniques leave something to be desired, often because they bleed into the prop itself. The lasso is the most effective way I've found, but it is tedious and painstaking, especially to mask out curves and other nonlinear shapes. Nevertheless, a little elbow grease has yielded results like the following:
http://www.jhyphen.com/miscellaneous/test/testphaser1.jpg
I would like to know what other people do. Some of my props do not lend themselves to such a good result with the lasso or any of the other tools.
One idea I'm batting around is to use a chroma key (blue or green screen) background, like they do for special effects in the movies. The high contrast might make it easier to use the magic eraser, etc.
Anyway, I know that the subject has been covered before, but I wanted to get into some more advanced discussion, and see if there's anything I missed.
By the way, if you visit my website, these are the three items I photographed myself:
http://www.jhyphen.com/collection/view_details.asp?id=20000145 (warning, prop from Pulp Fiction with nasty language)
http://www.jhyphen.com/collection/view_details.asp?id=20000146
http://www.jhyphen.com/collection/view_details.asp?id=20000092
The other pictures in the gallery were taken by the pro photographer. Call me biased, but I prefer my own efforts in terms of crispness and presentation. In any case, thanks for reading, and I look forward to sharing techniques.
John