When creating isolated product photos, you end up with a photo that isn’t connected to its environment via a shadow, but a reflection can look very cool. The problem in keeping the reflection when using the technique shown in the previous article is that if you dodge out the white background it’s allmost impossible not to paint over and affect the reflection of the subject. You could mask it, but that takes to much time.. now what?

First open the image in Photoshop. Jump the background layer (Control+J)
Hit control+t and context click inside the selection and choose Flip Vertical and hit enter to commit the change.
Press shift+down arrow and position the layer right below the background layer so it falls like a reflection would.
Hit Control+u and pull the saturation slider all the way down.
Pull the Lightness slider all the way down.
Ok out of the hue/saturation dialog.

Doubleclick the layer to enter the Layer styles dialog and click on Gradient overlay. Select Reflected and check the reverse checkbox. Enter 90 in the angle textbox. The reflection is now strongest right below the original object as in real life.

Ok out of the Layer styles dialog and finally adjust the layer opacity down to about 6-10% and your fake reflection should look credible.

Example result:

No reflection

fake reflection only

With fake reflection

Here’s what you need to create perfect white seamless backgrounds for product photography.

3 Strobe lights with barndoors.
2 home made diffusion panels.
2 Sawhorses.
Large sheet of plexiglass.
Quality polarizing filter.
Large white background.

For white backgorunds I don’t bother with white paper, way to expensive. Just go to your local carpeting store and buy a 3×4 meter piece of white vinyl or however large you want it. Vinyl is indestructable, and can be washed when it gets dirty. A little bit more expensive up front than a white paper roll, but it will last a lifetime so you only have to buy it once.

The polarizing filter is used to kill reflections. Sometimes you want a cool mirror reflection of your subject, sometimes not. With a quality circular polarizing filter you just turn the filter to kill the reflection, or make it appear when you want it.

A diffusion panel is just a large wooden frame with white acetate paper nailed on, shine the lights into the diffusion panel and you can model any light modifier. For soft light move the light and panel close to the subject, for harsh light move the light further away. Use the barndoors to control spill light from hitting your lens and creating flare that will cause lack of contrast, you basically never want your lense to see direct light. Diffusion panels are cheap to make and you can clamp them on anywhere with “A” clamps in seconds, so nice and flexible, I have softboxes but never use them anymore, they take up space, are a hazzle to store and expensive.

The reason you want to use plexiglass and NOT glass, is that glass will cause a double reflection and plexiglass will not. Don’t ask my why, but if you use glass, the reflection will look like there’s 2 reflections offset slightly from eachother and it makes the reflection look like blurry.

Hang the white vinyl on a wall.

Place the sawhorses about 3-4 meters in front of your white background and place the plexiglass on top of them. You need this distance so the lighting on your background doesn’t spill on your subject.

Place a strobe as low as you can shining on the background right behind where you’r subject is located horizontally. Turn off all lights but the background strobe, pull up all doors on the barndoors so light only goes forward, hitting the background only.

Adjust this strobe so when you take an image the whole image is blown and blinking, just one big horrible clipping mess, that’s what you want and no more. Don’t just fire that stobe all the way, but adjust it so it just clips the image. If you use to much light then you will have more spill and chances of flare causing lack of contrast.

Now place your subject on the plexiglass and take a shot with the background strobe still on. It should be very dark, if it’s not, move the sawhorses further away from the background.

Place your diffusion panels with a couple of clamps at the sides of the plexiglass and strobes shining in from the left and right sides. Adjust the barndoors on these strobes, so light only hits the subject, and no direct light can be seen from looking though the lense.

After a few adjustments on the side lights to get your subject exposed properly you will have a totally shadowless subject because there’s nothing below for the shadow to fall on, and a white 100% blown background with your subject just floating there, properly exposed.

The plexiglass also lets you put a white reflector below to get family of angles of shiny subject surfaces filled. You can also light from below if you have more than 3 lights. This setup lets you do darkfield and lightfield glass lighting easily. You can even put a piece of black (Or other color) cardboard on the plexiglass with a small hole in the cardboard and create self illuminated glass objects.

If you’r getting annoyed by the horizon line of the plexiglass that you have to dodge out in photoshop, just get the plexiglass deep enough that it goes all the way back to the background, then it will be blown out just like the background itself and you’d never need to work on removing it again, it’s a small thing and pretty fast to remove, but it adds up in the long run and plexiglass is not that expensive so splurge a little and get it right from the start. You can also just bend the plexiglass at the back so it bends out of the scene, like an inversed infinity wall.

Flare Problems, read on..?

If you find you’r getting flare looking like a milky/white film over your subject you’r background is probably to bright. When using only 1 strobe for a background most will instinctively turn up the power to cover a larger area. The problem with doing this is that the hotspot you get in the middle is many stops brighter than needed, this causes flare no matter how far you try to move your subject from the background because it’s so bright and your lense is point right into it.

To deal with this situation, instead of bumping up that background light, move it closer to the background and turn it down. Remember the inverse square law works in reverse to. Say you have your background light 100 centimeter from the background, moving it to 50 centimeter will make the area it covers 1 stop brighter. The light is now brigther because it’s closer, but turned down, the flare in your lense will be greatly diminished, if not gone completely.

Reposition your subject to be dead center in the whiteout area create by the background light to make sure the subject can fit inside the whiteout area and you have tamed the flare.

If you need a larger area, the only other solution is to use 2 background lights to cover it, but for most product photography 1 is plenty.

I put on the set of barndoors and took a couple test shots. Like magic I had more contrast because I could now block the family of angles from the lights. I use diffusion panels exclusively, (sod softboxes, pain in the ass to setup, takes up space and are expensive) and a lot of times the camera can “see” the reflectors on the heads causing glare.

So it seems that my contrast problem was simply flare biting me in the ass. (Again, grrr) but with the barndoors this is a thing of the past. Also nice that I can stop spill on walls and ceiling, I get better colors now to, since I don’t have reflections from the walls and ceiling bouncing off colors back into the scene anymore.

White is boring for portraits, so how can you make those nice blurry colors you see on professionally made backdrops?

First you go out and get some oil paint in whatever colors you like, blue, red, green is good to start with, blue especially. Also get a huge tube of white and the biggest softests brush you can find.

What’s that you say? Can’t paint to save your life? No worries. Go to youtube and type in “Bob Ross” Don’t worry you’r not going to learn how to paint Bob Ross landscapes. All you are looking for here is Bobs technique for painting the blue sky he always starts out with, it’s dead easy and anyone with a pair of hands will be able to pick it up allmost immidiately. All you do is first prepare the canvas by painting it with some white oil paint diluted with turpentine about 50/50 mix and cover the canvas with this first. Then grab a tiny bit of blue paint and do some criss cross strokes willy nilly at random places. Because there’s a background of the 50/50 white mix, when you do criss cross strokes the paint wil go all blurry and blend perfectly, it’s dead easy to don’t be scare to try it. I can’t paint for shit and I picked it up after doing a couple of practice strokes on some cardboard.

Once you get this down you can create all kinds of abstract studio backgrounds. The good thing about painters canvas is that it’s very thick and though and blocks light 100% so you can paint different colors on each side of a piece of canvas to get more miliage for your money, allthough it’s cheap. Get a large roll of the widest canvas you can find and go to town, there’s about 8 lenghts of backgrounds in a large roll, paint on both sides and it’s 16, plenty for anyone. Save any scraps of canvas left over, they make exelent reflectors to bounce some light around.

EDIT: Sadly, after Bobs death, his family is raping his corpse for all its worth (gotta make the most money before people forget about him, Bob was not like this, he was a generous wonderfull person), and has been getting all his episodes deleted of youtube, making it harder for people to follow this tutorial and make thier own studio backgrounds, I found a pretty good video showing Bobs technique. Just remember, the important part for getting your studio background all smooth is to prepare the canvas with the white/turpentine mixture first, otherwise it won’t blend properly.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CUs29vV0N4

• Allow you to block of light in any direction to control spill light.
• Allows you to focus the light by closing in the doors, any size of snoot can be emulated.
• Allows you to make strips of light either horizontially or vertially, great for controlling hair, shoulder, and background effects.
• Allows you to feather the light falling on your subject.

And last but perheps the best feature of barndoors..

If you have a studio lighting kit that isn’t 100% correct between the modelling and flash, just set the flash and modelling lights to match eachother 100% using a light meter, then control the light amount by closing or opening the doors. The barndoors controls both the modelling light and the flash output, because it’s in front of the reflector.

You can open all the way or close the light output completely with great presicion manually and just leave the flash and modelling dials alone where you know they are propertional.

Couple a set of barndoors on all your flash heads with a couple of large home made diffusion panels and that’s all the flash assesories you will ever need. Want a small softbox look? move the light a bot away from the diffusion panel and close in the barndoors. Want a huge softbox look? Move the light away from the diffusion panel and open the barndoors some more, any size softbox look can be created, and you don’t need to assemble the damn things. Move the lights close to the diffusion panes and you get a nice bright spot in the middle with a great looking feathered edge, open and close the doors to control where the feathered edge hits your subject.

You can emulate snoots, striplights and almost every lighting accesory with diffusion panels and barndoors with your studio lights.

If you put up a mirror so it reflects your light the inverse square law is not in effect for the mirror (The speculars become smaller, but does not lose intensity). No matter if the light is close to the mirror, or far away it will reflect the light at the same intensity.

There is a very important clue here… Specular hightlight intensity never changes no matter the relative distance to the light, but diffused light does.

So moving the light further away from the subject makes specular hightlights even more intense because you see them relative to the diffused light. Moving the lights say douple the distance will make the diffused light 1 stop darker, yet the specular highlights will be at the same intensity, just smaller.

So moving you lights closer to the subject will make the specular hightlights less harsh because the diffused light is now brighter relative to the specular hightlights.

Always expose to the right and shoot in RAW.

The way a digital camera sensor works is that it gives priority to the mid-tones and white ranges. Those ranges gets proportionally more dynamic range, while the shadow area gets very little. If you expose the way your meter tells you, or just the way you traditionally would expose, then the shadow areas will have a lot more noise and artifacts. Even worse if you need to bump up the exposure, either on purpose or using adjustments such as Adobe Lightrooms Fill light or Recovery sliders.

Exposing to the right simply means you bump the histogram as far to the right as you can, paying no attention to how the image looks. The image will look overexposed, but since you shoot in RAW, as long as you don’t actually clip anything it doesn’t matter because you can simply turn down the exposure so the image looks right. Exposing to the right moves the shadow areas out of the sensor shadow range and into the mid-tones where there’s a lot less noise. Later when you adjust the RAW exposure you are turning the exposure down which will not increase the noise in the shadow areas.

The result is a lot less noise and sharper images because you can turn off noise reduction all together. This also means you need to add less sharpening, further enhancing the quality of your photos.

When possible, blow the background and fill the frame.

When shooting tabletop and product shots, shoot so the background is pure white. Having a perfectly blown white background means you don’t have to mask anything, ever. Just put your main layer in multiply mode and put whatever background you want on a layer below, voila.

When shooting tabletop product shots, fill the frame with your subject as much as possible and disregard any in camera composition.

After the photo is taken you can always add back negative space and position the image to get the composition you want by adding these things in post, but since you filled the frame the subject itself will use the all the pixels off your sensor.

For example let’s say you took the image and composed normally, the subject taking up say, 25% of the frame, the rest is white negative space.

What you just did was waste 75% of the pixels in the frame to pure white nothing, that’s a lot of image quality right out the window.

If you’ve ever tried to take a nice photo of some glassware and just got horribly bad results then these techniques will make you jump with glee.

See, you can’t really light glass because either it’s transparent and the light will just shoot right through the glass and all you’ll get is some ugly reflections on the glass, or it’s translucent and you will have problems with glare, ugly specular highlights and a headache.

What you do is simple. Light up a bright background behind the glass if the glass is transparent instead of the glass itself. Since the glass is transparent, you will see the light through the glass, or rather, you will see the reflection of the light you shine on the background. In order to get edge definition just turn off all ambient light in the room. Because of light falloff (Inverse square law) and the family of angles, even though the background behind the glass is bright, the glass will see the light in the room as very dark (Can’t trust your eyes here, the room will look bright to you, but not the glass and the camera) and that darkness will be reflected in the edges of the glass giving you nice edge definition.

For lighting glass on a dark/black background, just light up the background again. Now put a black piece of cardboard a little bit larger than the glass, behind the glass. Start with the glass right up to the black cardboard, then move it away and look what happens. When the glass gets far enough away from the black cardboard, the family of angles of the bright background reflection, will hit the edges of the glass and give you a nice bright edge on the glass.

There’s so much amazing lighting knowledge in the Light Science and magic book that any serious photographer should have this book on the top of their wish-list.

Not to worry, here’s a super tip to get your lighting ratios set quickly.

Tie a string to the flash head somewhere, important, we want it so it moves with the flash head up and down.

Every time you shoot something, take the string and roll it out to reach where you focus on the subject, tie a knot there or mark it some other way. write down the flash settings and camera aparture. After a while you will have all your useuall distances marked so you can just look up what you need, roll out the string again and voila, ready to rock. If your other heads are the same type just make an identical copy of the string and tie it to the other lights.

You could also measure with a ruler or something if you don’t want strings dangling from your heads. Not wery pro, but if you’r doing product shots this works great.

Bowens esprit gemeni 250w kit

The Bowens esprit gemeni 250w kit contains:

2 x Sturdy flash tripods.
1 x Umbrella that can be converted to white, silver or shoot through.
1 x 80x60cm Softbox (Bloody nightmare to assemble hehe)
2 x 250W strobe heads.
1 x 4 meter sync cable.

The whole kit comes in a VERY nice carrying bag with built in wheels which is nice since the kit is kinda heavy to lug around.

The strobes has a 250W modelling light that can be adjusted step-less, or the modelling light can be proportional, which means whatever the flash is set at the modelling lights will match.

Flash is adjustable in fine steps down to 1/32 stop.

Other features include: Audible beep when flash is ready, modelling lights can be set to turn of until the flash is ready so it’s easy to see if all the heads have fired. Slave cell so the heads can be triggered by a normal camera flash.

The Esprit Gemeni series strobes can all be powered by batteries if needed for on location stuff, where no mains power is available.

The heads will accept all accessories from the Bowens range, such as beauty dishes, ring flashes, larger umbrellas and softboxes, brolly boxes etc…

I’m still playing around with the kit, but so far the light produced looks great.