Kens Photography Blog

Here’s a couple tips I use when doing product and tabletop photography to get the maximum image quality.

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.