Kens Photography Blog

This is a followup post to Product protography – white seamless backgrounds.

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