Yiskah Knits: hand knitted jewellery and accessories by Jessica Biscoe

Product Photography – How to Achieve a Crisp White Background

9 Nov 2012

Happy Friday, all! Here’s a little photography treat to play with over the weekend. A while ago I shared with you some tips for making a DIY light-box at home. I wanted to expand on this a little and share some ‘post-production’ tips that i’ve picked up since then. In no way do I consider myself a photographer so just know these little hints are what work for me and I hope, for you too. To give your photo a fighting chance post production, you still need to make sure the original is taken in as much natural light as possible. This particular tip needs to have a white background; if you don’t have time to make up the lightbox tutorial, two pieces of card stood up at 90 degrees works wonders.

Now open up photoshop, or your photo editing software such as iPhoto or Aperture and find the setting called curves.Once you have the cuves icon box open, you want to choose the very last eye dropper icon, highlighted below. Now click the eye dropper on the section of the photo which should be white. I went for just above the centre of the heart, and voila! The colour and white balance is automatically adjusted to make everything of a similar hue, bright white.You don’t want to choose a dark shadowy area, as this is going to over expose the rest of the photo, and make it far too white. For the same reason, this technique doesn’t work well on a photo taken in direct sunlight.

I can’t tell you how much this trick has helped to brighten up my shop, and make it cohesive. Have fun and banish that bluish tinge!

diy, photography

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• Anna Simmonds says:

  13 February 2013 at 8:06 pm

  I’ve been using different techniques to get my photos bright and hue-free, but this is by far the fastest method I’ve come across! It’s perfect for those photos that just need a little nudge in the right different. Thanks so much for sharing :)

  Reply
  • Jess says:

    16 February 2013 at 11:29 am

    Hi Anna, I’m so pleased it helped! :D

    Reply