White Background – Fotosolution.com

3 Mistakes to Avoid When Shooting on a White Background For Beginner

Choosing the ubiquitous for shooting is a thing that is not too difficult for photographers even for beginner. Simply, most of people always choose white background portrait because they think it’s easy to achieve. Simply you put your subject in front of the camera against a white background, preferably with a flash or strobe, and take the picture.

Unfortunately that thought is completely wrong. The best possible result would be an off-white background after you have done some edits. That’s not the only issue though because you’d be dismayed to see unwanted shadows everywhere too. To understand more these wrong for shooting, here are 3 basic mistakes to avoid when trying to achieve a 100% pure white background for beginners.

Mistake #1 The background is not lit properly

The first thing that we need to interest in is the background. The background must be lit with approximately two stops more light, than the amount of falling on the subject. For example, if you want to photograph your subject at f/8, set your background lights to two stops brighter, so the meter would read f/16 on the background.

Note: You need to meter both background lights separately, so that when metering for the main light, you would turn the background lights off, and vice versa.

Your camera settings for all the shots in this setup were: ISO 250, 1/160th of a second, shot at f/8 for Sven, (the background read f/16). The speedlights were set to 1/16th power. If you are using the SB900 Nikon, firing at 1/1 power, not only does it drain the batteries very quickly, but also makes the flash overheat. If you don’t like using Nikon for digital photos, you can use two SB910s and one SB900 were used for this setup. This is great suggestion for your choice.

Mistake #2 Not enough subject background separation

You need to separate them from the main subject because the background lights are brighter than usual. There are two key ways of doing this: flagging and distance

Flagging

You can use anything block to flag your lights; the black side of a reflector, black cardboard sheets, black foam core. Black does not let light in, instead it absorbs light rather than bounces it. It also blocks light from seeping through to places where you do not want it. If you don’t flag or block your background lights, your subject will get a halo effect and look very backlit.

Distance

Once you have flagged your lights, you need to distance your subject far enough away the background and background light so that any spills won’t touch your subject. This depends on your personal preference and creativity. For example, you may want some spill on your subject for a certain look or effect, or you may not.

If you do want some spill on your subject, make sure to run a few tests with various lenses, as chromatic aberration tends to occur around the edges due to the abundance of light. Some lenses are prone to chromatic aberration irrespective of aperture, while others can handle it very well even at wide apertures, where it is most commonly observed. Besides, be careful with the amount of spill you allow so as not to chop off parts of your subject from the spill overexposure.

Mistake #3 The subject is floating

If you do not include some floor shadows, your subjects will look like they are floating on white air, or cut out and pasted on a white sheet of paper.

The best suggest for avoiding floating subjects is to use a reflective surface like translucent white Plexiglas, or white tile sheet, this will help you avoid the bad thing and not affect the result . You can adjust the opacity of this reflection in Photoshop during post-processing, but having the reflection shows that your subject is planted firmly on solid ground.

These some simple guide will get you well on your way to creating professional and consistent images that really make an impression with prospective customers. Hope that they will be useful for you especially for beginners.

Thanks for watching!.

Simple and Easy Tools To Remove White Background

White background is the standard backdrop that is commonly used in product photography. It creates a high energy, happy, and distraction free scene, perfect for pictures of your friends and family. White background makes the product more visible and clear than any other color. It is also easier to remove during post processing process using Adobe Photoshop.
If you want to remove a white background from an image you’re working on, there are many ways to do this by using Photoshop. Here are some simple and easy tools that you can use to remove white background from your image in no time.

There are 2 mains tools that help you remove white background.

Selection Tools
Eraser Tools

Selection Tools:

These are a set of tools that helps you in making a selection, which can be modified later. The selection tools are not only useful for removing backgrounds but also for many other purposes such as changing color, resizing and doing other sorts of modifications. They are Lasso Tool, Polygonal Lasso Tool, Magnetic Lasso Tool, Quick Selection Tool and Magic Wand Tool.

Magnetic Lasso Tool

Magnetic Lasso tool is a very simple and easy-to-use tool available in the Lasso category. First, you take an image with white background. The magnetic lasso tool detects and snaps to the edge of an object as you to trace along its outline. The Magnetic lasso tool options used for this image are shown to the right. The lasso width controls how close the edge you need to stay as you trace the image. Frequency controls how often points are laid down, and edge contrast helps you fine tune the edge detection. Then, select the Magnetic Lasso tool under the Lasso tools icon from the toolbar. Click anywhere on the edge of the subject and drag your mouse pointer along the border. You can create a selection around the subject and complete it by clicking the starting point of the selection. Now, let’s right click on the selection, choose ‘reverse selection’ and hit delete to remove white background.

Quick Selection Tool

The Quick Selection Tool is very useful to select pixels of same color. First, you need to select the tool from the toolbar and you can see your mouse pointer turned into a circle shaped brush. Its size can be changed in the options bar according to the need and necessity. Once the tool is selected, let’s start painting on the white background and watch the selection grow without disturbing the subject. This is a quick and convenient way for selecting background.

Magic Wand Tool

The Magic Wand Tool works just like the Quick Selection Tool by selecting a group of pixels sharing same color. This is the easiest way to make a selection, but is only effective if the background you are selecting is one solid colour. So I recommend this method if your image is a solid object on a blank background, like a product shot. First, let’s make sure your image is in a layer, just right click on the Background layer, and choose ‘Layer from Background’. Now you simply choose the Magic Wand tool, and click on the background. With the background selected, you can now delete it and place your new background beneath the object’s layer.

Eraser Tools

Unlike selection tools, the eraser tools will directly delete the layer without making any selection area. They are typically made for background removal and deleting unwanted pixels from an image. Tools that are available are Eraser Tool, Background Eraser Tool and Magic Eraser Tool.

Background Eraser Tool:

As the name says, it is a great tool present in Adobe Photoshop for removing simple and complicated backgrounds. The tool samples a pixel and removes every other pixel with the same color within the brush diameter. By doing so, the foreground (i.e. the subject) is left undisturbed. Brush size can be increased to get the work quickly. It also has tolerance setting, which acts the same way it acted in Magic Wand tool.

Magic Eraser Tool:

The Magic Eraser Tool works the same way the Magic Wand tool worked. Only difference between these two tools it that Magic Wand makes a selection while Magic Eraser directly removes without creating a selection area. You can use the Magic Eraser tool you simply click on the background somewhere and it will vanish. If you only have one layer open, when you click to remove the background the pixels will be turned into a transparency, in other words there will be nothing there so you’ll just see a chequered pattern. How much of it is erased in one click will change depending on a few of the tool’s settings which you can alter in the tool bar found towards the top of the window. This tool is much faster than the Background Eraser tool, as it removes white background with a single click. However, when it comes to complicated backgrounds, you will have to be careful with the Magic Eraser tool.

These are some of the quick and easy tools that can be used to remove white background using Photoshop. However, as you happen to have lots of images to process and you don’t have time to do, we are happy to work for you. Thanks for watching!