Tuesday, March 1, 2011

A little Photoshop goes a long way...


Taking good product photos is probably the hardest thing about selling your work online. I use a Fuji Finepix  S1500, which is inexpensive and is in between a point and shoot and an SLR. Honestly though, my photos are not so hot right out of the camera (helpful hint: don't have your photo studio in a room with pale green walls if you can help it!) but I'm fortunate in that I used to do a lot of product photo editing in my former day job, so I'm quite well versed in Photoshop. I use two daylight balanced bulbs and a piece of white nylon fabric as a light tent to diffuse them.

The top photo has only been cropped, while the bottom photo has had cropping, rotation, skewing, levels and curves adjustments, hue/saturation adjustments, dodging, burning, sharpening and blurring. It sounds like a lot of work, but for me it's faster to do the work in Photoshop than to fuss with the actual photo taking. I recommend taking an online Photoshop class to really get a good feel for it. I did several semesters online at my local JC and it was well worth the time.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

This is great! In a lot of photoshopped pictures you see the piece changed. I love that your background changed and made it easier to view, but the piece stayed the same, no trickery in advertising! Great job.