Toronto Photography Meetup Group

Hey,

I've been looking at tutorials for making the background white, but most of them seem to require the object be of contrasting colour to the background for the photoshop tools to work properly. I have a pale skinned person wearing a white shirt against a white wall. I'm using CS4 and have RAW files. Any tips?



Thanks!

Do you mean making the bg white after the shot is taken? in post .. or are you planning on shooting something and need an all white bg?...


It looks like its just in post .. Depending on your picture you could duplicate the photo .. make the below layer your origional and your top layer all white then lower your opacity to 50 percent and mask out your white layer to reveal the person. Will take time and be tedious though

I assume you're talking about the Magic Wand? It has a tolerance option that you can set to control the sensitivity of variation. Lower means it's less tolerant, colors have to be closer together and higher means it's more lax.

I know how frustrating searches can be. This might help http://blog.avenaim.com/2009/12/10/phot ... ing-white/ its always good to get it right on the shot rather spend time correcting it later.

And of course the funny guy http://www.zarias.com/white-seamless-qu ... t-1-video/

hello there,

i think it's better make a white background being really white while you are shooting it. If your objective is shooting a white subject and putting it on a white background, if you light it the conventional way, one of them would end up gray.

What I learned is to have a light pointed to the background and have it +1 stop higher than the exposure of the light setting you have on your white subject. When you expose your subject properly, +1 on the background would set it to virtually white.

If it is a person and you want the floor really white too, the only thing you can do to not make it recede to gray is to have a reflective white material as flooring, to help bounce back the light and have lighter kind of gray.

hope that helps

+1 light it up like a christmas tree!

Haha I know it's better to get it right at the time.. we were just stuck for time and had to shoot up against a wall in their apartment.. and there were nails and small holes in it. I had a flash behind the model to blow out the wall, but that only did so much.

I'll try to magic wand..thanks!

well if its only a few shots id make a clipping mask cut the person out & do what you will with a copy of background layer underneath. clipping masks are relatively quick to make and are really accurate.