In the past I’ve had quite a few people PM or ask in the forums how I get the images how I do, so here I’m going to show the basics of how I do my own.
I took these pics as I was setting up a light box to start a review and though I would get this done at the same time if anyone else wants to try their hand at it.
Usually when I am doing reviews I will use my digital camera, but for this tutorial I just used my mobile phone to take the pictures to show a good camera isn’t needed.
Before I start the how to, here is a quick picture of the finished product.
This was just a rushed job, here is how it was done.
Here I just started with a small box, use a bigger box for bigger items.
Then you need to cut a hole in the top of the box, if you wanted to go all out you could cut holes in the sides for extra lighting.
The hole should be smaller than the piece of paper or whatever else you will be using for a diffuser.
Some standard tape and A4 paper
Cover the inside of the box with white paper.
First I had covered the bottom of the box with paper, then at the back of the box I have used a piece of paper taped to give it a gradual curve to cut down on sharp lines that can cause shadows.
I taped some polystyrene to the box at first, this wasn’t such a good idea as it blocked a lot of light.
Here there is some A4 paper taped over the polystyrene with a light on top to illuminate the inside of the box, but ideally you would use some kind of adjustable lamp. Or if you had a few adjustable lamps they could be used on both sides and from the top.
As you can see, there isn’t anything fancy going on inside of the box.
You can see where the lines in the paper are, don’t worry about it too much but just try to smooth them out a little.
Place the item you want to take the picture of inside the box, I could have lowered the paper at the back of the box so I wouldn’t have any line in the image but I took the picture like this so I can show how the lines are removed.
Open your image in Photoshop (I use CS6), you should then go to “Image > Adjustments > Levels
The slider on the right should be dragged to the left until its on the left hand side of the bulk of blackness.
You can see the new positing of the left slider and how the image has changed, you dont need to get rid of all the black lines in the image with this, just enough to make the background look pure white.
The middle slider can be moved to the right a little to cut down on the high contrast a little and the slider on the left can be adjusted to make dark colours darker.
Click OK then select the solid paint brush and use white to erase any dark lines left over.
The lines are gone and the bottle appears to have no background.
This was a little rushed but I could have adjusted the levels to bring back accurate colours of the bottle although it slipped my mind at the time.
And just another quick one while I was at it of some post-it notes.
And after.
I forgot to mention that you should adjust all your image sizes to a acceptable resolution, I usually save mine between 500-750px wide and when I save the images I use “Save for web” under the file menu to reduce the file size so it doesn’t take 5 mins to load a page with a lot of images.
I hope this helps anyone wanting to make their own clean images similar to this, there is also other ways to get the same effect but this is how I have been doing it for about 2 years or more.
If anyone is having trouble and needs help or has questions etc I’ll try to reply to this thread to help you out.
