Pls help! Invisible white backgrounds

[mark]

Hello!

I am taking pictures of clothes, shoes, hats etc in a very bodged together studio with a digital camera. A nikon coolpix5400.

The problem I am having is as follows -

I need to shoot the products so that the background board completely turns white (ie invisible) as the piccies are being transfered to a website. I can just about manage on dark clothes as the camera meters the light and over exposes slightly on dark subjects, but on white t shirts for example, it all ends up as a greyish mess. Is there a way to shoot white t shirts on a white background and loose the background? It's driving me crazy!

I am using two 1000w studio lights with diffusers (this is all the lighting that is available) and possibly a flash for the camera.

Any help would be MUCH appreciated.

Thanks

Mark :0)

[Sebastian]

Meter manually, adjust the camera manually. Tell us what sort of metering modes your camera has and we'll go from there.

[Asylum Steve]

mark,

Extracting an image from its bg in a photo is not like video chromakey. IOW, you do not HAVE to use any particular color. Photoshop has any of a number of ways to select and isolate either foregrounds or backgrounds of any color...

I think you would have a much easier time of it if you used a neutral gray bg. That way nearly every color garment would have a distinct edge to it, which really is the key to extracting. Just try to make sure your bg is evenly lit...

-Steve

[Photo-John]

Besides the background and extracting the product, there's an exposure problem going on, too. Using a gray background would probably fix that as it would get the camera to meter better. However, if you are photographing a white T-shirt on a white background, you'll need to either use a manual exposure mode or use some exposure compensation. The camera wants to make everything gray. That's what a light meter does. Usually that's a good strategy. But it's not good for white on white. When you're shooting white on white, you want to overexpose from what the meter says by a stop or a stop and a half. That would be +1 or +1.5 with your camera's exposure compensation.

Steve's idea to use a different color background is a good one. That will definitely simplify things. Good, even light is key, too. If you have too many shadows on the background, you'll have to manually select a lot of the product and that's a pain in the butt.

[mark]

Hey all, Thanks for the advice! I'll be getting a grey background soon, hopefully that will help. I have a black one already, but i still cant get a decent enough edge for photoshop to cut it out neatly. Will grey make this any easier? Perhaps i am not using photoshop correctly. I am using the smart edge function and clicking around. The colour replacer tends to take from the clothes too!

The camera has some manual modes which i have been using, i can adjust the shutter speed, apperture, and a host of other little things. The metering is a choice of four, matrix, spot, af spot, center weighted. af spot gives best results.

The two picies i have included are one of a decent hardly modified dark colour garment and one of a white shirt origional piccy. Argh!

Mark

[Asylum Steve]

Mark,

Normal edge tools are not the best thing to use for this. The Extraction Tool will certainly give you better results. It's at the top of the FILTER pulldown menu. In the Extraction window, use the highlighter tool to completely surround your image, then click inside the image with the fill tool to fill it. You can preview the seperated image, then click ok when you're satisfied. Any edge cleanup can be done with the Eraser Tool. Zoom in on your image to get a good look.

You might also try the Magic Eraser, in the same tool group as the normal eraser tool. You click with it on your bg color, and it selects similar pixels and makes them transparent. For clean, simple edges, this may work well enough for you, and it's fast...

Both of these will work best if you have good contrast between the garment and the bg. IOW, a decent edge.

[Photo-John]

Mark-
No matter what you do to remove the background, you still need to get the exposure right. As I said before, with white on white, you need to either use the manual exposure more or exposure compensation in order make your image really white. Your light meter wants to average all values to medium gray. That works fine for most scenes as they have a lot of tonal values. But for white on white (or black on black) it will make everything gray. You need to overexpose by a stop or more to get the image to look right. If you do that and then use the eyedropper tool on the background, you'll have a lot less work when you try to select the shirt.

[exposure]

Hi, just joined the forum and read your post.

From my experience and that of the other product photographers I know, the only way to get a proper white background is to shoot on white perspex and backlight it from underneath. Don't go overboard or you'll get too much flare.

The grey background might help, but you might get edges when you lift it in photoshop.

hope this helps

--Gavin

One more thing. from your first post it sounds like you'll using auto metering. try to lock down your exposure to one setting, and as long as you don't change the lighting it doesn't matter what color the clothes are.