Color Product Photography At Home - Beginner To Pro!

in this video we're taking boring product photos and utilizing color to make them pop you won't find a more in-depth guide on youtube we're walking through how a beginner intermediate and pro photographer uses color in their product photos to create eye-catching imagery these photos will help you gain more product photography clients and you don't need much to get started so let's get into it [Music] color and product photography this will be the most in-depth guide you find on youtube using color is a fantastic way to capture the attention of people with your photos if you're just building your portfolio color will make you stand out and when you work with brands these photos will make more people click on them and the brand is going to love you as their photographer by the way my name is chris i teach photography and creative business i want to say a special high all my new subscribers welcome to the channel this video is part of my product photography series we've already covered the importance of product photography we've covered lighting setups creative product photography and stop motion today we're talking about color utilizing color opens up so much creative opportunity you may be thinking that you can only do simple shots on a one colored backdrop but that's just the beginning i'll walk you through how beginners intermediate and pro photographers use color to create amazing visuals the first question to answer is why does product photography matter 99 of the time it's about trying to sell something in the world of e-commerce product photography has never been more important by adding color to product photos it helps them pop and capture attention when a potential customer is scrolling instagram and they see a bright colored photo pop up they might be more likely to take a couple seconds look at the photo and click through to learn more about that brand now if you can be the photographer that generates clicks for companies you're going to be able to make a lot of money adding color to your arsenal is a crucial step in that direction choosing the right colors is going to be an important thing to consider should you choose complementary colors to the product should you choose the same color as the product what if you want to use two colors as the backdrop this is where you can get creative as a photographer it's up to you to choose the best colors for the scene some people are naturals at this for some it takes a while to learn i'm kind of in the middle here a quick hack to find the right colors to use is to use the color wheel all you need to do is pick a color and then go directly across it and there's your complementary color now color theory is a really complicated subject and that's just a starting point if you think two colors look good in your scene use those see how the final result looks it might be good might be bad but at least you tried the more you do this stuff the better you'll get [Music] now let's put this all to work today our subject is going to be this loco coffee can this is a brand from the east coast that makes canned cold brew coffee now the flavor we're using today is our cold brew coffee with oat milk i like the yellow orange tones so we're going to use this for our color product photography now if you're trying to work with companies like this actually put together a guide on how to land your first clients it's a free short checklist with action steps to take as how i was able to work with over 45 brands during the pandemic that's linked down below it's free go download it grab a copy now the beginner setup is starting off with a single color when using a single color there's usually going to be three options to start out with one we can use the same color as the product so here we can use a yellow orange that matches a can number two we can use a complementary color that looks good with this yellow orange now if we look back at the color wheel we'll see that yellow and purple go together we see orange and blue go together i actually opted to go with a light blue for this one i thought it's a bit more subtle and it really allowed for the can to shine another reason i actually went with the blue is because the company has another sku that's blue so it's on brand with their colors speaking of which some companies will give you brand guidelines to stick to when photographing so if that's the case your creative process becomes way easier because you already know what colors you can choose from finally i want to go through one more scenario it's when the product has a very subtle splash of color i've seen this in a lot of my client work with product photography where the product will have just a tiny bit of color so here i have this product from a different company it's mainly black and white but the flavor has this light blue color here let me show you guys right here so what do you think we should do in this situation we can use light blue to really emphasize that blue design on the label all right so enough talk let's up the can with a light blue background [Music] first let's talk about the colored papers i'll be using today these are from a company called savage i'm not sponsored by them they're just good backdrops they're high quality they come in a bunch of sizes i have the smallest size back here it's 26 inches and it's plenty for this type of product photography now this paper is called seamless paper because there's no seam in the background where your shadow would land now you have to set this up properly so that when your light hits it it's actually distributed evenly you want to have a generous curve in the back there so that you can achieve this seamless look the reason to use colored paper instead of switching out the background in photoshop is because of reflections when you shoot on paper like this the blue is going to be reflected onto the product that you're photographing now this is really subtle but if you go into photoshop and try and mask out your subject and change the color of the backdrop to let's say yellow you're going to notice blue reflections on that can that you got from the paper for that reason i always use different colored backdrops when i need new colors now our light source here is going to be a simple flash setup on a 45 degree angle to the side of the product and 45 degrees above it this is a classic setup that i love to use i use this for a lot of my product photography because it just adds a little bit of depth to the scene and it lights the product slightly unevenly to give it a unique look if you want to learn more about lighting i made an entire guide that goes really deep on the subject check that out after this video now our camera is going to be set up on a tripod right here we're going to be shooting it straight on to start out with and we're using a aperture of f8 to make sure that the product stays in focus we're using a shutter speed of 1 250th and iso 100. now if you're using continuous light those settings are going to vary just a bit i'm using flash so it's super powerful so i'm able to get away with settings like that if you're using a continuous light source you're probably going to have to adjust your shutter speed or your iso to get proper exposure now let's grab our product from over here and we're going to want to make sure that it's nice and clean and there's no fingerprints on it when you're handling stuff like this fingerprints tend to get on it and they're hard to remove in photoshop and it takes some time so what i do i just grab my uh my microfiber cloth right here wipe off the front and we're pretty much good to go on that front now we just want to make sure that we have the label nice and centered in our shot right down there and we shoot away and that's really it for the beginner setup now we'll be editing all these at the end of the video so make sure to stay tuned to see how i can make the color pop even more in the edit real quick if you're getting any value at all please drop a like below and let's move on to the intermediate setup so remember how we talked about using seamless paper well now let's add a seam we're going to be introducing another color into the scene and using two colors is a great way to elevate your color product photography and really make it stand out i like using complementary colors when i do this kind of thing so let's bring in some yellow now you might notice that this yellow is not the exact same color as like the yellow on the can that's something we'll fix in lightroom later on so we'll be using our hue sliders to make sure that both of the yellows match i have this yellow paper and an orange paper but i don't have the paper that's quite like this i know i said before we shouldn't be changing the color um in photoshop and that's still true so with this situation uh the reflected yellow that comes up on here will be adjusted with those hue sliders within lightroom and will be good on that front now there's a lot of ways we can use two colors i'll be walking through just a few examples but don't let me limit your imagination alright so first off we have just a blue backdrop and a yellow foreground i chose to do it this way because we're still going to be getting that yellow against the blue for the complementary colors remember how we talked about that black and white product with that little splash of blue so what do we have here we've got a black and white product with some splash of color down there now with that we can align the line right here with the horizon back there and kind of have the blue on the yellow and then this slight yellow here on this yellow so now we're going to want to place our product down and adjust our camera height or product to make sure that that horizon is where we want it find it exactly where we want it and snap away now let's put up on the screen and see how that looks i think it looks pretty sick now that's just one way to use multiple colors what if we made a diagonal line running across the back what diagonal does is it's going to make your photo stand out even more when people are scrolling on social media when they're on social media they're scrolling down along the vertical they read text on the horizontal but if we introduce a diagonal that kind of breaks up that mundane process it pops up in front of them and they stop and look for another second and this helps raise brand awareness for your clients and that's why they're paying you so let's try and line the camera up and get those diagonal photos now this can be a little tricky so take the camera off the tripod move around a bit and find an angle that really works for you in this situation just take a bunch of photos and see what really looks best your focus might be a little off in the situation because you're no longer on the same plane as the front of the label so play around with your different aperture settings to make sure that everything is in focus when you're shooting these diagonal shots now there's one more way i want to show you how to use multiple colors in this intermediate section so let's grab the backdrop and clip it in down here on my table by the way if you're curious how to get this back drops up like me i have an entire guide on how to build a backdrop stand like this yourself after you're done watching this video go and watch that now for this new setup there's no rules just use your camera off the tripod and start snapping away this is kind of a meta setup because you're showing the backdrop papers but they look oh so cool we have a product standing up right here you can mess around with the positioning of it put it down see what you like you want to get creative with this process experiment see what sticks with you and really try and make something magical here whenever i'm doing product photography i'm experimenting all the time i don't have a formal photography education i spent a very long time experimenting and getting good and just seeing what worked if you're just getting started then yeah you can copy what i'm doing here but as you do that slowly you're gonna try and build your own style and that's where the magic really happens all right we're done with beginner we're done with intermediate let's see what pros do so as a beginner we learn the rules of photography as an intermediate we apply those rules in unique ways now as a pro we're here to break some rules [Applause] after watching this you might start to prefer the intermediate or even beginner foster ones i'm about to show you but having these in your photography arsenal will set you apart from other photographers first let's get this can wet all right i got my spray bottle and what i really want to do here is just kind of emulate what it would look like if you took this out on a hot summer day we want to convey it's nice and refreshing i just use a simple spray bottle with water in it and give it some nice sprays you want to make sure that you're spraying the entire label and your thumbs or fingers aren't in the way of where of where you're spraying because when you're taking out the fridge the entire can is going to be soaked so we want to show that in the actual photos next up let's break some rules starting with this light dome right here we're getting rid of this diffusion we're gonna use some harsh white so harsh light is really gonna change the look of your image it's gonna give your can some really hard shadows and really make those water droplets pop as well it's gonna change how the light hits the cans and it's going to give the can just a unique look the position of your light source is also going to really affect how the shadows look so let's take a few photos at different positions of the light and see how that goes just like before we want to change the the angle of where we're shooting constantly and just try and get some awesome shots you can try shooting the can straight on we can try shots from above to the side just add some interesting angles to the scene and see what sticks now the next thing i want to do is actually add some props to our scene i know with color photography a lot of people don't really use props but we're experimenting here and seeing what we can do so this is cold brew and i want to show how it's easy to use and gets you going i'm going to grab my laptop and bring it into the scene alright so i got my laptop here what we're doing is we're just going to build out a scene with the laptop with the can and just make some magic happen and set it to a 10 second timer so that we can use our hands in the scene as well so what we're doing is just building out this fun little lifestyle scene here we're gonna have the can we're gonna have the laptop we're gonna make it so like it looks like i'm typing on the laptop again we're trying to convey how this product helps people focus it's very convenient and it's just an all-around great product for uh for working all right so we got that built out all we have to do is come in here uh hit the shutter for 10 seconds come in here and just kind of be our own model so shutter goes off and we're good to go so hopefully that came out great we're going to load all these up into into my computer and we're going to do some editing so stay tuned for that now for the edit that's gonna be pretty straightforward for this type of photography we're gonna do some lightroom adjustments and then go into photoshop and finish up in there so we're gonna do the usual what i usually do with so we're gonna do some basic adjustments here so i usually drop the highlights a bit up the shadows a tad don't really touch the whites and adjust the blacks a bit to add some more contrast here i don't touch texture much don't touch clarity or dehaze i usually up the vibrant and the type of photography plus 10 we'll play more with the color in the hsl panel for the tone curve just give it a very slight s curve increase contrast slightly now we go down to hsl so i mentioned during uh the earlier part that we want to adjust the yellow of the paper to match the can um so what we can do is click on this button right here now drag our cursor over the yellow we want to adjust and move it towards the direction we we want so we don't really want to change the can too much here but we can see the can changing as well so instead of doing this we're going to go back here and just adjust this green slider all the way here we can already see the yellow paper changing a bit change this yellow just a tad maybe adjust this orange of the can so we stay consistent with our initial coloring and already we can see this color changing a bunch so let's go into saturation and enhance this color some more i'm going to grab the yellow slider here and really bring out the color of this paper here make it pop a bit i think that looks much better than before next i want to brighten up the blues a bit so we're going to go to the luminance and just select our blue slider here brighten that up a tad i think this whole image needs to be brightened up a bit so let's go back to our basic panel hit the exposure slightly bring back some contrast by lowering the blacks and we can adjust this to our liking i think already what we're seeing is uh looking really good what you'll notice are some imperfections in the can so we have this reflection here as well as this reflection here from uh i believe that's coming from our table so all this can be removed in photoshop now this video won't be a comprehensive photoshop review or a tutorial i should say but let's go in and see what we can accomplish in photoshop with just some very very quick edits so i just hit command e on my keyboard to get to photoshop we're going to hit command j to duplicate the layer here and what i always do is just get the spot healing tool adjust it to a decent size and then we're going to zoom into our can and remove all these imperfections so a lot of the time your client products will have a lot of imperfections like this so we're going to have to zoom in and remove all of them product photography is one of those on those areas of photography where perfection is pretty much necessary i mean you're charging your clients for a certain degree of work and they expect to have the best photos possible coming from you so what i'm doing here is removing all of these little smudges now i could be here for a while getting rid of all this dust because like the more you zoom in the more dust you see so i'm gonna skip that part for this photo or for this video now that we're down here there is some other stuff we have to get rid of so the a lot of the times the text on canned will have will not be perfect like this so we can use the spot healing brush tool to bring in some of that black on the text so you're going to do that as well your paper your paper gets dirty a lot of the time so you have to clean up your paper and finally we're not going to touch the reflection nora this right here that's a pretty complex edit and kind of beyond the scope of this video but if you do get rid of those small imperfections this photo will look fantastic so let's hit save on that and go from there the product photography space is an amazing place to be right now there's a lot of opportunity out there and if you like this video i may entire guide on creative product photography right here check out that product photography playlist as well thank you for watching i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Chris Pieta

Views: 124,406

Keywords: product photography, product photography at home, product photography tutorial, product photography tips, creative product photography ideas, product photography setup, at home product photography, product photography ideas, product photography techniques, professional product photography, product photography lighting, product photography one light, photography studio setup, color background product photography, product photography color background, chris pieta

Id: P1uOmNJ2ze0

Length: 17min 34sec (1054 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 21 2022