DIY Product Photography WITH Photoshop Editing Steps | Take your Photos to the next Level

hey everybody my name is Will I Am a professional photographer and today we are going to go over a kind of advanced DIY product shoot a buddy of mine he needed some product photos of this new uh water bottle that he's coming out with which has like the UV um thing on the top on the cap so it like kills all the bacteria and germs and stuff in the water so you can potentially drink Lake water or something like that so today I'm going to show you a simple setup on how to do your product photos including editing in Photoshop to clean them up and make them look really good now I have done this entire video on this setup so I'm using a little bit more advanced setup and I'm not going to go over all of that in this video just kind of a brief explanation uh if you want to see that video I'll link it up in the description I'll link it in the description for you to go check that out for the basic setup but essentially I am using this is called a v-flat it's basically a big foam core board that goes into a v that bounces light now you don't need this you could just use a table and some foam core stuff which I go over in that video I got this at Walgreens for like four dollars I think and you can just put it like this and then I'm using some pliable white paper like this and I'm just laying it down to create what's called an Infinity wall so it looks like there is no backdrop and this foam core here for the bounce so minus the V flat this whole setup was like ten dollars now you can use any regular light I'm using a soft box here which I will link in the description as well I think you can get like two of them for like 150 bucks or something like that so depending on how many shoots you do like this these are freaking great lights um so let's go ahead and get started now this is a relatively easy product to shoot there's not many lines there's not many mesh holes things like that so it's a very simple product to shoot and then edit but um obviously the more complicated the product is the harder it will be to edit in post which is Photoshop or what not to get it all cleaned up but I wanted to show you the example and then the technique on how to edit all right so let's get started here let's go ahead and turn this camera on now the settings I am using ISO 250 a 250 shutter and 5.0 aperture now the aperture that I'm using is a little bit higher that way I can get more of it in focus and just as a note I'm coming if you're unfamiliar with camera settings and stuff I'm coming out with some incredible courses that go over all the settings and I will link that in the description they might not be out yet but you can get on you can download one of my other courses and get on the list or they might be out yet so enjoy anyways so what we're going to do is we're going to set this here and relative distance right there good go ahead and focus on it and then we're going to turn on our light now what you'll notice you'll notice that it is completely lit because everything is white so it is bouncing the light off all around so you get a really clean photo now if I were to take this bounce off you'll notice that it darkens quite a bit on the left side so that's why we have this white foam core on the left side opposite the light so the light hits it bounces back and fills in fills in the light of the other of the other side of the bottle we could use another light but that might be too much light so this just makes it simple so we're going to take this and I'm using that box to hold up the bounce so watch as if as I put the bounce back as the left side brightens up see that without width it just makes a much cleaner photo good so now let's go ahead and take the picture perfect and then there is a special photo that he wanted to do um which you can use fishing line if you have like a something you can attach it to because fishing line is really easy to to edit out and post or you could just simply use a um your hand which is what I did here anyways so what I did was take the cap right he wanted a he wanted a picture of the bottle like this and then the cap kind of floating so you could see the underside of it so what we did was I took a photo like this just like that took a photo without the cap and then I took the bottle cap and I held it kind of like this so I just held it like this that way I could edit my hand out in post so what we're gonna do is come over here we're going to hold it the best we can and we're going to get it in frame there hold our hand up and take the picture just like that okay good so now that we have our photos let's go into the editing just as a quick note if you don't have a Photoshop or anything like that or have never used it I'm going to keep this extremely simple and you can actually get Photoshop and Lightroom for like 9.99 a month I will link it in the description if you want to sign up if you already have Photoshop and a little nervous about it again I'm going to keep the editing part extremely simple so you can follow along and do this technique does take a little bit of practice to get really really good at it but overall I'm going to keep it super simple all right so we're about to get into the editing and one thing I wanted to go over is if I were to put everything in this video it would be like three hours long something like that so if you I could create like a course from beginning to end showing all of the the tools that I use settings editing all of that stuff if you're interested in that or that's something that you would like to see leave me a comment and I'll get working on that right away as far as the video goes if you could hit the like button really quick and the Subscribe if you're not I'm trying to get 10 000 by the end of the year and liking subscribing hitting that Bell makes this video so much stronger and tells YouTube that it is informative and helpful so let's get into the editing the first thing is importing into Lightroom or just going straight to uh straight to photoshop if you're not sure how to do that I have a video on it I'll link it in the description because again if I included everything it would be like 15 hours long all right so here we are and here's all the photos that we have taken now I'm going to start with a hard photo because I can show you all the techniques on that hard photo if I just showed you like this photo here it is super simple but it wouldn't show you how to handle stuff like this so here are the photos that I took right okay so this one's not bad this one this one is no good so remember this when you're in Photoshop there's only so much simply that you can do and you want to keep your editing in post much much easier so this one here see how my thumb is on the on the four side the front side of this I would have to reconstruct this entire thing so that's no good so we didn't use that photo this one's a little bit better but it was the wrong angle and this was connected here so I actually settled on this photo here now even though my hand is fully in the image we're going to just take out the cap so we're going to make it basically look like that so the first thing we want to do is the basic touch-up now I'm in Lightroom you can take it straight into Photoshop if you open it straight into Photoshop you'll open into something called camera raw which is essentially Lightroom and all you're going to do is the same exact thing you're going to adjust the exposure you're going to adjust the contrast make sure the white balance is good all of those things then if you're in camera raw you press open if you're in Lightroom right click on the image edit in Photoshop okay now we're in Photoshop and we're going to click the background layer and all you're going to do is you're going to drag it to the plus sign this is going to Simply make a copy that's all you can also press command or control J and that will also make a copy once this copy is done this is just kind of a backup you're going to click on the copy and let's rename it actually it doesn't matter we don't need to rename it what you're going to do is you're going to come up here to the quick select tool or W on the keyboard and if you don't see that one right click on it make sure quick selection tool is selected then you'll notice up here select subject I'm going to click that now you'll notice that it'll select the hand it'll select everything that it thinks is the subject and that's okay this is where we refine it so then go up to the lasso tool which or which is here or the L you can right click on it if you don't see that one we're going to make sure lasso tool is selected then we're going to zoom in so press command or control plus or minus and that will zoom in then if you press the space key you'll get press and hold the space bar you'll get the hand tool and you can drag around the image so with the lasso tool selected push and hold the option key you'll notice that there's a little minus sign on it this is the tedious part this is where you're cutting out all the stuff you don't want and does take some practice so basically we are going to remove my hand so using the lasso tool and the mouse I'm going to just cut around here the best I can cut out that selection then I'm going to do the same thing over here and usually I don't try and do the whole thing because my hand is not that stable and a lot of times I will mess up so I'll just do basic sections like this and you're going to go all the way around see I messed up there just speed this up good and then up to the top and when you let go it automatically connects to the starting point so make sure we get this here so remember pushing and holding the alt or option I think alt on a PC option on a Mac and then let's zoom in again command and control command or Control Plus with the lasso key we're going to refine this a little bit more good that was terrible okay that was terrible good and it is okay to mess up because we can fix it now we want to include this so you can do two things one you can press the W key to get the quick select and just click and drag and this should select the white part or with the lasso tool selected L on the keyboard you can push and hold shift which gives you a plus sign and then you can add like let's say this whichever one works easiest it's just kind of a combination of the two tools to make your selection I'm going to use alt or options get rid of that perfect and we're going to add this here terribly good I'm gonna and then you're just gonna go through your image and you're going to refine it until you have your selection that you want now once this is looking good and I think it looks good enough for this video press command or control zero that'll zoom out then you're going to with the selection press command or control J you'll notice that a new layer is created and this layer is just the cap so now if we turn off these layers so press the I button you'll notice we have just the cap so then we're going to click click on the background copy click the little circle here and go to solid color and make a white solid color press ok good and then select the layer again this allows us to see where we need to refine it so using the refine using the Eraser tool which is here or press e on the keyboard we're going to make the brush really small this is that your brush go up here and reduce the size to about 20 22 good and make sure that it is on soft round okay and then we're going to just erase this now this is a little bit harder because the Eraser tool it likes to get in too far so this is just kind of like really fine-tuning it and not going too far this takes a little bit of practice to get used to where the what is called the feather is now you could go up here and reduce This Heart erase the hardness maybe that'll make it a little bit easier it's like 50 percent done pressing enter when I'm done and just do this and then every time you make a good good edit just unclick because that way if you have to undo it doesn't undo everything so every time you feel like you did good just unclick now if you want to make a complete straight line click one place press and hold shift and then click in another place and it'll completely make a perfect straight line so sometimes depending on your item this is much faster and more accurate see there it just kind of works really nice good so I'm going to Speed the video up a little bit and get through this okay good so now once that's done let's go over to this the color fill here the the solid color you created and click on and off the eye toggle and see how it looks so that looks pretty good to me so I am happy with that now there's two ways you can do this you want to make sure that you save it for one so let's go ahead and file save as and just going to save it in the file that you wanted and in this case I'm just going to save it as this because I've already done all this so press save good now you have your image saved so you have to come back here you can redo it now if you press command s or just go to save and you came from Lightroom it'll automatically put the image back into Lightroom so that's good um if you came straight from Photoshop you'll have to resave it as a different file which is fine either way save it then if you want to keep it like this so for example if you want to use this image right well for one I would make it bigger so command or control t and make it larger to fill up more of the picture and you can even rotate it when you're in the transform tool and press enter and then there's two ways to save it one is a JPEG now without the background notice how it has the checkered background without that if you save it as a JPEG it'll have a white background automatically if you save it as a PNG that is a file that doesn't have a background so you could take that PNG and put it on another Photoshop file and that background won't exist you'll literally just get the cap so you go up to file export export as and then you have a couple of options here you can up do it as a JPEG or a PNG whichever one works best for you if you're doing an Amazon or a website or something like that just do a JPEG it'll have a white background it'll be good to go if you want to take this file and then put it into another file use a PNG because then you can just drag and drop it onto the Photoshop file and combine them now that we have this we're going to create that two bottle one so we're going to go to file new we're going to create one that's 1080 by 1080. now since I have it already pre-customized all you have to do is come over here to the width put 1080 pixels by 1080 height and 240 resolution totally fine everything else just leave as as is and then press create okay good then with your other image Open click the layer 1 press command command or control C to copy it and then press command or control V to paste it now it's going to be huge because this one is a lot the first one is a large file the second one is a very small file so command control T you can zoom out you'll notice this image is massive and we're just going to make it smaller I think super easy command and control zero to come back to the size then there we go make it the right size and there you go now for this one I have the file already done so I did the same process with the individual bottle that I just did and cut it out selected the subject deleted the background all that good stuff so I have that right here so I'm just going to open that one up and then I'm going to take this one command and control C and paste it in there we go make it smaller put it right there I'm going a little bit faster because all of what I'm doing I've already gone over so command and control T to make it to fill it up boom command and control T to adjust this one now that cap looks way too big so we'll make it smaller make it the right size and maybe tilt it a little bit perfect okay good and there you go so there's your image let's go ahead and turn let's go ahead and create a solid color here uh white for the background and there you go that looks freaking amazing and then you save it as a PNG or as a JPEG just as is and that pretty much is the process of editing your photos now if you wanted to give it a little bit of another color you could come in here and you could do a curves adjustment and this just adjusts the blacks and the darks and you could adjust it how you wanted to make it look really good but that's getting into a little bit more involved in the editing and I just wanted to show you a kind of advanced method of editing this photo so I hope that was helpful and gave you a little bit more information go ahead and hit the like button if you liked it subscribe if you haven't already and if you have any questions you know where the comments are you can also send me a message on Instagram right here and if you got this far in the video go ahead and comment hashtag will is the best Shucks you guys stop it anyways it's always good to see that you guys watch this entire video and if you have if you want to see something else YouTube recommends this video so go check it out I'll see you guys next week it was good to see you

Channel: Will Simpson - Exploring Photography

Views: 37,609

Keywords: diy product photography, photoshop editing steps, take your photos to the next level, will simpson, exploring photography, willsbeenhere, will simpson tutorial, thewillsimpson, diy, product photography, do it yourself, professional product photography, photography, photos, product, how to, learn how to take product photos, phone product photos, how to take product photos with my phone, camera photography, phone photography, diy photos, how to take photos, white background photos

Id: rNOyTvVsylQ

Length: 18min 23sec (1103 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 08 2022