How To Photograph And Composite A Commercial Beverage Image In Photoshop.

hi I'm Brian Rodgers jr. commercial photographer and digital artist and today I'm going to show you how to light a bottle with a single light the first thing we're going to do is we're going to create a small set for this bottle so as you can see I've got my sony a7r 2 camera set up in position and then i've got a couple of soft forces that are going to be kind of the foundation of where we're going to place the product so right here we've got a 2 by 2 board any board will do as long as it's a nice flat surface and basically this is going to be our tabletop the next piece that we need is a black piece of plexiglass and these are about $20 or less on Amazon this is a 2 by 2 sheet and usually they come two sided so you'll peel it off and basically once one side gets pretty scratched up you can reuse the other side all right so the next thing we need is a light stand some kind of clamps like an a clamp you can get these at any hardware store and a piece of foam core and these are actually pretty common at most big-box stores or art supply stores as well and basically what we're going to do is we're going to create a little background here so I'm just going to place this in the center ok so this is our product today we've got some pie-eyed spirits mystical shine apple pie so this is a liqueur and one thing that's important to note when you're shooting product photography is to keep it as clean as you can most of the time I wear gloves on set when I'm doing this kind of stuff but I'm not really too worried about this bottle because I've been handling it on the bottom and right on the top here so you're not going to see fingerprints very well I'm using capture 1 to tether and so I can see a live view of my shot and that's really helpful so if you're away from your computer can actually take a look at it and kind of see what it looks like from the camera's point of view but one thing I like to do is instead of physically moving the product I like to actually move the plexiglass one thing to note is it's very important when you're shooting product photography to make the most of your sensor in your camera and to do that you really want to fill the frame with the product in this case I'm using a 24 to 105 Canon lens with a metal bones adapter on the a7 r2 and right now I'm currently at 105 so I'm doomed all the way in so I can fill the frame with that product shot one important thing to note is that when you're shooting a product photography you don't want to leave autofocus turned on you want to focus to shift every time you take a new shot another important thing to know is even though we're shooting at f-14 right now we're going to get sharper focus here than we are on the neck of this bottle so what we're going to do first is we're going to light this area and then as we build all the shots that we need we'll come back and switch focus and then we'll focus on the top of the bottle and shoot that so I just took a test shot and it's totally black that's exactly what we want we want to make sure that none of the ambient light in the room is affecting the shot we want all of the lighting to be coming from the light that we're actually using to light the bottle okay so I've got a studio strobe here this is the Profoto b1 it doesn't matter what strobe you're using if you're using a speed light that's completely fine if you're using policy buff whatever brand you like they all are going to do the same thing what is important is how you modify the light and you may notice that I have a grid attached to this strobe and what that's going to do is it's going to give us a nice feathered light and it's we're going to be really focused so what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you what this shot would look like without a grid and then with a grid so I'm going to go ahead and take this off and we're going to just take a test shot now as far as power setting goes on the strobe I have no idea what our exposure needs to be I'm going to hand hold this so I'm really going to use my eyes and make a judgment call based on that so right now this is at five point eight power and we're just going to take a shot and see what it looks like and I'm just hand holding this strobe overhead and I'm going to go ahead and grab the grid and we're going to see what that looks like again I'm holding the strobe overhead now we've got a grid on what the grid is allowing me to do is it's allowing me to kill some of the light on the background and focus the light more on the label and also feather it on the edges so I'm going to go ahead and fire some more shots and as I'm doing this I'm going to move the light around just a little bit each shot is going to be different now again what we're doing is we're trying to make the label look really good so you may notice that there's a hard reflection in the glass that doesn't really matter because again we're just shooting for the label so all this is going to be pieced together in Photoshop if you look at advertising images of bottles they have they always have that nice glow so what I'm going to do first is I'm going to take a test shot and I'm going to put this strobe with the grid right behind the bottle I'm going to put the angle at kind of a downward angle just to make sure that we don't get any flare in the shot all right so we've just taken the test shot and I'm noticing that because the light source is a little bit wider than the bottle we're having some light bleed over the edges and I really want to minimize that so in order to do that a nice little studio tip is that you can take some gaff tape which most people have on in studios it's very affordable if you don't but what you can do is you can take some gaff tape and you can just kind of cut the light down just a little bit and what that will help us do is minimize that flares now I'm going to do the same thing that we were doing earlier I'm going to take another test shot I'm lighting the bottle from behind they get that nice glow okay as we can see here it minimized that flare coming off the side of the bottle and that's exactly what we're looking to do so we want some nice clean shots I'm going to start at the bottom and I'm just going to work my way up slowly to make sure that I cover the whole bottle and again that grid is helping us confine the light overall I think the shots are looking pretty good as we get to the top of a bottle you may notice that there's a little bit of flare at the top I'm going to actually shoot up from the bottom and see what that does for us I'm going to go ahead and do another pass of exactly what I just did but at a higher power setting just to give us a little bit more light through there now again the neck is a little tricky so what I have to do is I have to angle my light upward just a little bit to light that neck so we're going to go ahead and move on to the next step which is creating a really nice edge light and to do that what we're going to do is we're actually going to use this foam core to our advantage we're going to get a nice big softbox and if you don't own a softbox you can easily use a scrim and what we're going to do is we're going to place it right behind the foam core and it's going to basically create two strip boxes on each side of the bottle so what I'm looking for here is I'm just looking to create even size lights on each side so what we're looking to achieve with this makeshift strip box look is we're looking to get some really nice edges on the sides of this bottle what we may end up doing is we may end up flipping it in post to make sure that they're exactly perfect but I want to see what this looks like on set making this look as even as possible and I'm just trying to create some contrast so everything is going to be really dark with the exception of these nice sharp white edges that we're going to get from this modifier so I left the power on the strobe at the same exact setting as we had it when we were lighting it from behind it might be a little overexposed it might be a little underexposed I don't know yet so we're going to take a test shot and see what that looks like I'm going to go ahead and fire this off and it looks like we got a pretty nice edge light but I think it could be a little bit brighter so I'm going to turn up the power on the strobe now that we've got the exposures out of the way that we need to build the bottom half of the shot I'm going to switch focus and make sure that I've got really sharp focus on the top of the bottle because we have this seal on the top of the bottle the exposure is going to be a little bit darker so what I want to do is I'm going to give myself a variety of frames to work with so I'm going to obviously keep the setting that I have right now it's an 8 and a half I'm going to boost that up a little bit and just capture a variety of exposures so if I want a brighter one in post-production I have that available to me now you may wonder why I am adjusting the flash power settings and not the settings on the camera the reason is if I switch my f-stop on my camera it's going to change the depth of field and I don't want to do that I'm also not changing my ISO because I always want to shoot at 100 ISO when I'm in the studio okay so we're almost done with this shot the next thing we need to do is we need to take the softbox back off add the grid back on and then what we're going to do is we're going to move around the set just a little bit and we're going to light different areas of the top of the bottle that way we've got some options in post-production now one thing you may notice is that I'm using a modeling light what that allows me to do is it just allows me to to visually see kind of where that light is falling on the product it's really helpful if you have a speedlight unfortunately they don't have that feature you could still work around it but having a strobe on set is definitely a good thing to have so what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to create some separation between the black background and the top of this bottle so by moving the light around what we're doing essentially is creating shape and form on the top of the bottle and depending on where that light falls it's going to look completely different if I shoot from camera position it's going to look really flat so I find that overhead looks pretty good so you may have wondered why I didn't place a light over here or over there to create more of a front edge highlight I could have done that and it would have looked nice but I find that doing it in post-production gives me a little bit more flexibility as to where that reflection falls and I just like the look of it personally so we've got all the shots that we need to put together this composite image let's go to the computer and take a look at the images [Music] all right guys so we just got back from the studio now we've got our images into Lightroom and we're going to begin post-processing alright so the first step in creating a product shot is you want to process your RAW files and we have Lightroom open this is what I like to process my RAW files in and I've already selected the shots that we're going to use to build the composite image so I'm going to go through those kind of one at a time so I can show you what we did on set now the first image is for the label so you'll notice that we have a couple of different exposures one's a little brighter one's a little darker the next set is basically just backlighting the bottle and what we what we're going to do in Photoshop is we're going to blend all these together so these are the range of exposures that I grabbed this is the first set and then I went ahead and did another set too just to see what it would look like this one I believe was a little bit brighter the next set up was for the edge lighting and then the one right after that was edge lighting and it was more focused on the neck of the bottle so this is where we switched focus in the studio and again I did that because when you're shooting the bottle the neck is actually out of focus when you're putting focus on the label basically we shifted our focus and then we shot some exposures of just the neck so as I go through here you'll see the other shots that we've selected and they all look a little bit different because I move the light around and they all have kind of a different look and we'll just you know we'll take a look in Photoshop and see kind of how I put that together okay so as far as processing the files go I didn't do a whole lot I did pretty much your basic Corrections you would normally do one of the biggest things that I really had to make an adjustment to was the transform panel and I just rotated a little bit because I thought that all the shots could have been just a little bit straighter other than that in the basic tab I added a little bit of clarity I added some sharpening I made sure that I had lens correction turned on and then also the camera calibration I changed to camera standard and that helped me basically just achieve better color and the only other thing that I did was going back to the edge lights i bumped up the contrast just a little bit because I thought it was a little flat I just wanted to bring out that contrast a little bit more so I just brought the whites up and the blacks down a little bit other than that that's pretty much all the processing that I did so that said we'll go ahead and jump in Photoshop and we'll take a look at the file okay so we're in Photoshop and the first frame that I brought in was the edge light so I'm going to go ahead and turn that layer on just so you can see what it looks like and right underneath that I created an adjustment layer and just filled it with black and that's ultimately what our background is going to be so even though we shot it on black I want to make sure that it's pure black and the only way to do that is to make an adjustment layer and fill it with black so right after the edge light we jump into the glow and basically these are all of the exposures that I shot when I started from the bottom of the bottle and worked my way up I pretty much merge those all together I brought all the layers together in Photoshop and then I change the blend mode to lighten and what that allows the shot to do is it'll blend all of the light layers together and it'll take all the dark stuff out so it only reveals the light once I did that I made a merged layer and I brought it over into our working document and then again I also change the blend mode to lighten now I'll go ahead and change it to normal just so you can see what that shot looked like and I'm going to go ahead and turn the mask off now when I turn the mask off you'll see that it's got a really nice glow it's pretty evenly lit and I just wanted to control that a little bit more I want to see those edge lights show through so again by changing the blend mode to lighten you're going to see those edge lights kind of pop out and that's exactly what I wanted so by adding a layer mask and just kind of brushing that in it lets me fine-tune where that glow is going to come through and it really helps shape the bottle a little bit so you can see that there's quite a bit of difference between just a regular version with you know the normal blend mode and then switching it over to lighten and adding that layer mask now I did two passes on this just to see what it would look like so here's the second glow option and I thought it was just a little too bright and I didn't like it as much so I went ahead and processed it anyway just because you never know but ultimately I ended up deciding to go with the first glow okay so the next set of layers that we brought in were all for the label and I'm going to go ahead and show you the first label layer with the masks turned off so this is what our shot looked like overall I think it looks pretty good and again when I'm looking at this I'm not looking at the bottle I know the bottle doesn't look good I'm lighting this for the label so again product photography is lit in just different parts and then piece together so that's kind of what's happening here now you'll see when i add the mask what that looks like you can see there's a huge difference from the way it used to look now this was the brighter exposure i also brought in the darker exposure as well i'm going to go ahead and shut that mask off so you can see what that shot looked like so basically it's just the same thing as the last one except a little bit darker but when I add the masks and I have both of those layers turned on you can see what a difference that makes in the label now I wanted to have the letters kind of pop out a little bit so I duplicated the darker exposure and then basically just made a mask for the letters now this is just more of a creative touch I thought it would look cool and I thought it would make the brand stand out and I really like the way it looks so just duplicating that layer and just adding a little bit of you know creative technique and cutting that out with a mask I think really went a long way and making that label look a lot better so again just three layers I've got a bright exposure a darker exposure and then a layer for our letters and that's pretty much the label I think that looks pretty nice okay so next up we have the neck of the bottle now if you remember from being on set all I did was I change the focus from the front of the bottle basically to the back I wanted to make sure that it was nice and sharp on the top of the bottle so let me zoom in to kind of show you what I'm talking about I'm going to shut this edge light neck layer off and if we look at it you can see that it's a little bit soft it's not terrible but it could be better so that's why we shifted focus and made sure that we got that area covered now I'm going to go ahead and turn this layer on just so you can see what it does you can see it looks a lot sharper now and a lot better now this is just the edge light I'm going to go ahead and shut off the layer mask just so you can see what it's doing so again it's just adding a little bit more focus on the top I change the blend mode to lighten again just so we could only see the light areas and then adding the mask I just painted in the light areas that I wanted to see now the next layer is pretty similar to that as well also changed it to lighten and let me go ahead and shut the layer mask off you can see what the top of that neck looked like prior to me adding a layer mask and just painting the areas that I wanted to see so when I do that it still has a really cool dramatic look and it gives that top of the bottle a lot more shape now the final layer for the bottle neck is just a little bit of detail right up on the top and that little bit of detail goes a long way because it really helps you see the form and texture and shape of this bottle so let me go ahead and shut all of the bottle layers off or all the neck layers off so you can see that so huge difference okay so next up we have the symmetry layer and all that is is a merged copy of everything that we've done so far and I made a little marquee selection and basically duplicated the left side and flipped it to the right and what that did was allow us to have perfect symmetry so I'm going to zoom in just so you can see what I'm talking about now first off let me explain the problem when I look at the highlights I think they look better on the left side than they do on the right if you look on the right you'll notice that some of the lines are kind of doubling up and they're just not very smooth and it's nothing that we did on set it's probably just the imperfections in the glass and you know that happens sometimes so in order to fix that I just made a symmetry layer I'm going to go ahead and turn that on and you can see with that on it's a mirror copy of the left side and it looks a lot cleaner so let me back out I'm going to shut the symmetry layer off and you can see what it looks like it's a mirror copy so we had a little bit of masking to do let me go ahead and turn that mask on just so you can see what's going on here so I made sure that the label wasn't included in that mask all I wanted was the bottle so again all I did was made a marquee selection so press the letter M make a marquee selection and I'm just going to I want to find the center of this bottle and I want to go over just a little bit more so I have some room to mask it out and blend it in so I basically just made a copy of this left side did a free transform flipped it and then you will see that we have the duplicate side over here so this is what it looks like without the mask so all I did was I created a mask where I use a soft brush I blended it in through the center and I have a selection that I made for the label specifically and I just made sure that I didn't include that so in the mask so basically what we have is just a mirrored version of the left side and that gives us perfect symmetry and it looks a lot better so that's what that layer is all about it's all about symmetry the next layer we have is just basically a clean up layer so I'm going to zoom in and shut this off so you can see what these are we had some actually from our video lights we had some ambient light coming through it's not a huge deal it's a pretty quick fix in Photoshop and then we've got these little particles because this has apple cider in it you're going to see some particles but visually I don't think it looks good so I went ahead and just remove those so you'll see as I turn that layer on they disappear same way with those reflections as far as cleaning up the image I used a couple of different tools one of my favorite tools to use is the healing brush and I like to use the Spot Healing Brush in particular set to content-aware and what I like about it is Adobe has created some really cool technology where it'll basically analyze your image and it'll it's really good at cleaning up blemishes even for portrait work it's just a really great tool and that's what I primarily used on it but I also use just a regular Healing Brush tool if I had some hard lines or something I needed to clean up that's a good option now the next layer is our label edge cleanup and so let me zoom in you'll notice that when we created that symmetry layer we have a little bit of a little bit of weirdness going on here on the edge of this label so all I did was basically cloned that out so I had a perfect label and now it looks a lot better so not a ton of cleanup work but just a little bit and that little bit goes a long way so the next thing we have are a couple of adjustment layers we've got a hue/saturation layer which pretty much just changes the color of the bottle it's real subtle well it's not changing the color bottle it's changing the color of the glow inside of the bottle and it's a real subtle change I felt basically that it was just a little too red like a red orange for my liking and I wanted to add just a little bit of yellow so I shifted that just a tiny bit so as you can see in the mask it's literally just affecting the glow it's not affecting it's not affecting the label at all and as far as the top goes it's black anyway so there's not going to be any color shift so the mask is literally just affecting the glow of the bottle that's all that is now the next layer is another curves layer all I did was kind of bump up some of the mid-tones a little bit and I added just a little bit of light at the top and the bottom of the label but I didn't want to affect the lave so I again relied on the past that I had created and make sure that the curve did not affect the label at all so again that's what the mask looks like and you can see that it adds just a little bit of light and I like the way that looks so overall at this point the bottle is looking really good I like the way it looks I could probably call this an almost finished image but there's one thing that I wanted to do just to give it a little bit more shape and a little bit more form now this is something I could have done on set with a light but I like to do this in post-production because I feel that it gives me a lot more flexibility in the way the image looks and this is a little technique that I've came up with over the years that I'd like to use quite a bit so basically how this works is well I actually let me show you what it is first I'm going to add highlights digitally in post-production so here's the left here's the right and there's the center and you can see that there's quite a bit of the difference between having reflections and not having reflections so in order to make this it's actually pretty simple all I'm going to do is I've made a path for the bottle so I'm going to make sure that I've got a selection of that I'm going to create a new layer and I want to select the gradient tool so let me get that want to make sure that I'm painting with white and I want to make sure that it's set to white to transparent so now that I've got that little selection going I'm going to kind of start from the left and move over to the right and you'll see that it gives us this nice little gradient on the side when i deselect I'm going to use the Move tool and I'm just going to move it over a little bit now right now it doesn't look good but what we're going to do is we're going to soften the edge a little bit and one thing I like to do is I like to work with smart objects so I'm going to right click on that layer convert to smart object and I'm going to go to filter blur Gaussian blur and I'm going to do this by taste every image is a little bit different I don't want it to be so sharp that it looks fake and I don't want it to be so blurry that it looks just washed out so I think right now I'm pretty happy with 38 around 31.8 so I'm going to stick with that and there's our first highlight the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to make a copy of that so command J ctrl T to free transform I'm going to right click and I'm going to flip horizontally and then all I'm going to do is I'm going to move it over to the other side so you can see that we've got a couple of reflections that look pretty good the opacity is lowered just a little bit so we can make it look a little bit more realistic and then I basically applied a mask right around the area of where the label is and I just toned it back a little bit so it would blend in and look a little bit more seamless so now that I've showed you how to do that I'm going to delete those layers because we don't need them and for the center highlight I pretty much did the same exact technique the only difference is I use a marquee tool and I use the elliptical marquee tool and basically just drag that out and filled it with white so basically I just blurred that lowered the opacity and place it in the spot where I thought that specular highlight might show up and again looking at these reflections I think they look pretty awesome and it's really cool to have that ability in post-production and you have the ability to change the reflection after the fact and move it around so again it's a technique that I came up with that I really like and I use it quite often so the next thing we have is basically just a merged layer of all of the stuff that we've already done so now I've got everything all on one layer i duplicated the background layer again just to make sure we have a solid black layer and all of the work that we've done I've put into another group called build so if I need to get back to that and change anything later I have that flexibility so I made another merge copy and just filled in the bottom so we have a nicer reflection and then I've created a contrast layer by using luminosity masks and let me show you how that works that's pretty cool I'm going to go into channels I'm going to load the selection of the RGB so I'm going to committer a control click on RGB and it's going to load the luminosity of that layer and as I click the kerbs layer I'm basically going to get a really detailed mask of just the highlights so when I go into the curves layer I'm just affecting the highlights and I can drag this curve up and you can see that it's affecting the highlights now to make the opposite of that I make a duplicate I invert the mask so ctrl I to invert go back to the curves panel reset it and then just bring your shadows down a little bit and then with the combination of these two layers you can see that we're creating a really dynamic contrast I'm going to go ahead and delete those since we've already made them so you can see what that contrast layer looks like and then finally there was something that I missed while I was retouching and sometimes this happens you think you're done and then you look at it again with fresh eyes and you notice something that you missed now it's not that big of a deal all I did was add a couple of new layers and I just thought that the neck needed a little bit more work right around the seam so let me zoom in I didn't like the way this looked I thought it could be a little bit cleaner so all I did was make a quick selection and I used the clone tool and just kind of cleaned up that edge so again that's pretty much it I think this bottle shot looks really good and that's how I build it all right so hopefully that gives you an idea of what goes into producing a really cool standalone product shot now I think any company would love to have a product shot like this they can use it for all kinds of things they could use it as pack shots for packaging they can use it for advertising you can drop some copy next to it there's a lot of companies that always need standalone product shots now this is just one type of product photography you can actually create much larger composite images based on something like this as a starting point and oftentimes I get hired to create really cool commercial images involving splash and powders and all kinds of different stuff and really the the creativity you can put into product photography is pretty limitless so while standalone product images are awesome to have this client wanted to take this image to the next level so I'm going to show you a couple of composites that I've created basically using some of the same techniques but a little bit more in depth and a little bit more intricate now I'm not going to go into depth as to how I created this image because it's way too much to talk about and we didn't really show it on set but I do want to give you a couple of examples of what this product can be and the kind of creativity that you could put into your product photography so just like the image we created in the studio combining multiple exposures multiple lighting scenarios I did the same thing but we've included some other elements such as spices cinnamon apple some Sparks and this image really pops because of that now I've also made an alternate version where we've got some apples kind of flying toward the camera so hopefully this just gives you an idea of the creativity and all of the different things that you can do with compositing and products photography now I'm not going to go into all the intricacies of producing an image like this right now but I do like to share tips and tricks on f-stop or calm so if you want to learn more about product photography feel free to follow me on FS comm and if you want to be notified about any upcoming tutorials that I produce with def Stoppers com be sure to click the link below and subscribe to the newsletter thanks so much guys I hope you learned a ton and we'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Fstoppers

Views: 1,243,572

Keywords: bottle, shoot, photography, tutorial, photoshop, post processing, commercial, lighting, BTS, lesson

Id: oqa9pbsTJQ0

Length: 32min 13sec (1933 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 28 2017

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