How to shoot on a white background.
If you are into product photography, you are probably often asked to take pictures of a client’s product on a completely white seamless background.
There are mainly 2 ways for achieving that, the “hard way” and the “correct way”. Before getting into that, the important thing to understand here is that in order to get a completely white background, you either have to light the object properly (check your histogram) and isolate it in post production, or you can try to individually light the object and the background at the same shot.
We will be dealing with this second method since it is much quicker and it is literally a “life saver”, when you might have to deal with hundreds or thousands of photos or you are just bored of spending too much editing time on your computer. So its best to try and get the picture almost perfect right on camera.
How to achieve that?
I found that placing the object on a transparent acrylic leaf, would allow me to properly set the exposure on my product and at the same time (since it is transparent) I could separately adjust an exposure on my background without the two exposures interfering one another. That’s actually pretty cool, isn’t it? You just have to purchase a transparent acrylic leaf right from your local hardware store and you are literally done.
OK. So, here’s what I did and how I did it.
The most basic thing as we mentioned is to buy the acrylic leaf and bend it into an S shape. This way you can get a seamless white (or any other color if you use color gels) at once, by placing the product unto it and shooting through it without having to extract the product from the background. The leaf comes in vary of sizes, so choose accordingly. Bending it is not such an easy task. It’s an acrylic leaf so expect it to behave like one. What you will need is a hot air heat gun, a corner so you can bend it over when its heated and some patience. You’re aiming to get something like the picture above. When you are done with bending, you will have to properly place it so the middle of your frame (where you put your product) is completely blank so the only thing you see behind it, is the white seamless background.
Since I was going to be using this for a large scale production and I might end up putting some weight on it, I contacted a dear friend of mine and we made a sturdy base for a relatively small cost but you can easily get away with it by mounting the transparent leaf from the sides.
So this is what I ended up with..
Next steps are quite easy.
First, adjust the lighting on your white background. Start from a low flash duration and power your way up. You don’t want too much light bouncing off to the walls or ceiling and then back to your product, so make sure that your object has at least couple of feet (1or 2 meters) distance from your background. You can block some of that unwanted light with a black flag (if necessary) but your goal is to end up with a completely silhouetted object and a completely white background. Depending on your frame, angle and size of the product you can get away with having just the area around your product completely white (since all white is around your subject, making the rest of the pixels to be completely white is a 5 second Photoshop retouch).
Now, adjust the lighting for your product.
Make sure that the background light is turned off for now. You will combine them both once you are done with properly lighting your subject. The suitable and most flattering lighting setup for your subject varies from product to product, so choose accordingly. Set each light separately, if more than one. First, set your main light’s basic exposure, and check your histogram (not to be overexposed or underexposed.) Always look at the right side of it, where the values of white are.
Then, proceed with the rest of the lights following the same procedure.
Once you are done with correctly lighting your subject, power on the backlight and you should have a picture that needs minor post editing changes. It is also essential to place two black cards facing the background on each side of the product. This is quite handy for minimising light flare from the background light, but also keeping the edges of the product sharp with a clear cut off line.