I got an unexpected gift in the mail this week. It was a sample set of teas from Capital Teas, sent to me by a friend who knows I love tea. If you read this blog regularly you know I love photography and that I am currently taking a Photoshop class. So it should be no surprise that I took a photo and then created something in Photoshop. Here is what I came up with:
ISO 100 50mm 0ev f/4 1/125
What I am working on learning in Photoshop is how to remove a background and add another. There were a couple of difficulties in creating this image. The first was to get a good shot of the tea tins on a plain background. If you have ever tried product photography you know that it is harder than it looks. When you look at a good product photo it should look clean and simple. It takes a lot of time and effort to get that right. If I was to re-shoot this I would think again about my lighting, I needed some more in the front. I also would have shot on a simpler background, you will see in this original photo that I shot it on a wood floor which created some problems when I went to take out the background. Here is the original photo:
ISO 100 50mm 0ev f/4 1/125
It’s too dark so the first thing I did was adjust the exposure in Camera Raw before I opened it in Photoshop. The blue background that you see is one that I created in Photoshop earlier and then I added it to the file as a background layer. I used the refine edge and refine mask commands in Photoshop to remove the background layer and insert my new one. This technique isn’t hard to understand but it does involve a lot of little steps, instead of trying to list all that out I am including this link to the tutorial that I used to learn how to do it. The video runs about fifteen minutes and will give you a good start on learning how to remove a background.
You will notice that mine isn’t exactly clean. The blue background can be seen in the lids of the tins and also the labels. I did leave that like that just because I liked the look. What do you think? Do you use Photoshop to replace backgrounds?
The tea, in case you are wondering, is wonderful. The set I got contains three black/green tea mixes and I really like them. Unexpected is the theme this week at the WordPress Photo Challenge, and this unexpected gift really made my day.
Cheers!
Photography Journal Blog 