A short time ago I put up a post about using some common, every day materials to build a "poor mans photo lightbox". It ended up not really being a "poor mans" anything because of the studio lights that I used. So today I'd like to walk through a similar picture with really, really inexpensive lighting and again use The Gimp to edit the image to a final product.
For this project, with the exception of the camera, everything I have used cost $5 (US) or less:
- Trifold: $1
- Black infinite background paper: $1
- Black board "stage": $1
- Ship in a bottle toy: $1
- Foldable, bendable light: $5
Side Note: Lighting.
Lighting is the most crucial aspect of photography. Obviously, I'm taking a photo of a dollar store prop, so a photo can be taken of about anything, but having good light is crucial. This particular light has a flexible neck so I can direct the light in any direction I'd like. It also has multiple intensities and brightness levels so it is not just one harsh glare from one location. I had a second LED light that I was prepared to use, but it was too bright and harsh, so I fell back to a single light source, and an affordable one at that.
The set up looked liked this. I ended up only using the one light that is on the left in the photograph (the larger of the two), because using both lights was causing too much reflection off the bottle.
Workflow, with steps.
1 - Turn all other lights except that one off.
2 - Place the camera really close and set to manual:
- Aperture: f/11
- ISO: 800
- Shutter Speed: 1.3 seconds
3 - Take the picture! Here is a copy of the original:
You know, that's not really bad for something cobbled together with just dollar store parts. The one light source gives some nice shadows, and the black background offers a really foreboding effect. I like it, but it can be better. So off to The Gimp I go!
4 - Perform some basic colour correction in The Gimp using curves. What this allows me to do is remove any digital entries with "null" values and, essentially, clean up the colour of the image:
An entire lesson could be given on just the colour curves. To summarise my changes, I pulled the bar mostly to the left to remove the "dead space" and then brightened the brights and darkened the darks, but not by too much. I found that the reflection off the glass bottle became overbearing, so gentle tweaks were important.
I ended up with a nice looking image, but I found that I wanted to perform some modifications more to the ship without editing the bottle or background. This can be done by creating a new "layer" of the image with just the part I want to edit.
Aside: Layers: Imagine multiple sheets of overlayed glass. Looking down you can see through all of them, but each can be touched individually to modify how the overall picture is seen. That is a layer.
Creating layers is as simple as cut and paste:
5 - Move the new layer into place to completely cover the first.
6 - Hide the original layer in the "Layers" dialogue box.
7 - We are now able to edit just that one layer. Any changes made to this layer will not impact the other layer.
Again I went back to colour correction to brighten the brights and darken the darks:
Note the curve of the 'curve line'. This is a "Standard S" curve and is one of the more common photo editing curves. Chances are good if you have ever used an "Auto Correct" feature, it does something very similar to this.
At this point, however, I felt the ship's sails were too red, which is not what I wanted. Colour Curve correction also has the feature to correct/modify any of the primary colours individually, so I also used this same tool to modify red and simply changed it's parameters.
There, that's better! Now let's "unhide" the original layer and look to see what we have. Looks good!
I do not, however, like the shine off the bottle. Not only does the shine distract from the bottle, I can see the very tip of the shine is different than the rest. This is due to how I cut and pasted the layer, which included just that snippet of shine. A better cut and paste would have prevented this, but c'est la vie. Time for more editing.
8 - First, however, I now want to edit the image as a whole, and not just an individual layer. To do this I'm going to flatten the image:
9 - Now I'm going to smudge. Imagine using your finger to smudge paint from one part of a painting to another. That's what I'm doing here, but digitally.
That looks better. At least it looks uniform. But I still don't like the shine. I want it gone. Gone! So I smudged and used the clone tool to remove it completely until I have a final image that I'm happy with.
The next post will be purely about lighting and the glory that is dollar store light.
| Original Image | Final Image |
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Final Picture
Not bad for a studio setup that cost less than $10, prop included!
(c) All images and photographs, unless otherwise specified, are created and owned by me.
(c) Victor Wiebe
(design by remyrequinart: https://steempeak.com/@remyrequenart)