I’m using CS2 and have taken some silver jewelry photo’s for my website. I would like some advice on creating a nice crisp white background with some shadow around the the base of the item.
What is the best and most efficient method as I’m finding the silver does mingle with the white when I try and adjust the settings. The magic wand isn’t much use either.
Thanks, John. I’ve done something like that before (I think) using the magic wand tool. Even with a low tolerance setting it’s not selecting it very well. Is there some sort of step by step tutorial that you could message me. I really want to master this.
The best way to get a precise selection in this case is the Pen Tool. If you haven’t mastered the Pen Tool, you could try the Extract Filter but that takes a bit of practice too. Third best choice would be to make a rough selection with the Polygonal Lasso and clean it up with the Quick Mask facility.
There is no easy way to make a perfect selection!
There are dozens of good tutorials for these tools on the web. Just do a search.
I was using colour replace and increasing the back ground color to white which did affect the silver slighlt buy also gave it a nice finsih. I then went the opposite for the black bitsa so they went darker. It was then a case of manually eraising or painting around the edge which although not perfect looked pretty good.
I can master the pen tool. If this is the best method then I will use it. I want these pictures to look spot on. I don’t mind taking a couple of hours on one photo at all. In fact, I enjoy doing it.
Agreed, what you need is a color adjustment to save yourself the grief of cutting out the jewelry. Post a sample somewhere (medium resolution, including some of the silver detail) so we can take a whack at this.
You might want to check how you’re processing your files. The backgrounds are definitely not white. Use the Info Palette to monitor. I downloaded one image and the "white" background read something like 178R, 253G, 255B, which, is heavily on the Cyan side, not just a tad. Remember that a neutral background will read roughly equal in all three color channels and that absolute white will have all three colors reading 255.
Your images are actually fairly simple to outline using the Pen Tool. May 2-3 minutes each including the enclosed shapes. The big problem is your overall color cast. Can you outline your shooting and file processing process? Are you shooting raw or jpeg? What type of lighting are you using?
Okay, looking at your metadata, it seems that you’re shooting with a Coolpix, which probably only shoots jpegs. In that case, you need to pay much closer attention to your white balance setting. It’s clearly WAY off unless you’ve made some serious adjustments to your image. I would try two things. One: set your camera to Auto White Balance and see if the color cast improves. Two: Follow the camera directions for doing a Custom White Balance to balance the camera exactly to the lights you’re using. That second method should get you really close with only a small tweak later in Photoshop.
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