Item Photography

[clubesquire]

Good afternoon all,

I hope some of you have the day off and are enjoying life.

This is a much 'lighter' subject to most handled in here, but noneltheless, presenting your items in the best possible way is very important. Probably more important than the narrative.

I'm not a novice photographer, but still have much to learn. I consider my skills to be basic. I use a Nikon D90 DSLR. I use good lighting, a well appointed light box, and I tweak my camera settings as much as I possibly can to eliminate that time costly, pre-posting exercise of cleaning up and modifying pics, although when I look at some competitor pics it's becoming more apparent that I should invest some time in this.

What are your experiences with photo processing? Is there one or two, user friendly, processing platforms that stand out from the rest? I'd be interested in what you are using, these days, and your thoughts.

Basic Attributes:

Background cleaning

Contrast and brightness

Cropping

Sharpenning

Colour hue

Anything beyond is a bonus.

Many thanks,

Melina.

[the4masters2013]

I feel you are undermining yourself .. by the sounds of things, you are more than just a basic photographer!!

I use an Ipad to take photos...set uo the item, take between 3 and 12 photos and then down load the photos on the ebay app on the Ipad.

That's what I call basic and also Sandra proof .

I use the KISS theory with photography...if it's not simple, I will struggle!

[dazzledayz]

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@clubesquirewrote:

Good afternoon all,

I hope some of you have the day off and are enjoying life.

This is a much 'lighter' subject to most handled in here, but noneltheless, presenting your items in the best possible way is very important. Probably more important than the narrative.

I'm not a novice photographer, but still have much to learn. I consider my skills to be basic. I use a Nikon D90 DSLR. I use good lighting, a well appointed light box, and I tweak my camera settings as much as I possibly can to eliminate that time costly, pre-posting exercise of cleaning up and modifying pics, although when I look at some competitor pics it's becoming more apparent that I should invest some time in this.

What are your experiences with photo processing? Is there one or two, user friendly, processing platforms that stand out from the rest? I'd be interested in what you are using, these days, and your thoughts.

Basic Attributes:

Background cleaning

Contrast and brightness

Cropping

Sharpenning

Colour hue

Anything beyond is a bonus.

Many thanks,

Melina.

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Hi Melina,

From what you describe as required, a reasonably simple photo editing suite should do everything you need.

Photoshop would be overkill but a free alternative is the GNU app "Gimp" or simpler but still with quite a few tools "PhotoScape".

To be honest, you'd achieve most of your goals without a great deal of editing by using a light tent with a couple of external flashheads or even continuous lighting (unless this is what you mean when you mentioned a lightbox).

The only real downside with continuous lighting is the lower shutter speeds you'll have to use.

Your D90 should be able to accept a custom white balance which, once set up, should give you correct saturation for RGB channels first up so only micro tweaking would be required.

If you need to break down your setup between shoots, draw your set-up in plan elevation fashion noting heights, angles, distances and intensity (if your lighting varies).

That would be a floor plan, side and front elevation.

This way you can record a lighting set-up and come back to it years later.

[clubesquire]

@4masters

Yes, I think I know my camera pretty well, but that's about where it starts and finishes. I've seen some remarkable results from post processing, but I've never really got into it, other than fiddle with Picassa a few times. It was okay, but I wasn't overly impressed.

I like your attitude. KISS rules 🙂

Thanks 4M 🙂

Melina.

[clubesquire]

@dazzle

Hi dazzle and thank you. Some really good suggestions. And yes, the light box is more or less the same as a tent, but with inbuilt LED daylight lighting - far from perfect, but not too bad.

I've got Gimp up now, having a peek on the PC.

Cheers 🙂

Melina.

[dazzledayz]

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@clubesquirewrote:

@dazzle

Hi dazzle and thank you. Some really good suggestions. And yes, the light box is more or less the same as a tent, but with inbuilt LED daylight lighting - far from perfect, but not too bad.

I've got Gimp up now, having a peek on the PC.

Cheers 🙂

Melina.

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Hi again Melina,

You'll find that the led daylight may not be quite the same as photographic daylight.

Led output tends to be "peaky" in one of the channels and Gimp should show you which one if you shoot a white card and analyze the channels at normal exposure.

I used daylight fluoros for a while shooting books and although very close, the red channel always needed a tweak and that was after setting up a good custom white balance in camera.

You probably already find yourself making similar shot to shot colour corrections and chasing your tail a bit.

That said, I believe Gimp will let you do batch corrections so it should be possible to do a correction on an antire folder of new work.

If you really want to nail true colour, the only real way is to think about using a couple of small flashheads outside the tent and triggered remotely from the camera hotshoe.

Or even consider taking the tent outside in indirect daylight and fill using a foil covered reflector.

I forgot to ask; are you shooting through the slit in the front curtain of your tent?

[clubesquire]

Good suggestions  again, thanks dazzle 🙂 

I certainly understand about the LED's. Not perfect but, oh so easy. Ok, some changes here.

I'm hoping to sort the colour issue 'in camera' but just now I'm sorta finding one click back is too much less and one click forward is too mucH more. Still playing with this.

I photograph with the whole front flap open. Thanks for mentioning that. I'll try it closed up.

Big thanks 🙂

melina.

[clubesquire]

Well, just for anyone's information who may be interested in improving their photography....

Gimp is easy to use, so far, and has all the tools you'll need for eBay.

I've got colour almost perfect by fiddling with white balance and hue settings and keeping an eye on the 'vibrant' colour saturation settings.

Changing  the fstop according to the distance from the subject has helped.

Reorienting the lights within the light tent has provided a more even result. Still using LED, but okay.

Although a bit awkward, closing up the light box and using the slot has also helped substantially. A good tip thanks 🙂

It's taken a bit of time and fiddling, but it's worth it. I've also tried so many different backgrounds, but I'm beginning to think plain white is best.

It's the little things you tend to tend to overlook that make all the difference.

Thanks for the pointers. Very worthwhile 🙂

Melina.

[dazzledayz]

Good to see you're mastering Gimp Melina.

It's pretty much the open source version of Photoshop and ships with most Linux distros.

From what I can tell you are well on the way to an efficient workstream 🙂

The last thing to do to smooth the flow and make your tweaks minimal is to get a handle on custom white balance for the D90 and your standard light tent setup and lens combo.

It's really quite easy to do and you'll reduce your workload noticeably (gives you the opportunity to get more creative).

There's really not much more to it than setting up a sheet of white paper at the subject's position, parallel to the camera sensor plane and then just taking a full frame picture of it (or part thereof) while the WB is in "Pre" mode.

Once you've got this under your wing you'll have a really useful tool you can use in lots of different scenarios.

It's one of the biggest advantages with DSLR's.

In the bad old days of film you'd be experimenting with filters over the lens or lights and would also need a densitometer to read and evaluate the results.

The whole process could take days or even weeks rather than the seconds it takes now.

Good luck with it!

[clubesquire]

Many thanks dazzle 🙂

You don't realise your own photography shortcomings until you see the work of someone who obviously knows their way about it. Then things become just too apparent. It's a bit frustrating, because the whole process is already time intensive, really, and to be honest eBay's own very basic tools must be a big bonus for some photographers who really struggle.

Still tweaking, but just with your help alone, things are better. Closing the lightbox off, which should have been apparent to me, but wasn't, was a big improvement. Our next batch of listings will be looking much improved.

Much obliged dazzle.

Melina.