New User requesting help !!!

[Michaela Lusted]

I'm a new user just subscribed to Actinic and in the process of building my site. This is not a specific Actinic question but I'm struggling with the photos of my products that I'm putting on the site.
Ideally, I would like to cut the background out and just show the product itself on a white screen background ... a lot of other sites seem to do this but I can't work out how !!!
Can anyone help? I would be extremely grateful!!!
Michaela

[fleetwood]

Hi Michaela
Could you provide more details about your product photos, and maybe post and example.
Are these your own photographs taken with a digital camera, or photos sourced elsewhere?
If they are your own, the most obvious solution is to photograph the products against a plain white backdrop, which is how the professionals would do it, ideally using a digital camera and tripod.
Removing backgrounds from existing photos will be a time consuming job, but can be achieved using any reasonable graphics package, by tracing around the subject and cut and pasting. The results may not look that professional though.

Martin

[Michaela Lusted]

Hi martin

Thanks for your reply. They are photos that I shot with my digital camera against a white background. I think it's a pretty decent camera but the white background looks very grey against a white backdrop.
I'll attach and example ... thanks

[fleetwood]

I'd say that was a lighting issue Michaela.
To get a more professional look, you will need lighting other than the flash on your camera.
I'm a wee bit short on time just at the sec, but if you can post a larger pic, I'd be happy to take a closer look later (bit difficult to see much in the one posted).

Martin

[chris ashdown]

You may find this answers some of your questions

http://community.actinic.com/showthr...oshop+elements

[Michaela Lusted]

Thanks all.

I've attached another pic - will try re-shooting tomorrow with better lighting.

Will also look into the packages mentioned, I've found Photoshop Elements for £38 + vat on checknowsoftware.com. I subscribed free to PhotoPlus 6 earlier today but it doesn't help much - apparently PhotoPlus 8 allows you to cut backgrounds though and is just an additional £9.99 + vat...does anyone know if it's any good ?

[fleetwood]

Whilst its certainly possible to cut backgrounds using the graphics packages mentioned, it really depends how many you have to do. It can be quite a job. Taking the example pic you posted, there are quite a few seperate elements in it to trace, magic wand or no. It would be much better to see if you can shoot the pics as close as how you require them in the first place.
Both examples are a little blue. I'm not a lighting expert, but I think that you ideally need indirect / difussed lighting, rather than a direct flash, for a better more natural look. If you can make the room as light as possible, without shining light directly at your objects, you should have to rely less on the light from the flash. Also may be worth seeing if you can shoot at a higher resolution if your camera permits, and use a tripod for a sharper image. This will allow you far more control later if you need to tweak the pics.

Personally, I would experiment, and see if you can't acheive a more white looking background, rather than relying on cutting out the background with photoshop/elements.

Good pictures will create more sales than clever text, so its worth taking the time to get it right, if you have the time to spare.

Martin

[fleetwood]

heres a very rushed idea of what you can do with graphics software. This was a quick magic trace with adobe photodeluxe. I'm not so keen on the results, but if that what your after it can certainly be done. This took 30 secs to do. You could take more time and care

[Michaela Lusted]

Thanks Martin for your opinion and taking time to look at the photo. As you say with a number of photos to get a professional look is going to take much time and patience !
I will try to improve picture quality tomorrow.
Looking at your website, you have some pics on the home page with no background, are these clip art style ?

[fleetwood]

I tend to use two types of pics on our website.
The product pics are clearly just cover scans. Most are downloaded from publishers websites, rather than scanned by ourselves. With the amount of products we carry, and with new additions every week, it would be a very hard task to scan from scratch.

You may want to consider seeing if any of the work has already been done for you. If the manufacturers of your products, or your suppliers have a website, they may already have pics that you could use. Just don't go so far as taking pics from another retailers site, as they might well object to you 'borrowing' (ploite word used!), their work.

The section buttons are created by resizing an image to a set size, and then applying a circular vignette. Once set up and stored, this action takes a simple click or two to achieve. Any decent graphics package will allow to achieve similar effects. Bear in mind that this is a uniform action - I'm always working with the same size and circular shape, so it can be pre programmed simply.
What we were discussing about extracting the image from the background takes a bit more work as each 'trace' is going to be unique.

Please keep us posted as I'd like to see how you progress. Good luck

Martin

[chris ashdown]

At the moment it looks like you have a white wall and a white sheet over the table

A better solution would be to hang the sheet from the wall and then drape it over the table (With the table against the wall) with a gentle curve between the wall and table

This will give a more uniformed background with little colour variation and if you used a couple of table lamps just outside of vision plus the room main light you may see more acceptable pictures. Try and shield the lens from the table lights

You could also blur out the backgrounds with any of the software which again would be easier than deleting with the magic wand.

As said before most companies are happy to supply JPG's to their retail customers

Most photo software allow you to download a trial for 30 days and i suggest you try a few to find one that meets your needs

[RuralWeb]

If you have lots of pictures to do then I would recommend getting a portable studio from CubeLite (pictures on my website). It will produce profesional quality lighting. The next bit of kit you need is a good camera which has settings for white balance (Tunsten light) and exposure eg canon G6 or Canon 350D. This will alow you to take pictures against a white background and produce the correct shadow effects. I used to waste hours cutting out images - I found the extract tool in Photoshop the easiest to use.

[Jan]

You can buy light tents very cheaply on ebay. They make it a lot easier to take good photographs. We have an 80 cms light tent and it is big enough for me to sit in (I am a bit short though). This is an example :

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Light-Tent-50c...QQcmdZViewItem

Regards,

[RuralWeb]

Look like bargans to me - mine cost alot more!

[jont]

Hi Michaela, welcome to the forum.

Don't forget about natural light as a source ... either taking the products outside or place facing a window adds more colour clarity than standard artificial light. You can also use standard desktop lamps to illuminate but these tend to cast a brown hue - this can easily be adjusted in image editing software.

Just to show you what can be done the attached took less than 5 minutes in PhotoShop where the background was removed and the colour and contrast settings were also adjusted... but obviusly the better the original photo the better the finished image will be