Photography - Reaching Nirvana

And of course, by Nirvana, I mean a white background in photos.  Neither is easy, though I dare say getting a white background is easier than reaching Nirvana.   Maybe, I can make the white background thing a little bit easier.  That way we can all put our energy into finding Nirvana. LOL

So the first place you want to start is to mess around with settings on your camera.  Fortunately, even among point-and-shoots like mine (Canon Power Shot SX110 IS), those settings are fairly standardized.  Some cameras may not have some of these, if you're not sure about yours check out the manual.  (or search for tutorials online for your specific camera and it's features, which will probably be clearer)

The setting I've used in the past was Indoor.  I'd set it to macro, maybe bump up the light balance a bit and take dozens of pictures.  Then, I'd go into my photo editing software to clean it up, and find that the backgrounds weren't quite so pretty and white as they looked on the camera screen.  I've been doing this for years, and somehow I still forget on occasion that my camera screen is a little overly bright.  Anyway, in using the software to edit, I would hit a point where I could either get a nice white background -or- I could have the colors actually look like the thing I had photographed.  Not a fun choice!

                                          Way too much magenta!  Ewww.

So, I decided to try the Program setting on my camera, and change the white balance setting to Tungsten.  This is because I use regular non-fluorescent bulbs, which have a yellow/orange cast.  Also known as warm white!  Lovely in rooms, not so much in photos.

                                          Too much blue, not enough green.

This setting produced an improved color temperature over the indoor setting, so I shut off the lights on my lightbox and was about to upload the pictures...

And then it occurred to me that perhaps I should try shooting without my lights on at all.  It's pretty bright here in Phoenix, and the open side of my lightbox faces 1/2 a wall of glass, so it was worth a shot.

                                          Pretty close to aaahhh-mazing!


Bingo.  The color temperature looked considerably more neutral on Indoor with the lights off than it did on program with the lights on.  So, I cranked up my light balance (the +/- button) to +1.5 and...


Bam!

                                         There it is!

All I had to do at that point was up the contrast a bit to get that perfect white, and use a big white paintbrush to remove the darker areas around the edges of the picture, to arrive at the final image:

                                                      I dream about pictures like this.

So there you have it... a brilliant white background and all I had to do was turn off the stinking lights.  Who'da thunk it?  Okay probably everyone else but every now and then I'm not as bright as I pretend to be ;)

So, here are all of the pics side by side so you can see the startling differences!

Hope this helps!!


Next installment will be about ... WHY IS THERE GLITTER IN MY ICED TEA?  Oh, sorry.  Noticed some glitter in mah tea.  Risk of that craft that I do.  Anyway,

We'll be talking about macros and cropping.  Or, "How to make the focal point feel like it is at a natural place in the photo so the viewer's eyes don't go buggy"  It matters more than it seems like it should!

<3
Amber