How to get a white background ?

Hi all,

I have canon 350D.

I am trying to get white back ground, I have white colour MUSLIN backdrop, 1 boom on top, 2- 50x70 Softboxon sides each with 85 watt continouse light.

If I decrease shutter speed I can get white background but object itself very white.

I am totaly new, will be very thankfull if some one advise me what wrong I am doing.

The attached image was taken with settings,

ISO: 100
Apperture:10
Shutter:0.5 second
White balance Auto.

Regards,

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mmm i would firstly put white balance on flash if u are using a flash

and other than that - if you don't have a light metre to measure the reading then get yourself a grey card and take it from there

You may be getting some light reflecting off the background onto the subject. If you have the room try to move away from the background more. If you only have 85 watts of continuous light on the background what are you using to light the subject?

Have you tried to do a custom white balance?

Thanks for quick feedback

TamEric,
Can you give me some link where I can get more details about light metering Grey Card.

A_Kraker99,

I will try next time to move more away and I have three lights in total 1 top(boom),2 soft boxes.

BMS Studion,

I tried to customize but I was totaly lost. As I was looking for some values to put 55000K

But could not find how to put these value.

Sorry about that I am totaly new in this.

Thanks all of you and best regards,

If you're happy with the color of the chair, (which is more important, IMO) just blow the brighter end of the curve in PP.

I can try to make an attempt but you don't have the "IMAGE EDDITING OK" flag turned on.

I posted a link to Zack Arias' tutorial where he does the white BG; check it out

Zack Arias tutorial

You MUST separately light the background, independent of lighting of the subject, to get a white white on the background.

Wilt wrote in post #5581431
You MUST separately light the background, independent of lighting of the subject, to get a white white on the background.

Wilt is absolutely correct. This is mandantory.

Illuminate the backround so that the light falling on the background is a stop or two brighter (measured with an incident-mode light meter) than the light falling on your subject. By choosing a correct background lighting level and/or correctly positioning the light and/or smoothing the wrinkles out of the background and/or moving the main subject further from the background, you can make the background essentially wash out to pure white. What I'm saying here is that you may need to use more than one of these steps.

Of course, you will need to have your white balance properly set for the light sources. You can do a "custom white balance" or shoot in RAW and put a gray reference card into a test shot for the purpose of picking the white balance point in the RAW conversion process.

Looking at different threads over many months there would appear to be several methodologies for achieving this. These range from .5 stop above subject to 2 stops + above subject level? I have also seen measuring the background with a spot meter to get 2.5 stops above subject incident level? Another recent idea I have seen is to measure the reflected light from the backdrop - taken from the rear of the subject with an incident meter?

I recently posted a thread with my background 0.5 stop above subject level, but strangely the foreground was greying out. A conclusion I have come to is that it would appear that the angle of the light has an effective impact on how your chosen backdrop / base appears, maybe with certain materials?

I would be grateful for the more informed to explain how to achieve a near enough total white out. In my examples although I only used the one light for the subject, my thoughts were that if the subject was properly exposed then white would show as white. Hence my conclusion about direction of light onto the backdrop / floor covering. I can understand light fall-off beyond the subject, but not the greying out ahead of the subject?

The example below were my first trials with a beauty dish / softlite reflector. Choice was by advice from others about the wide and even coverage it gave. The 2nd example was from a screen shot in ps3 to show blown highlights.

Many thanks in advance.

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Again, as has been said, separately lighting fore and background is absolutely key. That way you can blow the back to high heaven, completely white, and still perfectly light the subject

First thanks for the tip, even if I wasn't the OP.

Would the tips given here still hold true if you were using a colored background? Or should a white background be use all the time and the color changed in PP?

Thanks,
Craig

Steve, I use a white tile board from Home Depot and got pretty good results. The tricky part of where the BG material itself meets the floor material and the line that's created by the two meeting. I used my speedlights to light the BG, and maybe they just aren't strong enough, or I didn't have them close enough to the BG to get some reflection on the seam.

Sometimes a grey background is easier to play with - color wise.

Whack a light grey with a colored gel....and it comes out great. There's some really nice example of this in the G&N forum

just reading some good info.

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