Photos to sell small products On-line/ebay

wow, some great editing lessons here !!..

lens pirate wrote in post #6254719
OK I tried a white background. What that did was to show case the serious issues I Am having working with White balance. Only one source of light here.
The daylight florescent bulbs.

a really simple fix is to use the photoshop levels neutral grey eyedropper tool;
or in lightroom use the WB eyedropper... & click it anywhere that you know should be grey or white

I most often do the WB with a curve layer. I set the white & black point, then I look for a mid-gray point to set. Whichever your prefered technique, its easy. But ...

if you do the WB on the lighter (white on the BG, black on the writings) then you discover that the white sticker on the lighter is turning bluish...

And here you are for a hair-pulling session.

This is why seting a manual WB on the ambient light saves a lot of time. At least, if your colors look off, you KNOW that the ambient light is balanced and you can go ahead in the analysis of your image (many reasons can locally alter the WB and need local corretion).

Here is my play with the lighter.

Note the shadow is bluish which was caused by the color of the lighter. easy to correct with a desaturation lauer and mask.
Note also the sticker is also slightly bluish despite I took care of it.
Balancing colors can be a real nightmare. You definitely need to think about that before pressing the shutter, not after.

somethingsimple wrote in post #6257543
a really simple fix is to use the photoshop levels neutral grey eyedropper tool;
or in lightroom use the WB eyedropper... & click it anywhere that you know should be grey or white

sometimes this is not enough.
the correction is seldom the same in the lights and the shadows.
Moreover, colored objects are projecting their specific colors to the neighboring objects in a way which often looks unnatural on the image and need correction.

The curve layer, as well as the levels layer, give 3 points to white-balance : black, white and gray. you need to use all of them. I do prefer the curve version because it shows the resulting curves. I can tweak them manually, or make my own judgement and redo if I dont like them.

aram535 wrote in post #6256869
You know you can't sell guns or gun replicas on ebay right?

OL9245 wrote in post #6257036
I isolated the knife and set a WB with curves, then desaturate 50%
also played around with DOF with sharpening the FG and bluring the BG, to bring the attention on the black string at the FG so that the attention was not brought to the small defects on the blade.

strmrdr wrote in post #6257395
med green felt is one of the best backgrounds for gun photos.
The gun rags use it all the time.

Yes I know you can not sell guns on Ebay. That is why I mentioned the other forums I sell on.

Thanks for the edit and the felt suggestion. It turns out that getting good pictures of things is easy.... Its when you want to make them EXCELLENT pictures, that last little bit, that kills you. I have some learning to do.

Jim

Bill Huber, who posts on the Olympus Talk forum of DPReview, posted these instructions on how you make a DIY Lightbox a few years ago. I followed his instructions and built one that works well even today.

The poster who told you not to use mixed lighting is correct. Choose either incandescent of fluorescent; but only one. Also, you should use a Grey card in your shoot and it will make color correction MUCH easier. Personally I use a WhiBal card and shoot Raw; after that its a trivial matter to color correct my images to show the true colors of the object(s) photographed. It also helps to mount your camera on a tripod and use either the timer feature or a remote shutter release.

lens pirate wrote in post #6258695
Yes I know you can not sell guns on Ebay. That is why I mentioned the other forums I sell on.

Thanks for the edit and the felt suggestion. It turns out that getting good pictures of things is easy.... Its when you want to make them EXCELLENT pictures, that last little bit, that kills you. I have some learning to do.

Jim

FedkaTheConvict wrote in post #6259687
The poster who told you not to use mixed lighting is correct. Choose either incandescent of fluorescent; but only one.........

Just don't ask me how I learned that important bit of information.

Ha... I can well image the nightmare of trying to get the correct white balance.

bill boehme wrote in post #6262577
Just don't ask me how I learned that important bit of information.

FedkaTheConvict wrote in post #6264505
Ha... I can well image the nightmare of trying to get the correct white balance.

everyone who has experience this once will tell its worst than what you can imagine!

To begin with, a nightmare is something you usually get out of it sooner or later. But A mixed light source with colored objects and no proper WB prior to the shoot is something in which you can sink to death

Ok only one light source! Used one of those cards with white, black and grey sections to help set the white balance in PP. Not perfect but improved don't you think?

Colors are spot on. Great job!

Brightened a bit, and increased local contrast with USM.

My trick for USM in CS: duplicate the USM-ed layer, set one duplicate to darken at 100% opacity, and the other to lighten at 50% opacity. Group the two layers and adjust opacity for the whole group. This trick allows stronger USM settings (larger radius and higher amount).

Great job on the new images. Those white/gray/black cards are also great for doing curves adjustments.