I just found you through etsy and I love your art!! I have a question if you don't mind me asking? ;u; How do you take such amazing photos for your charms on etsy? The white background in my photos never come out nice and bright, even when I edit in photoshop lol
Thank you very much!!
I will try to make a little tutorial under the cut as an answer because I think that will be easier to explain and understand :)
First things first, you don’t need the fanciest camera, I use a camera I bought some years ago for the shop, it was really cheap but takes acceptable pictures...!
Find a sunny spot in your house and use a white paper as background. For me, it’s better if the sun doesn’t hit your products directly because they won't look that "natural".
This is only to make the Photoshoping easier, but it helps a little. I'll take a picture I took during winter when the sky was always cloudy.
Yeah! It looks terrible and blue! This is (I think) because yellow light tints white blue, it’s complementary colour (I think!). To compensate the blue tint I add a Photo filter “Warming filter (85)”. My PS is in Spanish but I think it’s - Image > Adjustments > Photo Filter.
This step depends on what coulour your picture is tinted with (if any) just find a complementary colour to minimize it (if your picture is strongly tinted like mine at least!)
Now go Image > Adjustments > Exposure and play with the values.
I try to make the bg as white as possible without the products being *too*... burnt? (They always are)
Then I play with Levels (Image > Adjustment > Levels)
Manually erase any remaining dirt that isn’t stuck to your products.
Using the magic wand and select-deselect lasso create a selection of the dirt in the background that is touching your products and use exposure again to get rid of it.
The borders of the shadows of my products look too crisp and unnatural now, so I like to use the Smudge(finger) tool to make it look better! (I find it works best when you smudge all the border in one go)
And you’re done!
I know I’m not professional at all and I hope I didn’t offend anyone with this mess...! But it works for me and hope it helps you a bit :-)