White background & isolation

Objects on white background are often good sellers because it is easy to use them in any design. Many beginning photographers ask themselves how they can achieve a perfect white background on their photos. It is not always easy, and powerful lightning is crucial for achieving good results.

Here is a useful thread on Shutterstock forum where photographers share their experience and techniques.

There are two basic techniques for obtaining white background: manual isolation and getting it white naturally in the photo.

     1.   Manual isolation (clipping path)

To isolate an object manually, the best way is to use Pen tool in Photoshop. It requires good skills, but once you master it you will appreciate its advantages and understand why you shouldn’t do isolation with lasso tool or magic wand. A useful and funny article about this technique can be found on iStock website. When you do a manual isolation you can save it in Photoshop as clipping path. Designers appreciate clipping paths because they make it even easier to extract an object and add it to any background.

     2.   Shooting on white background

The second way to get an isolation is to shoot your object on white background and to get the background as white as possible with your camera. The photo below was shot using continuous lighning (3 powerful lamps) and a light tent. The camera was set to overexposed and a little bit of contrast was added in camera settings. You can achieve the same result much easier if you use studio flash lightning.

If the background is not perfectly white on the photo, but very close to white it will be easy to adjust it in Photoshop to make it pure white. There are several techniques for doing that. I use Levels control.

Let’s take this photo as an example.

The background is almost white, so it will be easy to make it perfectly white. Open the Levels control in Photoshop. You will see the following graph:

Move the right slider to the left of the peak in the right part of the graph, and you’ll get a perfectly white background. The thinner this peak is and the closer it is to the right border of the graph, the better the result will be. If it’s too thick (which means there is still a lot of grey in the background), moving the slider left will affect the contrast and colors of the object on the photo.

For this photo, I also moved the left slider a little to the right to add some contrast to the image.

And here is the result:

TIP! To check if the background is purely white, select in Adobe Photoshop the Magic Wand Tool (W) , set Tolerance at 1, and leave blank checkboxes “Anti-alias”, “Contiguous”, and “Sample All Layers”. Click on the white background in your image. If the background is purely white (contains only white pixels), it will be completely selected. If it is not purely white, stray pixels will not be selected.