Tips on capturing products with glossy and reflective surfaces.

admin March 29,2017

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For photographers or even for inexperienced ones, taking products with glossy and reflective surfaces is extremely difficult for them. In this article, I want to share with you ways of capturing photos with a glossy and reflective surface.

When it comes to the photo of the product, it is important to remove unexpected reflections from the final photograph. And it becomes more difficult when taking pictures with six-sided mirrors and taking the photo of faucets since the reflecting surface makes flare points. To solve this problem, we place the headlamp above and radiate lamp down to the product through a soft box to get the light over the product. And another lamp is placed next to the faucet and illuminates on the reflective umbrella so that the light hits the back of the product.

After setting up the light, the next step is to clean the fingerprints on the surface of the product. We use rubber gloves and a non-slip cloth (a kind of fabric is commonly used for camera lenses) and a little glass cleaner to remove fingerprints on the glossy surface of the product. Keeping the surface clean is very important because small dirt or fingerprints also reduce the value of product photo. You can solve them in post-production but it will take a lot of time, so you should do it from the beginning.

In the process of shooting, we use a remote timer device which allows us to capture established area. We want the product to be the clearer, so we put the ISO at the lowest level (here is ISO 100), and the aperture of the lens is about f/11 (you can put higher, depend on the light intensity you set up), which allows the faucet to be focused completely. Both of them require the speed of taking the photo with the cheap cost and slow to sufficiently expose to the image. Therefore, the camera must be placed on the tripod and you should remote when capturing, the camera will not shake when shooting manually. If you focus on these details, you will get an image with great standard and clear light.

We take the product with two versions: take the faucet on the white background and the perspective shot. When taking a perspective, we use the floor tiles to make the background with other different outfits such as shaving cream, soap tray … To make the product more active, we add flowing water on the products in post-production.

What I have shared with you above, I hope that you can easily capture products with the glossy and reflective surface.

When finishing the shooting products, you can move to the editing process to increase brightness and some other parameters by Camera Raw and then move to Photoshop to edit. After dealing with stains or dust on the product in Photoshop, you can use the pen tool to cut the image out of the background and use the white background on the product and we had a pack-shot picture of the faucet.

Do you know how to make a reflect shadow in Adobe Photoshop ? Let’s watch and try it!