Topic: Shooting closeup product photos - HELP! Amateur! (Read 4634 times)

hampower · « **on:** January 10, 2006, 12:34:14 pm »

I have a Canon EOS Digital Rebel. I am shooting pictures of yarns on a table with a "good" light setup. I have my camera set at 400 ISO, fstop of 8.0 and speed at 250. I have a gray board and clicked pictures adjusting the speed from 800 down to 160 and found that the 250 setting was the best for my lighting.

I am an amatuer and have a question regarding what to do now. The yarns range all over the rainbow including black yarns and white yarns. Some are multicolor. When I take the shot, I am doing a closeup of the yarn, so there is no background. Do I just leave the exposure settings the same for each and every color? If so, some of the darker colors seem dark. Black seems too black and white seems unclear and overexposed. The black and the white are the 2 biggies giving me trouble. Should I make adjustments for those colors? Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

If you need more information then I have provided, please post it and I will get it for you. Thanks in advance for all your help!!

Hank · « **Reply #1 on:** January 10, 2006, 01:14:32 pm »

This may be helpful:

Among wildlife photographers there is a rule of thumb to overexpose black subjects by a stop or so to help reveal more detail, and likewise to underexpose white subject by a stop or so increase shadow detail and preserve highlights.

You may run into another issue with colors, especialy "new age" varieties, whether or not they would be used in yarn. Some are difficult to register properly, and the color temperature of your lights can add complications. Worse yet, if you need to hit the colors right on as you do in product shots, it's impossible to make accurate color adjustments after the fact if your monitor isn't accurately calibrated.

Product photography is a lot of fun, but extremely demanding in many regards. Color management of your system is key, but so is feedback from your client. Often their eyes will see colors differently that yours, so communication (lots of it sometimes) is required. Even if your system is fully calibrated, the conversations can get really muddled if their monitor isn't calibrated like yours.

hampower · « **Reply #2 on:** January 10, 2006, 01:50:00 pm »

Thanks Hank!! I am the client, photographer and everything else. I am fairly happy with my monitor. Of course, for $700 - $1000, I could be happier. But, using my current monitor, I am happy with most of the colors, except the black and the white. And for some reason, orange seems to be kinda outta whack. I will try your technique in a few and let you know. Just wanted to say thanks in the meantime.

Tim Gray · « **Reply #3 on:** January 10, 2006, 02:52:39 pm »

Maybe I'm not understanding the problem. When you say 250 is "best", is that based on getting the "best" histogram? Ie no clipping or blocking and "exposed towards the right"?

If there is no detail in the blacks, you are blocking the shadows and you need a faster shutter speed to give you some space at the left end of the histogram. If there is no detail in the whites, you are clipping and you need a slower shutter speed to give you some space at the right end.

If you are blocking and clipping in the same shot you have a problem with dynamic range, not exposure. If this is the case you should shoot raw (actually you should shoot raw regardless) which gives you a bit more headroom to extract details or if that's still insufficient you need to bracket and combine the shots either PS HDR, or MR has a tutorial on exposue blending on the site or there are some decent PS actions to blend the 2 exposures.

tshort · « **Reply #4 on:** January 10, 2006, 03:24:57 pm »

Some random thoughts, from one who does not know a lot - but maybe enough to be dangerous...

Assuming you are using a tripod, why shoot at ISO 400, and 1/250sec?. The subject shouldn't be moving, so stop-action shutterspeeds are not needed. You may find that you can get more depth of field (unless you intentionally want DOF falloff), and best overall sensor quality if you reduce your ISO, close up your aperture, and use whatever shutter speed that dictates.

And expose to the right.

And remember that your meter wants everything to look grey - especially important if you're setting exposures for blacks or whites using a meter (altho with digital's instant feedback you may not need to do this - altho that may be a way of making sure your colors are more consistent).

Hank · « **Reply #5 on:** January 10, 2006, 04:07:21 pm »

One more thought, just so you are prepared if you start altering your exposure for black or white subjects:

If your background is being lit by the same lights as your subject, you will notice changes in background exposure when you change exposure for the subject. In other words, if you increase the exposure for a black subject your background will be lighter, and if you cut exposure for a white subject your background will be darker.

We illuminate our backgrounds seperately from our subjects so that as we change subject exposure we can make independent changes in our background illumination to compensate, in order to end up with consistent backgrounds no matter what the changes in the lighting on our subjects. In this way, when you present an array of photos as it sounds like you will, the background will always look the same rather than some being darker or lighter, or worse yet showing color shifts.

dwdallam · « **Reply #6 on:** January 11, 2006, 03:44:13 am »

To answer your question directly, yes, you may need to adjust exposure for different colors, but you will need to adjust for black and white. Go less light for white and more for black, however you want to do that.

What the gentelman meant about your monitor is not about how good it is, although that matters, but how well it is calibrated to reproduce the color the camera actually saw, and how it will print. There are way to do a pretty good job using software, but no professional printing service uses software. They use a device called a "spider" that affixes to the front of your screen and uses hardware to calibrate the color by measuring teh actual temperature of teh colors on your screen. You probably won't need that degree of perfection unless you need to reproduce mathmatically the exact color of the product, which manufacturers will demand for printing using CYMK.

Without hardware calibration, you can get almost perfect color using printer profiles and doing a good job with software calibration. But some colors, like one person says, will be hard if not impossible to reproduce when printed. Reds are the hardest to keep natural as the product looks. Also, if you use compression, such as a JPG for web use, you can forget about accurate color replication. You'll get close sometimes and never get close others--such as reds--if you use much compression at all.

So that's about it!

Jonathan Ratzlaff · « **Reply #7 on:** January 17, 2006, 04:07:45 pm »

If you have to adjust exposure every time you photograph a black and white subject in the same frame, then a lot of wedding photographers myself included have done this wrong for years!!! i don't think so.

You only need to adjust for different colours if you are actually metering off those colours. For example if you are metering off the white, you need to increase your exposure by at least 1.5 stops. You will have to decrease your exposure if you are metering off black by about the same amount. If you are metering off a gray card, which is what you said you were doing, then no compensation is required.

If you are unsure take a meter reading off your palm and open up one stop. This is what I do when I am unsure of what my exposure is going to do.

Hank · « **Reply #8 on:** January 17, 2006, 04:45:46 pm »

Aaaah, Jonathan. Sounds like it's time for you to expand your world and do a bit more diverse shooting.

We have shot weddings too for the last 15 years, and you miss my point. It's all about expsoure latitude- akin to the challenge of getting detail simultaneously in the bride's white dress and the groom's black tuxedo. Fuji tried to pawn off the S3 as the ultimate solution, but that model has been an expensive corporate misfire, since it failed overcome the mechanical shortcomings of the S2.

My point is that if a subject is all black or all white, adjusting your exposure allows you to show more detail than with a "straight" exposure, whether off a gray card, your hand, or an incident meter. When you make such an adjustment in subject exposure while your background is under the same lights, a corresponding change will record there as well. Hence the advantage of illuminating your background independly and making simultaneous adjustments there.

Do a lot of tabletop lighting and shooting, and this will all come clear to you.

Sorry if I sound terse, but your opening line was pretty confrontational and condescending.

dwdallam · « **Reply #9 on:** January 17, 2006, 09:29:10 pm »

Quote

If you have to adjust exposure every time you photograph a black and white subject in the same frame, then a lot of wedding photographers myself included have done this wrong for years!!! i don't think so.

You only need to adjust for different colours if you are actually metering off those colours. For example if you are metering off the white, you need to increase your exposure by at least 1.5 stops. You will have to decrease your exposure if you are metering off black by about the same amount. If you are metering off a gray card, which is what you said you were doing, then no compensation is required.

If you are unsure take a meter reading off your palm and open up one stop. This is what I do when I am unsure of what my exposure is going to do.
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No, I obviously didn't mean that. I meant that as you go from color to color, you MAY have to adjust exposure, but when you go form color to a black or white subject, you WILL need to adjust exposure.

Jonathan Ratzlaff · « **Reply #10 on:** January 18, 2006, 12:48:03 am »

The original poster asked whether in the case of a tabletop setting, in shooting all different colours of yarn whether he had to vary the eposure to get proper exposure of black, white and coloured yarns at the same time. the answer is simple. Because everything is in the same liight a good exposure for white will produce a good exposure for black and all the colours in between. So unless he changes his lighting setup every time and his meter setting , keep it at one setting for all colours, one exposure setting will be good for all colours.

If he doesn't change his lighting setup the amount of light falling on the subject will be consistent. Just because black yarn is placed there doesnt mean that he has to change his exposure. The same for white and yellow. This is how incident metering works ( I stilll use it when shooting with studio flash.)

I have shot negative film, slide film since 1972 and digital film from 2003. when you have a black and white subject in the same light, there is no problem getting shadow detail in the black part of an image and in the white part of the image as long as your lighting is within the five stop range for slide film and about 7 for negative film. Digital is no different from slide film; in fact the dynamic range for shadow detail is a bit greater than slide film.

I do agree however that if you are metering off a predominant colour be it black, white, yellow or green that you have to make adjustments for the reflecitivity of the material. That is why I mentioned that if in doubt meter off your hand and open up one stop. I have a tendancy to lose grey cards, however since my hand is attached it follows me along.

Actually as far as shooting is concerned, I actually shoot everything from landscape to macro to high key portrait photography and exposure is exposure.

poljazz · « **Reply #11 on:** January 18, 2006, 09:10:03 am »

I am wondering what your lighting setup is like. You may have a problem with it being too contrasty (not flat enough). You should be using a light source that is as wide and as even as possible, such as a soft box or a bounce light on a large white surface, with white reflectors on both sides of your subject and maybe even one in front. If your dark yarn is on one side and the lighter yarn on the other you could add more light to the dark side and less to the lighter side, either by adding another (controllable) light source on each side or by using a more reflective (silver card) reflector on the dark side of your subject.
If your result is too flat reduce the size of your light source by moving it away from your product.
I agree that using raw and a lower asa rating should get you better results.
You should aim for an exposure with enough depth of field to get everything in focus i.e. f11-f16 for a shot that is not directly from above.
Do your first shot of the day with a macbeth color checker card or your grey card in the field of view so you can match your shots from each shooting session.

Paul Lamontagne

lester_wareham · « **Reply #12 on:** January 25, 2006, 10:42:46 am »

Is this not an ideal situation for manual camera control and incident light metering.
As already noted if the lighting is resonably flat this should be well within the camera exposure latitude.

Also if the OP is shooting a lot of different colours that will dominate the frame it may be a good idea to use a custom white balance from a gray card. I would suggest shooting RAW and applying the custom WB in post processing.

Hank · « **Reply #13 on:** January 25, 2006, 11:04:28 am »

If hampower is shooting the colors individually as he indicated rather than all at once, exposure latitude is only an issue if he's trying to use the same subject exposure for the full range including black and white. I'm recommending he adjust his exposures ala shooting black subjects @ Sunny 11 and white subjects @ Sunny 22, rather than trying to both @ Sunny 16. This is a standard and normal practice for wildlife photographers and translates beautifully to tabletop shooting with independent background lighting. Simply shooting RAW while not adjusting subject or background exposure- then making your adjustments on the computer- will engender changes in background exposure along with those on the subject unless working in layers is a viable option.

RAW is a good suggestion for his problem with the orange yarn, provided he's using a calibrated monitor. Things get entertaining if he has to use the same shots in sRGB on the web, as well as in CMYK for print.

Author Topic: Shooting closeup product photos - HELP! Amateur! (Read 4634 times)