hey what's going on guys john santos and in today's video we're going to be showing you how
to do product photography from home so whether you own a clothing line or you have a products
business or maybe you just want to photograph some accessories that you created in this video we're
going to be showing you the mechanics of how it's done but we'll also be showing you a really cool
thing that's called the floating effect hey what's up i'm mike leisure and in a previous video we
covered the importance of branding and marketing for your clothing line today we'll be diving into
the mechanics of some creative product photography so this is what you'll need a camera anything that
shoots really even a phone could work a light on a stand and if you don't have that then you can
use natural lighting whether that be a window or just shoot this outside you'll need some string
or fishing line today i think we have some yarn a stand or something to suspend your item from and
then you'll need a friend if you don't have any make some you can't make any i guess find some
if you don't have a friend hire a photographer if you know a photographer i would get yourself
a little tripod because it's a lot cheaper and uh it sticks around a lot longer a clean wall or
a background and then some good old-fashioned photoshop and that'll uh get the job done for
you so for clothing this technique is called the ghost mannequin uh it's very popular with
athletic clothing you'll probably seen it on under armour or nike and things like that especially
with compression sleeve shorts or anything like that i've also seen it done with socks now the
thing is that you can use the same ideology the same techniques to bring that floating clothing
into something creative and use that for a banner and add a social post and it's just it's visually
striking it just looks pretty cool i'm gonna let you in on a little secret so when i create
anything really i look at all right how can i make this billboard how can i make this video
my criteria for it is somewhat simple i look for three things how can i make someone say what the
duck uh how can i make someone double take that they're scrolling some thumb stopping content like
what did i just see and then the last thing is how do you make someone wonder just like how did they
do that why did they do that you have to make them think and these uh simple questions will help you
create more um engaging content create something more visually striking just have that factor to
it you know what i mean one of the quickest and easiest ways to do this is to create uh something
with floating clothing and i'm sure you've all seen it it's very trendy right now you've probably
seen it all over instagram somebody's gonna jump in the air they're gonna float they're floating a
camera it's in a thumbnail uh but they're doing this for a reason it's it's very effective now
if you do learn this don't overdo it because it becomes a little gimmicky but it's a very useful
tool so just make sure to put that in your pocket put in your tool belt and then use that for later
all right the first thing we're going to do is shoot this mask on jonathan because i do have
friends afterwards i'm gonna shoot the inside of the mask on the other side so that i can
photoshop it in okay so i actually just uploaded all the photos from the shoot onto my hard drive
here and what the first thing i'm to do is make sure it's organized because organization is key
i'm going to open it up in bridge this is actually one of my favorite workflows is to
put it in bridge first and then after i make my selects i'm going to move them over to lightroom
and then from there i'll make my adjustments to it and then we're going to take it into photoshop
first we're going to do this one of jonathan here inside the studio so i'm going to open that
up and then we're going to clip him out first thing i'm gonna do is duplicate that layer so
we have the original background there and then let's get up close and tight with jonathan here
and then let's go ahead and select this mask out and honestly we don't even really need these uh
ear loops straps here but i'm gonna grab them just so we have something to work with as we move
through and then i also want to add in a solid color here probably white just so we can see the
mask itself and boom doesn't look super pretty right now but we have something to work with
now the second part is going to be bringing in the inside piece and then potentially the
loops that we're going to use uh now as you can see the we were talking about it earlier as we
were shooting the ear loops are actually moving upwards just because that's how it actually is
on on a person but if you want it to look like it's floating you're gonna have to give the loops
a bit more of a like floating or like mid-air feel and the gravity should be pulling it down
so if we hop in here i'm actually going to just grab the loops themselves
so that i don't have to work with anything else and i'm going to duplicate that and just
get rid of this so oops if we take this over and i actually pop it into place where it should be
you'll see that it starts to line up and if i need to i can actually
size this up slightly and the better you size it up now the easier it will be as you move because
then all your lines will match up as you can see around these areas and something that can help
with that is if you actually drop the opacity down like halfway go to about 50 and then you
can actually line up everything pretty close as you see here i might need to scale up slightly
boom that looks pretty good so let's go back to 100 opacity on this and as you can already see we
can now get rid of the straps in the back which we technically didn't even really need in the
beginning but it does give you a nice reference point and kind of see where everything's at
and if you're familiar with using photoshop then you know you should be masking
and if you're not you could totally erase you can delete or whatever but using the masks is just a
nice way to work because it's not as destructive if you need to go back you can bring back a piece
for instance here if i'm i can just reverse the colors and that's going to come back for me so
i don't have to keep re-importing that same thing if i messed up and lost a piece of it
all right so now let's get rid of this inside part here of this mask
actually we'll start the mask first and then select this inside here and then we'll just color
everything out see that background's starting to show up and that little piece uh here in the
back from the old mask is showing up but that's okay because we're gonna mask that out as well
now we'll go ahead and select the outside portion of it and get rid of that
and it's okay with the edges not being so perfect right now because we'll go in and just perfect
everything so that's just the front portion of it and now we're gonna go ahead and grab
the inside piece of it so that we can photoshop that into the background and drop that in there
and again i'm going to grab here and i'm going to grab here
and then we can actually just drag this behind everything so what we're doing here is actually
just trying to line up that back piece and then you start to find these nice intersections here
where you can actually see the back of the mask because this could go anywhere you could literally
leave it here but it just doesn't leave for a nice clean look and so if we're faking it all
we're going to come in here again leave those nice intersections and then we're just going to plop it
down there and get back to masking all right and there you have the mask and now we're going to
go in and clean everything up so again i said as you work on this you want to be non-destructive
so i have all these layers as you can see on the right we have our mask all cropped and we have it
clipped out the next part is to then make our shadow so i'm going to duplicate this bring it
down maybe call it mask shadow and then i'm just going to transform it and pull everything down
put it onto the ground now this is a pretty roundabout way to do it but it works
size it up slightly looks really weird i know i'm going to come over here and go to the blending
options do a color overlay and i'm going to want something dark but not too dark so like this dark
gray and already it's looking pretty decent um if we drop it behind the mask here we'll see that
it looks like it's a shadow but it is not by any means like that realistic so what happens
from here is we'll go in and we can play with the gradient overlay
instead of the color overlay and i'm going to make it dark on one side and then make it slightly
lighter on the other side here all right and here's where things start getting a little ghetto
we're gonna go in here and then go to filter and then i'm going to gauge and blur it now that we
have the shadow and we've got the blur going um we want it to look slightly more realistic
so realistically if the lighting is coming down from the top here and the shadow is
coming in there it's going to be brighter in certain areas and not in other spaces so
i'm actually going to drop down and do a gradient here and yeah if you can imagine this going into a
banner here it could even go into a shorter banner like this and voila you're all done
and yeah so if you follow these guidelines it ends up looking pretty good and the more you do it the
better you get at it and uh yeah that's the end product oh is that is that what you just worked on
yes sir we were shooting today that looks legit it's like i'm not even in that photo and we'll
be using these photos on our website which is at streetwearapparel.com so make sure you check those
out about how we use them for e-commerce and mike thanks for coming on the channel man this was a
huge help to those that are thinking about product photography and i know that if they're watching
this and you haven't watched the other video i highly encourage that you guys check out the other
two videos we shot earlier in the year mike mike went into branding and marketing the importance
about why clothing brands fail so if you're thinking about starting one or if you already
have one there's going to be two videos you're going to want to check out which we'll link in
the cards up above as well as in the description down below and uh if you're a new visitor to this
channel always remember to hit that subscribe button post notification bell and uh download
your free resources also make sure you guys check out their youtube channel which is called proper
worldwide which is linked right down below they continue to expand on topics and e-commerce and
branding to help elevate your brand mike is there anything that you'd like to share or point them to
yeah just uh piggyback off that we'll be launching our new website where you can actually go to sign
up and talk to us about working with your brand we'll be working with select brands
uh in the future on branding and marketing so if you need any help feel free to hit us up awesome
guys and leave a question or comment concern right down below and we'll see you guys on the next one
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