In this video
I've got five top tips, to fix your white background problems.
Hello I'm Gavin Hoey and you're watching AdoramaTV brought to you by Adorama the
camera stores that have got everything for us photographers and today I'm talking
about white backgrounds.
Now over the years, in my small studio, I've used white backgrounds for
everything from portraits,
to still life, to product photography. It really is incredibly versatile and along
the way, I've learned a few of its pitfalls as well and that's what I'm
going to help you with today in this video.
Now it doesn't matter whether you're using a vinyl background, a paper
background, a material white background or even a pop-up background of some sort
they are all slightly different versions of white, but that really won't matter in
this video because the techniques I'm going to show you will work on all of them
so, let's get a model in. Let's get shooting!
So you've got a white background of whatever type.
I'm using a Lastolite HiLite here and you think ok
well I've got a white background
I've got a great model like Brian is going to help me out with this video.
Surely if i just take a picture that background will come out white.
Well let's see. I've got my little Speedlight up here
I've got Brian sat just a little way from the background and I take the shot
and what I get is, well it is definitely not white,
it is a really really dark grey background.
Brian is correctly exposed because I've set the lights before we started,
but that background isn't white.
Now that's happening because of the inverse square law and you can find out
more about that
over on the Adorama Learning Center.
Let's get Brian closer to the background
if you want to hop up and move your chair right up against the background,
I'll need to move the light so that we have a similar distance,
between light and subject.
I'll take the same shot again here we go.
Now this time I get a lighter background but it's definitely not white.
So if you want your backgrounds to come out really white you need to light them
and in this case that means adding an extra light, actually it means adding extra
two lights. I've got one already in the HiLite on that side.
I'm going to add a second street light 360 over onto this side.
Now depending on your lighting setup and your background,
you may have your lights set completely differently they may be coming in from
the side and use flags or barn doors.
There are so many ways that you can actually light a white background but
without light,
you won't get that pure white background that you're after.
Ok I've already metered this out let's take a shot see how it looks,
and as you can see, that white background is really, really white.
Adding those lights in, made a massive difference and allows us to get the pure
white that we are after.
So you've got your background lights in place and you take a picture.
Well let's do that see what happens. Here we go and as you can see, things aren't
quite as good as they should be.
Infact the picture has extremely low contrast and the edges of Brian's hair
and his body, they are all burnt out.
Well you've got to think about this as being two separate exposures.
You've got exposure from the key light lighting Brian and then the exposure
from the light on the background
bouncing off the background, hitting the back of Brian
and they need to be balanced.
Now you could do it by trial and error but I like to use a flash meter because
it just speeds the process along.
So let's start by metering off the, the key light.
That's given me f5.6
and if I meter off the background and I do that by getting my flash meter
turning it around, so I'm metering the light that's coming off the background,
hitting Brian and I'm getting f11.
That's two stops more light on the back of Brian then the front.
Now what I need is about the same light front and back and I can adjust the
background lights here, using the street light remote control,
to get me two stops lower.
Ok let's take a meter reading we'll just double check, yeah f5.6 we're good to go.
Here we go
Getting a pure white background
all the way across your image, of course, is the goal with this setup, but things
can happen to make that more difficult than you think. For example,
let's take a shot like this, here we go.
Now when I look at that picture I can see that one side is well
it is white and the other side is nearly white. I mean it is almost white.
There's definitely a hint of gray coming in there. Now in this case it's a pretty
simple fix one of the lights has accidentally turned itself off.
That happens a lot when you have two lights or more lighting your white
background so it's worth checking that you've got your lights balanced
correctly and actually switched on.
However it's also worth noting that it may not be the end of the world and when
we get to post processing in a couple of steps time there is some things you can
do there to help.
Now what if you don't have multiple lights? What if you only have one light?
Well if I get my light out from the HiLite, if I were shooting Bryan with
a single light lighting him and a single spare light,
I would put it in behind, like that and then I would take the same shot but with
this one light here. Let's do that,
and as you can see I've got light around the edge of Brian but
the corners of this picture are gray.
Does that matter? Well no because of course I can fix that in Photoshop
really quickly just by painting a bit of white into those corners. The key when
you're doing a head shot, is to make sure that the areas around your model,
are white and if the corners are a little bit gray,
well maybe that doesn't matter so much.
Having the floor in your shot is one of those things that sometimes you've just
got to do, especially if your subject like Brian here is sat on the floor
you've got to have a white floor, but can you get your white floor really white?
Do you need your white floor to be really white? Well at the moment I just
got the the vinyl rolled out here
let's just take a picture and see how it comes out ok Brian, here we go.
and when I do that you can clearly see that's not great,
on many reasons, that doesn't work.
Even though in the video the, the vinyl floor probably looks whiter than the
HiLite, at least it does to my eye here, in the photo it's completely the
reverse that lit background much brighter than the floor.
So what's the solution?
Well the solution involves a little piece of extra equipment.
So the only thing I've changed is the floor, which makes sense, because that's
the thing I want to be brighter and what I've done is I've added a clear piece of
perspex. Now you're going to find all sorts of different ways of doing this Im just
using a very thin piece of perspex. You might be able to find some white glossy
sheeting, anything that has a reflective surface and mildly reflective surface is
going to bounce some light from the background off the surface into your
camera. I have to thank Zack Arias for showing this tip many years ago
and it's something I've used ever since.
Ok let's take the same shot with the perspex in place,
and when I do that you can see straight away the difference that makes.
Yes there is still going to be some Photoshop cleaning up to do but,
by and large that reflection looks really good.
Like a lot of photographers I shoot in raw format and I edit in either
Lightroom or Adobe camera raw from Photoshop but when you bring your white
background images into the software, you might get a little bit of a surprise.
Let's have a look so here's an image. I know this background is white but if I
hover over it and I read the values on the histogram they're going to be just down
the bottom here, I can see my RGB values are never a 100%
I mean, they're close, but at no point is this pure white with a 100% RGB
So what's going on?
Is this a mistake by the photographer? No, because when I took the picture, I had my
camera in the highlight preview mode so, I could see on the LCD that the
highlights are blinking away saying you've blown them out
this is actually what happens with the software and once you know
it's going to happen,
it's not a problem and the fix, well the fix is really easy, it just uses the
histogram and a slider.
so if I down to the histogram, I'm just going to turn on the, the warning
here which has a little white rectangle saying you are now going to see
any clipped highlights.
Now to make sure my whites are really white,
I'm actually going to come down,
not surprisingly to the white slider. I'm just going to move it just a little bit
to the right-hand side and as I do you see how that spreads out and fills that
background with white just as I was expecting it should be.
Now that works really well, it's really quick and
its really simple, but of course what happens if you haven't quite got your
background pure white? It didn't quite work and in fact, in this case
what about the the floor which is not quite white?
Well the solution again very simple and very quick this time it involves using
the adjustment brush, so I'm going to get the adjustment brush. I'm going to make
sure everything is zeroed. Double click the word effect if it's not,
and then I'm just going to change the whites slider.
Now depending how much your whites are off, in this case quite a few of
these are quite off. I'm just going to max it out for speed.
It's gone all the way to maximum. I'm just going to start painting here and you'll see
that my whites very quickly go white
I can do the other side as well, and we get a nice white reflection
below like that, there we go. Now in this case it works really well because of
course, there's no whites on the model. He's not wearing any white clothing and
he hasn't got blond hair for example. Things like that can make this operation
a little bit more tricky. If that's the case you may need to do it inside a
Photoshop if you need to fix it or you can try turning on the
auto mask function here inside of Lightroom as well.
Ok, so that works really well but what about the outer areas of this picture?
The areas around here where you can see my studio, now of course what we could do
is cropped this down but what I'm going to do is actually
come back to the adjustment brush,
I'll make a new brush and this time I'm going to take the exposure and put it
all the way to maximum plus 4 and the highlights and the shadows and the
whites and the blacks. Basically everything
to maximum other than contrast and now I can just paint around here, now the auto
mask by the way is turned off I should point that out but I can basically
over expose all these areas to get that nice and bright and clean and
white and there we go.
That works really well. If I've made any little mistakes, I can see I have there
let's just come down here, choose the erase option and we just
erase that bit back in. There you go,
and there it is my beautiful white background image completed.
Now at this point is worth reminding you that there are no rights or wrongs in photography
it's an art form after all, so the mistakes that I've been talking about here can be
somebody else's perfect picture.
So don't let that put you off however, if you want a really white background
hopefully you found these tips useful and of course if you want to see more
tips myself and the other amazing presenters right here in AdoramaTV you
need to be clicking on that subscribe button over there.
I'm Gavin Hoey thanks for watching.