Many of you are creating PDFs and assignments for hand in at the moment. As much of your work is physical, I thought it might be useful to show you how to set up a simple home photography studio. Along with some Photoshop tips and tricks to create professional-looking images, simply using your mobile phone.
FYI The book I've photographed is by the brilliant illustrator Tara MacPherson
Most importantly – this is easy!
I’ve created this video to show you how simple setting up a home photography studio is – all you need is a table, a backdrop, a window, some card and your phone. It’s Photoshop that we’ll be using to make your photos look good enough to use in your presentations.
This tutorial offers you an easy way of taking good-looking images with your Smartphone. However, if you have access to a DSLR camera and tripod and want to learn how to get more from your Photography check out this from the UOB Photography Services Unit : Photography From Home
Back to today’s tutorial…
Tools Required:
- Background material, for example, mountboard, paper, cardboard or painted wooden background.
- A sturdy surface to shoot on. A table or the floor is fine
- Natural light from a window (not direct sunlight, however)
- White card/mountboard to use as a reflector
- Mobile phone
- Tripod (preferred but optional for this tutorial)
- Photoshop for Post Production
Watch the video first before we delve into some Photoshop tricks for creating photos worthy of your portfolio.
Post Production in Photoshop
Once you have taken your photos with your phone, upload them to your computer.
Mobile phone files often have strange file extensions and colour profiles so your first steps are:
- Open your images in Photoshop and save them as a Photoshop file (.PSD) ready for editing.
- Change the colour profile to sRGB (suitable for web use or interactive PDFs). Go to Edit – Convert to Profile. I used Working RGB – sRGBIEC61966-2.1
Next, we’ll look at how to create professional-looking images in Photoshop, using only 5 steps.
5 Photoshop Steps to Perfect Images
At the bottom of this post, you’ll be able to see a timelapse video of how I edited the final images of the book. Basically, I use a mix of 5 main steps.
Step 1 – Crop & Fix Perspective
Crop out the irrelevant background as much as possible. I also like to centre my subject matter using the crop tool. I used the crop tool with a ratio of 4:3 (horizontal) but you can choose whatever works for you.
At this stage, I’ll also use the perspective tool Edit – Transform – Perspective, to fix any proportional issues which can arise especially if you haven’t used a tripod. Tip: Turn on the Photoshop grid to help you fix any proportion issue. Use keyboard shortcut Cmd + ; or go to Go to View – Show – Grid.
If you don’t have enough background and need to expand it, don’t worry, we’ll look at that next, in Step 2.
Step 2 – Content-Aware Fill
We can use the content-aware fill for 2 things. To a) fix the background and to b) make the background larger if you haven’t used a background big enough when you took the photo.
a) To fix the background, select the area you want to ‘fill’ using the marquee or lasso tool and go to Edit – Content-Aware Fill. You can select the parts of the image you want to ‘clone’ from (in green) in the dialogue box that appears. You’ll also see a preview of the changes on the right-hand pane of this dialogue box, to preview how the final fill will look.
b) If you want to ‘add’ background or make it larger, crop beyond the borders of the image. Then go to Edit – Content-Aware Fill.
NB: The crop tool has a ‘content-aware’ option, however, Photoshop’s Content-Aware Fill is far more powerful and gives you better, more intuitive results.
Step 3 – Healing/Clone Tool
Select either the clone tool or the healing brush tools and fix any scratches, dust speckles or marks on your background. I like to really zoom into the photo in order to be able to see any imperfections.
Step 4 – Adjustment Layer: Levels
I love adjustment layers! Using an adjustment layer is non-destructive to your original image and offers you the option to tweak the image as you go.
Levels are like magic when editing your photos.
To manage the images colour balance:
– Create a levels adjustment layer, then select the white eyedropper tool.
– Click on the image in an area that should be white and Photoshop will adjust the white balance for you. Experiment with where you click.
Once you’ve done this, use the sliders to make further adjusts.
Step 5 – Adjustment Layer: Curves
This step is optional but I like to use it to add further adjustments to the layers.
The important difference between Levels and Curves adjustments:
Levels – globally change all of the tones in the image;
Curves – allows you to choose specific tones in the image
Timelapse Version
Further Study
With experimentation, you’ll be able to create good looking images in just a few Photoshop steps. Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Photography. If you want to learn more do check out this from the UOB Photography Services Unit : Photography From Home
As always we value your feedback, so email Mark with your comments or questions about this tutorial or ideas about further tutorials you would like to see.
