Product photography - Dodo

[Clip]

Hey guys,

Always enjoyed taking pictures, but mostly it's been outdoors shooting landscapes/waterfalls/etc. Tonight I was at the store and grabbed a piece of posterboard to use as a backdrop as well as a few big work lights. Ended up using a smaller set of 3 lights on a stand for lighting, but this marks my first attempt at product photography with decent results. Still need to work on reducing the shadow a little, I've been playing around with the idea of 'floating' the knife on a piece of glass. I'd love to hear tips/tricks/advice from others on this topic, as there's always room for improvement. Didn't do much processing to the pictures with the exception of using a Datacolor Spydercube to set white balance and exposure.

Camera is a Canon XSi with a 100mm f/2.8 macro.

[jabba359]

Looks really good. The light seems to be nice and even and doesn't leave very hard shadows. My only suggestion is using some photo-editing software to tweak the color a little bit. The camera I use is a bit older and really struggles to accurately reproduce the bright oranges, yellows, and blues that Spyderco uses on their knives, with my pictures coming out a bit flat and almost pastel looking at times. Photoshop has a great little tool called "Vibrance" which boosts the color intensity without getting the unnatural look that is normally accompanied by "Saturation" bumps (it looks like you're using CS3 and I think "Vibrance" was introduced in CS5).

Here's the same picture but with vibrance set to +37, I tightened up the levels for black and white points, and added a little S-curve to increase the contrast.

[Clip]

Thanks for the tips Kyle!

I shot these in RAW (Camera Raw 4.6) and I think Vibrance was an option. I took it up to 6 or 7 on most and took the saturation up to 2 or 3, looks good your way!

[Donut]

Nice pictures, thank you.

[bh49]

Chris,
Very nice pictures. Thank you for sharing. Keep them coming.