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5
By Mike Ault
So, you have used a light box and lights, set the camera for the proper exposure, white
balance and such, used a tripod and your picture still comes out like figure 1.
What can you do? Well, I use PhotoShop 5.5. other editors are gimp on Linux and
PhotoShop Elements (and many others) which all allow adjustment of the photo in the
areas of color balance, sharpness and levels.
So I load the image into PS5.5 and end up with what you see in Figure 2. Immediately do
a “Save As” and save the photo under a different name, this prevents you editing the
original.
In the above photo, I do not need to crop and at least for now there are no dust, scratches
or other artifacts to cleanup. So now what do I do about the non-white background? I
assure you, this was taken against a white background so how do I get it back? The
answer is levels. Look at figure 3, it shows navigating the menus (Image, adjust, Levels)
to get to the levels adjustment window. The Levels adjustment window is shown in
Figure 4.
In our picture white will be easy, examine the non-necklace area, all of it is white, find
the area that looks lightest. Now, using the mouse cursor, select the left hand arrow and
slide it all the way to the right. Next, use the cursor to select the right hand eye-dropper.
Move the eye-dropper to the area you decided was most “white” and then click the left
hand mouse button. Just before I clicked on the left hand mouse button I captured Figure
5.
Figure 5: Left slider all the way right, eye-dropper is in mid lower-left quadrant
Once you click the image should reappear with the background reset to be white. See
Figure 6.
Figure 6: White Balance has been reset
Now, if there are some colors still off, you can try setting “Black” as well a “White”. To
set black first determine where the best “black” is in the picture. I usually move the
Levels window so a corner points to it before the next step as in figure 7.
Figure 9 shows the affect of setting Black on our image. Note that at anytime should the
results not be what you want, you can use a CTRL-Z to eliminate previous steps.
Now, is the image as sharp and clear as you would like? Or is it a bit soft? I usually like
to use an unsharp mask to clean up the image a bit and really bring out the details. The
Unsharp Mask is on the Filters, Sharpen, Unsharp Mask menu trail as shown in Figure
10.
Click on the Unsharp Mask menu item and the Unsharp Mask Adjustment Window will
appear. Note that all changes to settings will be shown live on your image as they occur.
Figure 11 shows the Unsharp Mask controls.
See how the lines look crisper and the silver, well, looks more silver! However, beware!
Over sharpening can result in curved lines getting jaggy and the halo effect against
colored background. Tweaking the settings gives me an optimal sharpness with minimal
jaggies and halos at about 114% as shown in Figure 13.
Ok, we have adjusted white and black (levels) and sharpness. However, the image still
seems a bit dull, let’s look at brightness. Figure 15 shows how to get to the
Brightness/Contrast controls.
The Brightness and Contrast in PhotoShop consist of two sliders, one for brightness and
one for contrast. Simply use the mouse and left click to select the control and move it
back and forth to get the desired change. I want to increase brightness slightly then adjust
contrast to keep details sharp. In this case I increased brightness by +29 and upped
contrast to +8, see Figure 16.
First, make sure your “brush” selection is the proper size to clone just the area you want,
too small and you can get artifacts, too large and it can be hard to get just what you want.
You do this with a right mouse click. Next, place the stamp brush indicator (usually a
circle) over the area you want to clone from and push the ALT-click combination to tell
the tool to take pixels from the target and use them overlay where you tell it. Then move
the brush indicator to the target area and simply click to paint over the target. The source
area will move with the target area once you start clicking so be careful not to accidently
clone something in the general source area as you move around. In Figure 18 I have
cloned out the upper right hand corner to make it uniformly white.
Figure 18: Upper Right Hand Corner Fixed (not clone brush)
Now, using a white background you won’t get much reflection and sometimes you want
that. If you want reflections then use a colored sheet behind the glass stage area. Figure
20 shows the before and after image.
Figure 20: Image Before and After Adjustments
Hopefully with a bit of experimentation you can get your photos to where you are proud
to put them on your web site!