What do you do when you are asked to produce some marketing shots in an hour, and your photography gear is 5 miles away at home? Panic? No, improvise.
I used the camera in my pocket (my trusty iPhone), made a makeshift studio by setting up a table in one of the meeting rooms and purloined a marketing pop-up banner from the Sales department to use as a backdrop. It is 6 feet high, so I used some gaffer tape to allow it to remain ‘popped-up’ at a more practical 4 feet. It is also quite narrow and left areas on either side without any background, so I used some white foam board on both sides, knowing that I would need to blend them in during post-processing. I positioned the packaging samples in an arrangement that I thought was ‘artistic’ and used Portrait mode on the iPhone, which I know gives a good result for product shots, as well as people portraits.
Fortunately, I have both Lightroom and Photoshop on my laptop, and with two large monitors attached, I could do the post-processing immediately. Lightroom is more than adequate for these relatively simple edits, and I only used Photoshop to fill in the upper corners where there was no white background. For example, Lightroom’s healing brush made light work of removing the join between the two tables I used as a base.
The only slight faux pas was that when I emailed over the first proof, the comment I received back was that the editing of the background in the upper corners was noticeable. It had looked acceptable to me, but I quickly realised that the contrast on one of the monitors was set incorrectly and over-exposed my view during the post-processing. Once Lightroom was dragged over onto the other monitor, I could see the issue and was able to quickly adjust the exposure to rectify the problem.
Of course, it didn’t take long before I got the dreaded “while you are doing that, can you do this” and so I also ended up taking some individual shots ‘on white’. I used the two aforementioned foam boards in an ‘L’ configuration to make the background as light as possible and then, in Lightroom, used ‘select subject’, inverted it to select the background, and then over-exposed it to make the background completely white. Once again, Lightroom produced a result in seconds, formerly only possible in Photoshop. Five of the images are being used for a display stand at a forthcoming exhibition.
Coincidentally, Lightroom had an update this week which added some more tools, including a beta version of lens blur. If only they could add layers, photographers wouldn’t need Photoshop at all.
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