Playing With Photoshop

The other day Tracy posted about photographing items with a white background while using Picasa. If you want to learn how to do this with Picasa, Tracy shows you how here. These type of photos make great shots for ebay or etsy. So, I thought I’d give it a try with a sugar and creamer. I have a lot of items that I would like to gather together and photograph so I can start up an etsy. This would be good practice.

Sometimes you get a line where the bottom and the back meet. I didn’t have too harsh of a line to deal with. I think it might have been that the lighting was coming from behind me. It was late in the day too and I was trying to hurry. It took all day to find my foam core!



I did my editing in Photo shop elements. I did the same as Tracy did in Picasa only the terms are different. In the photo above I did a levels adjustment, upped the brightness/contrast. I also duplicated the background layer, brought to to the top and changed the blending mode to soft light. I know that it might all sound Greek to you but it’s much easier to do then it sounds.

The photo below I lowered the brightness and contrast back down a little to give me the soft grey background.




And just for fun, here it is with a couple of textures added to the previous photo. I used warmly vintage and grey day 2. Both are Kim Klassen textures. It gave me reason to play around with all the textures again. See how the textures lighten them back up?





Here’s one more example with just a brightness/contrast and level adjustment. Nothing else. No books either. It was only 2 steps and gave me a great white background. Though it’s bugging me that the creamer looks darker which might be because in this shot the light was coming from the side. So be aware of where you light is coming from. I could fiddle with them to make them look the same but I didn’t bother. It’s the background we talking about right?


This was lots of fun. It didn’t take long at all. You can get a lot of different looks with just a little adjusting here and there.

I’m going to join Tracy with her link up she’s having. You can do this with lots of photo editing software.





see ya,