Essentials for the Business

As we near the end of our time at Hallmark, there are a few things that are essentials for running a successful photography business. This entire year, we have been trained in multiple programs, two of which we've used on a near daily basis. As students we get discounted prices on these two programs -- Lightroom and Photoshop.

Lightroom is a post-capture editing software that allows us to enhance our pictures with regards to exposure, brightness, luminance, sharpening, lens correction, vignetting, etc. We also have the ability to crop and prepare pictures for printing. But before we print, we take our optimized images and edit them in Photoshop, which is where a lot of aesthetic changes are made.

In Photoshop is where most of the beauty enhancements take place. On people we remove blemishes, fix skin tonal issues or uneven skin tones, and work with a bunch of technical sounding things like curves and masks and layers. On objects, we're doing things like using the pen tool to "strip" products and placing them on different backgrounds, using healing tools, brushes and clone stamps to enhance the products to make them the best they can be.

So.....I bought Lightroom and Photoshop and installed them on my computer last week.

Since I'm a photographer, of course I had to take a picture of what came in my package.



And for fun, here's an example of stripping a product and putting in on a new background. You may remember seeing these products in my Phase 3 work, but what you didn't see is what was captured with the camera. As I've said before, it's all about the lighting. So we have to photograph our products with lighting considered, then in post-production we make all the changes and enhancements that are needed to make the final product.*

Here's the "before"...as you can see, I am holding a "fill" card to allow the light to reflect and illuminate the silver part of the bottle, where the text is. There is also a fill card on the right hand side of the bottle. Notice how close it is to the dispenser part of the tip. And then on the left - slightly out of frame - is a large soft box. The "background" of the picture is another softbox, simply allowing the background to be white and non-distracting.



And the "after" shot with the product on a different background with drop and cast shadows, as well as design elements.



*disclaimer: As I may have mentioned, Bath and Body Works did not contact me to do any of this work. We had to select a product we wished to photograph for a student assignment.

There's so much that goes into producing a picture. I haven't shared any of my Phase 4 work, because I want to wait till it's submitted to post the pictures. But just imagine this....we need to take a total of 27 pictures...all of which go through Lightroom and Photoshop editing.

So in the meantime I am posting about other things going on at school and in life. I can't wait to share what I've been working on.