-Tentus
Rant 15 - Photoshopping Products
One of the main things I do to pay the bills is photoshop pictures of products for online stores. Most of the time, the following steps cover the task, though I should put in a disclaimer that inevitably, you will end up with an image that requires a much greater depth of skill than addressed in the article. Please don't expect to be a Photoshop Master after reading this. =D
By the way, I've decided to use CS2 for the screenshots below. Originally, I used CS3, because that's what was installed on the computer I was using, but I feel tha CS2 is a bit wider spread right now, and I'm more comfortable in it. They work almost exactly the same, they just look a little different. Also, the screenshots were taken on a widescreen computer: if you're using a 4:3 ratio screen, don't worry, they just look a little bit different.
Ok, on to the meat of the article. Most products can be done in a few simple steps. The following assumes that you want the image to be on a white or other solid-ish color.
Step One: Open
This is pretty self-explainatory. Open Photoshop (Start.. All Programs.. Adobe.. Photoshop) and drag the image you want from the windows explorer into the Photoshop window. Or, if you prefer, go to File.. Open... and your image will come up logically. Note that it is entirely possible to have many images open in Photoshop simultaneously, but too many images will slow down the machine and increase your risk of crashing the computer.
This is about what your screen will look like once you open your image. Notice the percent number below the bottom left corner of the image: that's the amount of scaling applied to the image to give you your current view. So, 33 percent means that you're viewing the image at one third its actual resolution. Clear as mud?
Step Two: Crop
The crop tool is very simple to use. The symbol is kinda odd, but don't let that throw you. It's the fifth symbol down in most installs of Photoshop, and we really only have to do one thing with it. Click where you want the new top-left corner to be (or top-right, it doesn't matter) and drag down to the opposite corner. While dragging, without releasing the mouse, press the SHIFT key to force the crop selection to stay a perfect square. Once the opposite corner is where you want it, hit ENTER or right-click and choose "Crop".
This is what about your screen will look like right before you crop your image. Notice that there is a bit of leeway room in each direction from the product.
Step Three: Clone
Now that your image is a nice square, lets tidy up the corners. The clone tool is your friend here: it's the stamp-looking icon, the one selected in the image below. The clone tool basically copies parts of an image to other parts of an image: imagine pointing a pencil at some text, and then dragging the pencil across a different piece of paper: the text from the first page will appear on the second (bet you wish your math class had a Clone tool, eh?).
So we can use this tool to make the backdrop appear bigger than it actually is. Stuff may be cluttering up the corners of our picture, so we use this tool to cover that up with the existing backdrop within the image. We select what parts of the image we want to use as our base by pressing ALT and clicking, and then clicking again where we want the cloned image to go. I'm afraid that's the most elegeant way I can phrase that.
This is what about your screen will look like after you've done some cloning. Notice that the brush is 171 pixels in diameter, and fuzzy (you can see this in the horizontal bar above the image, where it says "Brush:"). Big fuzzy brushes blend nicely with the existing image, heping you to avoid unnatural-looking lines.
Step Four: Levels
Sometimes it's a good idea to go ahead and adjust you levels a bit before moving on to step 5. Got to Image.. Adjustments.. Levels and the dialog shown below will appear.
This is a tremendously useful tool. Adjust the little arrows to look something like below, so that they're just outside the slopes of the graph. Noticehow it affects the image itself. Be cautious on this step... if you have second thoughts, don't overdo it!
Step Five: Selection
So, we're looking at a pretty decent image by now, but there are still some rough spots, things aren't as bright as we'd like, etc. What we do now is select parts of the image, in anticapation of the next step. This is exactly like selecting text and making it bold or a different color, etc, but with a chunk of the image instead of a line of text. There are two mains ways I go about doing this:
1: The Magic Wand tool. Yes, it's pretty magical. The wand tool will select all the pixels within a tolerance of the pixel you click on, and unless you tell it otherwise, will do so in a contiguous pattern. Translated into lay English, the wand will select the pixel you click, and then look at the neighboring 8 pixels: if they're similar enough to the first pixel, they'll be added to the selection. It'll then look at their neighbors, and so on like wildfire. This is a great, fast way of selecting large chunks of well-defined color.
2: The Polygonal Marquee tool. This is better suited when the Magic Wand tool selects too much (if your product is light colored, like your background), or if the background is too diverse to be selected quickly with the magic wand tool. I'll go ahead and warn you: you'll almost always have to use this tool in conjuction with the magic want too. The wand just makes things faster. This tool allows you to add and subtract to your selection manually, in whatever polygonal shape you desire.
Step Six: Overlays and Adjustment
Once we have our selection ready, it's time to make some more adjustments. Mostly just tweak the levels somemore, but if the color is a bit off, go to Image.. Adjustments.. Color Balance. Brightness/Contrast is useful too. If there tools aren't really helping, try making a new layer and filling your selection with white, and then playing around with the new layer until things look right. Once you're satisfied, right-click the layer and choose Merge Down.
As you can see above, the levels for the selection is a bit odd looking. This is because we've aready adjusted the levels some.
Because we want a lot of our selection to "max out" in the white areas, it's ok to have the rightmost arrow inside the graph area now.
Now we're opening the Hue and Saturation dialog. This is my most used dialog for art stuff.
We kill the second slider, to completely elimate color, and then go ahead and bump up the brightness some more. Again, use your own judgement here.
Step Seven: Erase, Dodge, or Burn
As you can tell, the image above has some rather inconsistent dark and light patches. Some of that is good: we want there to shadows and subtle changes in value. But too much is distracting, so now we take the Dodge and Eraser tools to the image! (Or, if you have a background that needs to be darkened in spots, the Burn and Eraser tools). The dodge tool will darken any area you sweep it across, and the burn tool will do the opposite: again, use big fuzzy brushes so that things will blend. You can tell the Dodge and Burn tools to only affect light or dark areas by playing with the properties in the horizontal bar above the image.
The Eraser tool is a it more complex. If you're on your base layer (as you will almost always be with a JPEG image), the erase tool will simply erase the information in favor of the color that is your "Background Color". See the two overlapping squares near the bottom-left of our screenshots, in the vertical toolbar? One is black and one is white. The black is currently our "Foreground Color" and the white is currently our "Background Color". You can adjust these colors by clicking the squares and playing around in the sub-windows that pop up, or clicking outside the sub-windows with the little ink-dropper tool. This will pick up whatever color you happen to click on (very handy). Now, in the event that you are NOT on the base layer of your image, but are on a second or higher layer, the eraser tool will simply make that place of that layer transparent, revealing the layer below that.
Looking good. Notice how there's stilla little bit of a shadow around the product. This helps make the product seem more real.
One last bump up in the lightness of the shadow...
And that's about it. Save your image, and then save it again with a slightly different name at a resolution appropriate for your website. I always use 512x512 pixels: to resize an image, go to Image.. Size and make your adjustments.
Hope this tutorial has been helpful!
