Photoshop Ninja

If you have ever had to deal with studio shots that feature items with a white background, sometimes it can be infuriating that the white background isn’t, well, pure white! This can be particularly annoying if you are placing the image on a white page and don’t want to cut it out. There is a quick fix for this though and if you have not used them yet it’s time to start using Levels!

Backgrounds can pick up all sorts of problems - like a colour cast from the lighting or reflecting the colour of other elements in the studio. Also poor lighting or lowgrade Photography equipment can spoil you pure white background. Luckily, this is what Photoshop is made for - basic colour correction like this is easy once you know how!

Firstly, open up the Info Palette and select your eye dropper tool. Switch it to 5×5 sample in the Options bar and move it over your image in the ‘white’ areas. You are aiming to get values of 0/0/0/0 in CMYK or 255/255/255 in RGB for pure white. We are trying to find out how far out our background is from pure white before the next step, because if its quite far out you will have to mask off your object so it is not affected by our white colour adjustment. It its quite close to these value (eg in CMYK its reading values of around 3/3/3/3) we probably won’t have to mask out our object as it is a minor tweek.

Once you have evaluated the background, you can apply a Levels Adjustment Layer. Simply drag your white point (the arrow on the right) to the left a little to dropout the colour in the brightest parts of your image. If there is a little of certain specific colours in the background you can go to each colour channel and just adjust those in the same way to take the colour out of the lightest parts of your image.

We use an Adjustment Layer, because you should now evaluate how this has affected the object sitting on a white background by switching the Adjustment Layer on and off. If you have had to substantially alter the levels you will need to mask off the object so your adjustment layer only effects the background not the subject. Care must be taken not to ‘blow out’ the highlights of the subject in your image. Also, Adjustment Layers offer you future editability, they are non-destructive - something you should always build into your Photoshop files.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 12th, 2007 at 12:50 pm and is filed under Techniques - Layer, Techniques - Other. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.