Bottle photography revisited

[Mr Darcy]

A few days ago I asked for advice on photographing bottles. Here is the result so far.

I have come a long way. Thank you.
I still have some way to go. Hotspots, Some unwanted reflections;
I am still not happy with that foil etc.
That is waiting on a real light tent and more time to play. I also need to come to terms with PS some more.
Final (for now) images can be found <a href="http://www.swtd.com.au/CurrentText.htm" target="_blank"> here</a>.
While they are not perfect, they are good enough that I feel I can drink these ones now

I have also realised I need to calibrate my monitor, maybe invest in ControlPro (I downloaded the trial version. I love it already.) Extra diffusers, or maybe umbrellas, wipe down the bottles before I photograph them etc etc etc BTW I Started with:

[beetleboy]

Mr Darcy..

If I can say one thing, it's that persistence WILL pay off eventually! You're doing something here that is a very important process in product photography: seeing the light.

Wine bottles are great if you like jumping in at the deep end! The only inanimate object I can imagine to be harder to shoot would be a 10 FOOT TALL wine bottle!!! Actually cars are pretty challenging too, but I prefer to imagine the big bottle =]

I digress! Keep doing what you're doing, look at the reflections..look at the gradations (what we call "slicks"). The art in bottle photography is minimising reflections to enable the label and shape of the bottle to attract the viewer. Here's an example of what we do in the studio (I must have shot a couple of hundred bottles in the last 6 months!!):



The big differences you'll see include the separation between the background and the bottle, clean uniform slicks and an evenly lit label. The trick with the label is easy - it's a second separate exposure lit solely for the label without moving the bottle or camera. The rest is more about the quality of your light and how it's diffused.

Typically, if we're shooting a bottle with a complex label that involves foils etc, we're often working with 4/5/6+ layers in Photoshop to really optimise the image quality.

I hope this helps a little - I can't really go into much more detail, otherwise I'd have a long list of forum members I'd have to knock off!!!

[stetner]

Russel Brown has a good 'podcast' of shooting a wine bottle.

http://av.adobe.com/russellbrown/ThinkDifferenceSM.mov

It is about 19Mb and if you have heard Russel before, you know he has a wierd presentation style to say the least, but he does know his stuff with PS....

[Mr Darcy]

Thanks beetleboy & stetner for the further pointers.

I still have some way to go.

Make that a long way to go

I enjoyed Russel's video, but found his site impossible. It just seemed to be advertising. I even tried allowing up popups, and found I was on a gambling site in short order. I don't think I will be going back there any time soon.

Still I did learn lots. Once I have better means of controlling light, I will watch it again, and try to implement some of the techniques.
Thanks again.

[beetleboy]

I'm surprised you had issues with Russell Brown's site, it's always been very clean. Are you sure you don't have some nasty Adware hiding on your PC?

RE the lighting control - keep in mind that for the kind of bottle photography we do we have a permanent (yet mobile) setup that has been fine tuned over many years!

We also use tungsten softboxes to give us more pleasing and adjustable lighting.

[stetner]

I enjoyed Russel's video, but found his site impossible. It just seemed to be advertising. I even tried allowing up popups, and found I was on a gambling site in short order.

As far as I know, the Russell Brown site is clean, I would assume your pop ups are coming from some other site or adware on your machine. I would get your machine checked/cleaned up.

I just went to http://www.russellbrown.com/tips_tech.html with 'block pop ups' turned off and did not see anything amiss and not one popup. I also poked around other parts of his site with no ill effects.

Russel brown is Adobe's Sr. Creative Director, therefore it would not be in their or his best interest to have the site do bad things.

Doug

[Mr Darcy]

My machine IS clean. I run NAV, MSFirewall, 2 hardware firewalls, 3 spyware checkers (MS one resident), not in admin mode etc.

However I checked the the URL of the site I visited. It was
http://www.russelbrown.com/ not
http://www.russellbrown.com/

I think the operative word is DOH!

Don't go to the wrong one unless you feel like cleaning up your machine afterwards (Spybot does a good job)

[beetleboy]

Ahh! There ya go!

I'm glad it didn't turn out to be a prob with Dr Brown's site cos he's somewhat of a stalwart in the Photoshop community!