Cosmetic Product Photography: 2 Light Approach with Entry Level Gear | Dustin Dolby | Skillshare

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Cosmetic Product Photography: 2 Light Approach with Entry Level Gear

teacher avatar Dustin Dolby, Modern product photography tutorials

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Intro

      1:31

    • 2.

      Equipment

      4:33

    • 3.

      Composition

      2:28

    • 4.

      Capture

      13:36

    • 5.

      Editing in Photoshop

      9:24

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About This Class

Take a beautiful white background cosmetic shot using entry level camera gear, with this class from Dustin of workphlo product photography.

Join for a full walk through of getting a clean catalog image, perfect for e-commerce, marketing and elsewhere. From composition to final retouching, you'll learn the entire approach of achieving a bright background while retaining the sharp stylish aesthetics of cosmetic lighting. 

Key Lessons Cover:

  • Start to finish cosmetic lighting
  • Establishing a bright background in camera
  • Lighting modification
  • Ideal surfaces
  • Photoshop process

This cosmetic photography approach is ideal for anyone looking to build a portfolio, expand their skill set or build a cosmetic brand. My aim is to give you the lighting knowledge to feel comfortable without overly expensive equipment or sets, to approach this subject matter.

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This class is open to students of all levels, though is particularly focused on intermediate photographers. Dustin uses a DSLR, and you can use any camera you choose. Learn more about Dustin's gear in the Projects & Resources tab.

Meet Your Teacher

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Dustin Dolby

Modern product photography tutorials

Teacher
Level: Intermediate

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Transcripts

1. Intro: Everybody, my name is Dustin Dolby from workflow. Thanks so much for tuning in. Here we make modern product photography tutorials just using simple, basic year. And the focus of today's class is going to be how to capture a cosmetic shot on a white background, something that's wildly popular and in demand, and how to focus on leaving it looking really elevated and expensive looking. We're going to focus on just about everything along the way here, this setup, the execution, plenty of tweaks as we go just to make a systematic approach to achieving this. So you can not just shoot one cosmetic scale, this approach out across an entire inventory. I think this class is ideal if you're looking to build up your skill set, or maybe even build up a portfolio or shoot for your own cosmetic brand. I mean, cosmetics are abutting industry and there's a lot going on there. So it's a great skill to have in your back pocket. My hope is that after you watch our class, you'll be able to take on your own cosmetic client with confidence and just know how to approach the different material finishes and know what's going on to make the little tweaks needed to get a nice image. So make sure to follow along at home with your own cosmetic and your own camera equipment. We're using a D5 100 speed lights and the kit lens. So we're using a pretty modest, minimal setup and you probably have something similar or maybe even better at home. So don't get too hung up on the gear. A lot of it is about understanding the light and we'll talk a lot about that along the way. So thank you so much. I'm so excited to have you all here and let's enjoy the class how to photograph a clean cosmetic on a white background. 2. Equipment: All right, So here we are in our humble small studio space, something like you could have at home, maybe in a side room, or maybe a professional studio. You don't need a lot of space to capture this stuff. It's more just about creating a really reliable system. So let me quickly run you through the few pieces of gear we're going to need to remain confident whether we're shooting one cosmetic or whether we're shooting a half of Sephora and shooting a million cosmetics. So the first thing we're going to need is a camera and a nice sturdy tripod. This is a classic must have for a product photography situation, you want a consistent shot angle and shot type. So as you move through different products, everything is really consistent. You're never gonna get to a CGI level of consistency in organic photography. But you can take a few steps just to approach that and leave things really consistent and professional for your clients. So on top of our camera, we also have a transmitter poking out there that just talks to our flashes. So that's optional if you're using flash, some of you may be using continuous light, but that's going to speak to our flashes and that's the only other piece of gear we have attached there to our camera. You'll also notice it has a tethered cord coming out. We're plugging our DSLR right into our computers so we can bring the images up big because the two or three inch LCD screen on your camera, it doesn't really cut it because people are zooming in on such bigger screens today, you really want to be on an even playing field when you're adjusting your image. So when it comes to our table, we have a common light stand, our surface support plate, and a piece of black acrylic. This is a really tried and tested system that product photographers have used for a while with the black acrylic. If you don't have a narrow table, try to find an N table or something as small as possible. If I use a big kitchen dining room table here, it's going to be so big that the lights can't make their way inward and they're kind of bumping and getting in the way. That's why I suggested narrow bench or an N table or something similar to this to get your surface as isolated as possible. The reason I like acrylic so much is it gives you an in camera reflection which already elevates your scene and adds a little bit of a sense of class. But on top of that, it's going to reflect our background because it's directly reflected. So if we put something bright behind our scene, it's going to reflect in the surface and also make the surface bright. That's a chert product. Photographers used to have their products sort of swim in a pure white space, but still have a ton of control over the lighting without using a ton of Photoshop. So acrylics, my number one choice if you don't have a curve like No worries, Just shoot on a piece of paper. Maybe you don't want in camera reflections, so the paper works just fine. And also by shooting on something flat light and bright, you're going to reflect light into your cosmetic towards the bottom. Or sometimes they tend to get a little darker and muddier. And the paper can actually help elevate the brightness. For now, we're going to use a piece of acrylic to try to get this as clean as possible in camera. And the more products you shoot, the more consistent you want your setup to be. If I'm shooting one product, maybe I can get away with a few tweaks. But if I'm shooting a whole scaled out inventory of products, I have more of an incentive to nail what's going on in camera because that will exponentially pay dividends as we continue to shoot or cosmetics. So one of the most important tools, it's more of a feature than a tool might be our white wall back here we have a big white wall. So a lot of you probably have access to a building with a white or a bright gray wall. I'd recommend using that as your background. It's really useful and catalogue photography, you can shoot an additional speed light off of it. And it will essentially make it, if you think about it, a big light, light panel behind our scene. This is a great way to recreate like a studio environment at home. And it can be really, really useful. But you want something available to you if you don't have a white wall that will go behind the product and you'll illuminate it. And then in camera your product will be on a white backdrop with the assistance of the acrylic. There's a lot of different ways you could do this. The white walls, my favorite, but bringing in a modifier only takes a quick second. Other modifier I might be using when it comes to my speed lights is strip boxes. Strip boxes are really useful. They have a nice linear shape, and I just ordered the cheap ones off the Internet all the time to put my speed lights in. And that linear control, it often directly reflects in your cosmetic. Now if that's not intuitive to you, don't worry about it at all. We're going to be running it through for you step-by-step in our lighting class. But now that we've went through all the equipment we're going to use and it's fairly minimal. Let's move on to the composition and we'll touch on how we're going to compose our shot here to get the most out of our cosmetic and make sure that when we see it on a big, beautiful screen, It's looking nice and crisp and professional. 3. Composition: So let's chat about the composition. We're going to be shooting on a bright white background. So you'll notice that we've placed our cosmetic on the edge of our acrylic, which seems kind of counterintuitive. But if we're shooting anything else than a flat background, I'd be using the middle of the piece of acrylic. But since we're shooting for a pure white background, the second this is surrounded in any white pixels. Photoshop can make that infinite. So we have no incentive to put our cosmetic in the middle and actually have an incentive to put it on the side. We're going to be putting our primary highlight in. We're going to be putting our primary light right over here. So by placing this on the edge of the acrylic, gain even more access. And we have a narrow table like I touched on earlier. And those together will leave us in a really leveraged position to linearly light the side of this cosmetic in a really direct, beautiful way. So for our settings currently we're at F 13, which is a reasonable depth of field. I mean, this cosmetic is pretty thin. It's probably half an inch deep. So when we think of F 13, that's gonna give us a decent depth of field. I don't have to go to F22 or something. Absolutely wild. They're going to do F 13, ISO 100 because we're not struggling for light. So I might as well have the cleanest Christmas sensor I can possibly have. And we're at 120th of a second right now we're gonna go to 1 200th when we turn our lights on. But 120th for the time being, to just see the ambient light through the camera as we adjust our composition. So since our product is going to be on an infinite white background, we might as well maximize the resolution of our actual product. So I'm going to zoom right in here, nice and cozy. The background really doesn't matter. We just need a pixel of white perimeter here to satisfy our needs. And we're shooting with the kit lens and it's around 50 millimeters. As a rule of thumb, I usually use the kit lens around 40 to maybe 60 millimeters. If we bring our camera too close to the subject and zoom out, we'll get a really wide angle and almost a heroic distortion we're not looking for. We want our cosmetic to look true to form. And in the same vein, we're not trying to move our camera, you know, a football field that away and zoom in with like a bird photography lens, because that'll have the spatial compression of fact, the opposite effect, it will over compress it. We want to sort of Goldilocks happy medium at 40 to 60 millimeters where we're looking at the product and getting a good vantage of it. But more importantly, it looks true to form. So now that we've nailed down our composition, Let's move on to the next part of our class where we will talk about the lighting. 4. Capture: I like to bring out the backlight first so I can establish a bit of a silhouette. When you establish a silhouette, it's going to become a lot easier. And you're gonna start seeing your results in camera right away, which can in and of itself motivate you. So what's motivating our lighting versus this ambient lighting? This is the lending available to us in the room. And in our final shot, we're seeing much more of a sort of polished look. So we're going to put the lights where they actually need to be to get the best result in our cosmetic and not allow a window light or things in the room to affect it whatsoever. We've already went down to 12 seconds. So we're looking at a black frame and we're bringing out a speed light in the back when it comes to the backlight, didn't have to do the strip box but went for the strip box. And I just have this hiding right below the horizon line here of our cosmetic. This is going to shoot off of our white wall. Why don't we take a look and see if we need to adjust the power. Great. So my ideal situation is to make a bit of a silhouette. And here we've started to create just that, a bit of a silhouette. We have our reflection in camera. We have a slight window reflection happening, bleeding through here onto the Chrome. So what I could do is stop down to F22, for example, even though I didn't need to earlier and step up my lights. But that's such a small miniscule highlight. I'm not going to obsess over it too much. I'm just going to try to establish a nice silhouette here. So I'm going to turn the power of our backs speed light up just two notches here, from a quarter power to full power. So you see we're getting a nice bright background now and it's almost like it's sitting in a cosmetic space. Ignore the plant to the right. It completely doesn't matter. I get very lax about knowing all this stuff to the left and right of my scene doesn't really matter Once you're in a mindset that everything that isn't the cosmetic is going to just be pure white pixels after. So I'm really focused on the data which comprises the actual cosmetic. And I like how the silhouette is looking here. Okay. So I'm bringing in our second strip box. And if you only had one strip box, I would prioritize using the front light as the strip box. The back one could have been exchanged for a normal speed light, but having a strip box or even the diffuser, that nylon diffuser as a modification on its own, is going to go a long way in flattering the front of our cosmetic, which has many directly reflective aspects. It's not a cosmetic. Even if it was, I would light in a similar way, but it's very directly reflective. So you'd have to think that this strip box is going to directly reflect in here. And it's such a small cosmetic, small little tweaks are going to make big differences. So just to start us out, I'm going to just put the strip box back here on sort of a 45. And let's just take a look on our big computer screen to see what we're dealing with. So this is nice. You know, your typical cosmetic highlight. And a lot of the times people will just put a big beam of a strip box down, a cosmetic like this. The one thing about just letting straight up with a strip box is if I zoom in, it gives you a very uniform dispersion to how the highlight looks. You see we don't have a lot of movement from the front to the back of the highlight. It's just a very flat, consistent, bright highlight that has its uses. But I want to show off the curve, the shape of this cosmetic and compliment it with a bit of a wrapping glow. And to do that, I'm going to elevate our simple strip box and bring in a diffuser. So I have one right here. And these are the nylon diffusers I was talking about earlier that I like so much. And I often double them up in thickness because they are a little thinner and I can give you a nice result. So let me position this in here in between our strip box and our cosmetic. So it's a bit of a jungle of light stands and that often happens. But whenever I light stand the diffusion, I always do it from the front. So I bring in a light stand right near to the camera. And that creates a good system. So we have our strip box right here, our diffusion in-between the strip box and then our cosmetic. Let me take a photo and then explain kind of what's going on here because it's going to affect the scene significantly. If I zoom in here, you see it covered a bigger space. And we lost a little bit of our juice. This happens whenever you shoot through something. So I'm going to change the power of the speed light up from one-quarter to 1.5. So you see what that did going from this bear strip box to shooting into a diffuser. And that can also be replicated by shooting a bear speed light into a diffuser is we gained a bigger area that's reflecting into our cosmetic. And this is leaving a direct highlight because we're glossy. Now I touched on this, but if it's Matt, if the product is Matt, I'm still going to approach it from this way. But when the light hits a map product, it's diffused upon contact. That's what characterizes a Mac cosmetic or a map product in general. But still it's gonna kinda even make it easier if it's math. When things are glossy, you get really stark lines like a mirror as to where they're reflecting. This can help you position your lights. But at the end of the day, I want a little more movement going through this gradient. Still looking a little flat to get nice movement in the gradient of your cosmetic photography. It's all about where the strip box is positioned relative to the diffuser. Right now we're shooting right into the diffuser and it's kind of broad. But what I'm gonna do is flip the angle. And what this will do is create a hotspot where the strip box meets the diffuser. But where space opens up here, you're going to get a more feathered out look to the gradient and it may complement our scheme. Here's the before and here's the after. So it's subtle, but now we have a bit of a brighter gradient on the left and it falls off subtly towards the middle. I like that kind of movement from the outside to the inside. And as a primary highlight that's going to serve us well and start to define our cosmetic in this bright white space. If we zoom in decently to our cosmetic, you see we're already kind of getting a sharp catalog look. One thing we're going to have to look out for as the edges of these products. Although they look half acceptable, they're actually a little bit hazy. This is coming from our backlight. And if we were shooting in a massive studio 30 feet back with the background, the backlight would have almost no effect on our cosmetic. But since we're shooting in a smaller home studio space, those limitations, though spatial limitations, are going to leave little aspects of our image like that that we need to correct. It would be no problem, no problem at all. If we wanted to sort of symmetrically apply this same idea over here, or maybe you just have a secondary light that's kinda weaker over here. Because sometimes you don't want a symmetrical lighting. You want something like in our final result that carries a bit of like a two to one or three to two ratio. I'm not a mathematician, but you don't sometimes want perfect symmetry. You want some interest, some asymmetrical interest, or a flatter can be really good for that because naturally, if you reflect light back into your scene, it's going to lose a bit of power and create those ratios which are kind of pleasing to the eye. Now I use white foam core. I use all sorts of things as reflectors. Paper actually makes a decent reflector when you're dealing with acrylic, because you can bring it right down to the surface of what you're shooting. I'll zoom us out there and that's a good example of how we can quickly light something up using a reflector. Now you notice naturally there's a dark band created in the middle of your cosmetic. It conveys the material finish. Without darkness. There is no light. I think that was in Lion King, wasn't it? But no seriously, it conveys the material of finished by harshly cutting through the metallic. And that's going to tell the audience right away just looking at it. Oh, it's a metallic because if you make an entire glossy product, look bright everywhere, you can actually trick the audience into thinking it's mat, which is the opposite of what you want in catalogue photography. In catalogue photography, the aim is to accurately represent the products. So if we have the product looking mat, we're kind of living and when we leave a dark area harshly cutting through, we intuitively convey that material finish. Now, since this does go through the brand name, I might want to just show some special TLC to light up the brand a little bit better because you don't want to obfuscate a brand name. It's kinda like a golden rule of product photography. Watch what I'm gonna do here. Instead of putting my reflector in the side of my scene, I'm going to put it in the front of my scene and just hover it right below my label here. So that's a nice little kiss of light. You can optionally bring in, you can use the same exposure for every skew in this product type theoretically, but sometimes you wanna do little secondary things to complement your image outside of just the basic scheme, which can be nice to do. However, if you're shooting products at like 1000 quantity, you're obviously not going to show that much TLC to each aspect of the image, but there's a spectrum to how well you can show love to certain material finish, certain aspects of the part of the cosmetic. Having said that, the baselining is totally cool and I like the way it's interacting with the product. There's just a few things I would tweak to make this a little sharper and a little stronger. So I just set up this black bar, horizontal bar in our set. And this is something I do sometimes to avoid how many light stands are swimming around and place too dark cards to the left and right of our product. So you know how the side of our product is reflecting the bright background off of it. This is a trick we can use to make sure the edges of our cosmetic end up really, really sharp. So what I'm gonna do is just clamped two of these. And these are just black foam core from the Dollar Store. I cut it in half and I'm clamping them to this bar. And I want to have a vision looking through here where I can see the lens narrowly and kinda know I'm silhouetted the product is good as possible. So I'm gonna move this one over a bit. And why don't we take a test exposure? And it might take a couple tweaks before we're exactly where we need to be. And you can usually get away with a pretty narrow window. I'm in the back of the window. But for spacing, That's looking pretty good. I'll just move this one back over eighth of an inch. And we'll have a good system here to take our final shot. So once we have this all aligned, now we can work on the final shot and the reflection. Now that we're confident that the edges are going to be crisp. And that's going to be very good for defining our products. So it looks strong and confident. This wasn't the case before when we were shooting just off the blank background. But by bringing those in, we now have a much more confident system to start churning through multiple different skews within this kinda modular system. So now that we've set this up, we can bring in our reflector like before and be way more confident our final shots going to be really strong. Now obviously we're just looking at our one cosmetic here. And in our final shot, we're going to bring both out. I'm capturing them like this intentionally. Because if we brought them both out, they would obfuscate the light from one another. So last time when I brought the reflector route, I brought it pretty far back. I'm going to try to move it a little more forward. And I'll show you the reason for that. But I don't want our reflection to go right to the edge. We have a bit of a black perimeter here, which is nice, but I want to leave it a little inwards so that when you zoom out, There's a little padding before you're straight to the white. Typically when things have a white background, you want to give them dark edges with a little bit of padding and helps them cut out more. And when you have a bright gradient going right to the edge of your cosmetic, you run the risk of having a bright edge on a bright background, which means you can totally lose what you're doing. But I'm getting consistent with a reflector. I'm going to put it on maybe a clamp and a piece of card so it can stay really consistent throughout the shoot. So let's twist out that cosmetic and try to get it in the exact same position and we'll take another reflector exposure. All right, So we have unraveled are lipstick and we've brought out our reflector card in the consistent position. It's going to look good based of our tests of the reflection spectrums here. And it's the exact same shots who are really confidence going to look the exact same. And see we have a nice edge here on the side of the product where we're not reflecting too deep. We're getting nice detail all the way down the lipstick and we're getting some nice movement within the gradient in the chromatic notes of this. So this is going to be a really easy thing to comp together with our other shot to get our final result. Great. So now that we've captured are two essential exposures. If I was shooting maybe 12 different lipsticks, I would just start cycling them in and out now and just paying attention to nailing the rotation, making sure there's ample whitespace around the product and hopefully not having to move anything here because they're all the same size, almost molecule for molecule. So you should expect a consistent result. All right, so thanks for watching the lighting aspect of our class. Now we're going to bring these exposures into Photoshop and show you how it's really easy to streamline your process. And you could do hundreds and hundreds of products like this once you've built the base system. So I will meet you there. 5. Editing in Photoshop: Okay everybody, so here we are. We find ourselves in Photoshop with our layers are lipstick and B2B, and optional consideration that will show you along the way if you want to do a reflection in the front of each product, that's optional, and I'll show you that tip as we go. So first I want to group these layers so they're with their respective counterparts. So I'm gonna grab the two tube shots, the tube and the label reflection, and hit Control G to put them in a grouping. And I'll double-click on the name and call it tube. And then I'll grab the lipstick layer with its reflection, like Control G once again to group them. And I'll call that one lipstick. That's fantastic. Now let's mask these out onto a white background and then we'll bring in those front paper reflections to show you that option. So to mask this out, it's going to be no problem. We are on bright gray already and almost pure white in some areas. I'm going to get at the Marquee selection tool. And while having this group selected here, I'm going to make a marquee selection just crudely around my product with getting the perimeter of bright gray in there. And I'm capturing as much as the reflection as I can. I got a little close to the edge there, but that's fine. I'm going to hit this button down here, which means give that selection a layer mask. So if I hide the underlying layer C, That's what it just did. It hit all that other data and created this layer mask for us. I'm gonna do the same thing with the tube now. Again, I'll grab the grouping, make a crude selection. Getting a nice amount of the reflection. And I'll click the button again. And that's fantastic because now we have each layer and I can move them independently and compose them how I wish. I'm gonna do the lipstick to the left. And let's grab both of these layers and kinda center of the mountain. Now. Now there's some bright gray pixels in here for sure. And we'll use an effect to knock out into pure white in a moment. But if you want to bounce light into the front of your cosmetics, let me show you really quickly just how you can mask that in. So here's the layer, for example, the tube. It says that reflection. The first thing I'm gonna do is put the layer on lightened mode. If you're not familiar with lightened mode, it only allows a layer to lighten the underlying layer and darken it. So when I put that on, it will only improve the image, so to speak, in the bright areas. I still need to mask out the paper. To do that, I'm going to hit this button once again, but holding Alt on a PC computer, holding Alt, we'll give it a black layer mask, which omits layer from showing up. So hold Alt and I'll click that layer. Now I need to paint white end just right here in the layer mask, just so only that area sort of gives us that extra data. So I'm going to zoom in here a little and I'm gonna make a marquee selection. We'll apply some feather to this, but just crudely grabbing the area and in that layer mask, I'm going to simply paste white. By pasting white in there. I'm allowing it to show up. And that's fantastic. And I'll do the same thing with the counterpart over here on the lipstick tube. I'm going to put it on lightened mode. Holding Alt. I'll give it a layer mask, which creates a black mask. And then once again, I could also do it with the brush. I'll show you here with a white brush. So whites in my foreground and I have a feathered brush. And you could just even click and hold Shift which will paint a straight line and just mask it in with the brush. And I like the way it looks up here. So I'm going to paint a little black 20 minute. But there you go. There's that extra kick of light. And these are a little bit too much there, a little bit too bright. So one thing I'm going to do is make sure they're masked in evenly. And I'm going to reduce the opacity. Maybe just to 40 percent, which might seem kinda redundant. We're making it dark again. But I wanted to convey that material finish and just give us a little extra something to make the brand name legible and get it off too dark of a shade. Okay, so now that we kick those labels into high gear, it's time to get these into a white background space. We can do this because we constantly have really sharp edges thanks to the black cards. And we have it on a really bright background already. So this will just take a quick effect. I can use selective color. So I click this button down here to bring up effects. And selective color is the module we're going to use. There's lots of channels when you open selective color, I'm going to go down to the whites channel and drag all of the values down. When you drag the values down, is going to kick all of the high gray into complete white. And some areas. We don't want that to happen, but since we have sharp edges, It's still coming in off beautifully on the white background. And all we need to do now is omit it from a few areas. Let's click the layer mask. You're going to get really familiar with layer masks here. So with a black brush in my foreground, I'm just going to click here and paint the effect away from the side of the metallics, whereas getting a little hot and I didn't want it to affect it. And maybe up here in the lipstick also where there's a little bit of a hotspot caused by that effect. I'll do the same thing over here. I'll paint the effect away with the black brush wherever I don't need it because I really only needed it to boost up those sides, which is great. And that's fantastic. Now there's still a couple of hotspots, but let's work with these reflections real quick. It's a little sloppy here at the bottom, so I need to get rid of the bottom of the reflection and fade it out a little bit. The cleanest way to do that with confidence is make a new layer, bring white into your foreground, and then bring up your gradient tool. I like to do that by hitting G on my keyboard with a foreground to transparent gradient. I want to fade out these reflections. Obviously, if I start down here is not going to fade them out enough. And if I start up here, it's going to be too much. You kinda wanna start where you have the minimum acceptability. Like it's a little muddy here at the side. So I'm going to lose a bit of this reflection and hold shift to get a straight line up to the horizon line. And you can do multiple Passover is if you want something more subtle, but we'll get a nice fade out from that. And kinda put all of our products if I move them together here in a nice visual space looking at them. The last thing I'm gonna do is just chill out a few hotspots here on the image and how I'm going to achieve that as make a curves layer. If you pull a curves layer down, you're gonna get a darker contrasting look. And that's overkill for some areas, but I'm going to do a subtle effect of that. And then once I get to invert my layer mask, hit B to bring up my brush. And with white in the foreground because we want to reveal the layer. I'm going to paint that effect in even with a low flow, which makes your painting more subtle. I'm just going to paint that in a little bit in a couple of the areas that seemed a little hot. And you can repeat that as an action on other areas if need be. But it's a quick thing you can do just to make sure nothing's too bright and just having a lipstick in front of me, I had to make a quick adjustment for the color of the top because it did get a little hot. And I do want to pay attention to making it look true to form. So with those few tweaks, we could compress everything. Now if we wanted to edit it in a more simplistic manner, maybe I'll grab everything and control G to group it, Control J to duplicate that and Control E. Now I have a flattened version which is nice and editable, and I have a sort of smart saved version underneath just in case this image is great, I'm totally happy with it. If I was to tweak one thing, it would just be a quick passover of the materials. You know, areas like this. We cleaned our cosmetic. But sometimes in manufacturing There's little blemishes and things. If you've got this in a store, et cetera. So it's always a good skill set to have. What I just did there is use the patch tool. So hit J to bring a note on my keyboard. And how the patch tool works is you simply draw a selection around a blemish and then you click and drag and re-sample it from an area that's a candidate, a sort of clean pass of that area. And if you turn that on and off, you'll see just a quick passover of your image like back and go a long way in making a look clean and respectable to make sure you haven't a clean shot. So thanks so much for following our class here and building up this really simple catalog cosmetic shot with us. I like the way it's looking, it's clean and we can just use a couple of selective colors to get that on a pure white background as long as we focus on the black cards at the edge. And that helped us so much when it came to tweaking the shot impulse production and getting a nice clean look. So the project component for you for this class would be to shoot your own cosmetic photography item. You know, find any item with cosmetics, it can cost a dollar, cost a $100, and just try to put it on a white background and try to focus on how to get that looking really sharp and classy, and how to give yourself a reasonably easy time in post-production and a reasonably reproducible system in a way to approach this. So thanks so much for following our class again, guys, I'm so excited you watch this. I'm going to be making some more classes shortly. And cosmetic photography has always been an interesting area to me, I think because there are so many nice material finishes in cosmetics and there's just a certain way of lighting really small items to look kinda larger than life. That is always kind of impressed me and unlocking those lighting secrets has always been of great interest to me. So thanks so much for tuning in. My name is Dustin Dolby and I can't say it enough. It's been an absolute pleasure and I will see you all next time. Take care.