DIY Backdrops II: Custom Photography Textures | Tabitha Park | Skillshare
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DIY Backdrops II: Custom Photography Textures

teacher avatar Tabitha Park, Product & Food Photographer

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.

      Introduction

      1:22

    • 2.

      Project Description

      0:51

    • 3.

      Painted Texture Tutorial

      5:14

    • 4.

      Stained Wood Mock Table Tutorial

      3:13

    • 5.

      Rusty Metal Backdrop Tutorial

      5:51

    • 6.

      Lighting, Composition, and Styling Tips

      9:50

    • 7.

      Gear and Prop Ideas

      2:15

    • 8.

      Edit Your Photos!

      7:18

    • 9.

      Pinterest Board

      0:45

    • 10.

      Final Thoughts

      1:01

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About This Class

In this class I'll show you how to create beautiful handmade photography backdrops to add to your collection! I'll also show you how you can use them to improve your tabletop and product photos.

We'll be making 3 different dynamic backdrops that can be customized to be uniquely yours.

Here's what I'll cover:

  1. Supplies
  2. Technique
  3. Tips and tricks
  4. Lighting Suggestions
  5. Composition and Styling demos
  6. Tools and Props
  7. Two full editing sequences for Mobile
  8. My Pinterest board for inspiration

I hope you'll join me and make a stunning art backdrop (or two!)

If you missed it, here's my first backdrops class for simple, clean, classic backdrops:

Meet Your Teacher

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Tabitha Park

Product & Food Photographer

Top Teacher

Hi! I'm Tabitha and I teach photography classes. I'm a lifestyle, product, and food photographer living in the Pacific Northwest with my husband, our 17 gorgeous chickens, and Smallcat! I love plants and coffee and naps. In my spare time I'm a reckless gardener (irl and in Stardew Valley), and unapologetic hobby starter. Currently hyperfixating on crochet, embroidery, and spoon carving!

See full profile

Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Tabitha a photography teacher here on Skillshare and this is backdrops 2 the much anticipated sequel. I'm just kidding. You don't have to watch my first backdrops class to jump into this one. My first class offers a basic, clean, classic, simple solutions that are really cheap, and then this one dives a little deeper. We are going to be doing more painting and a little bit of science. We're going to be making three different backdrops In this class. The first is a painted panel, so you can use this as a table top or a wall. It will offer a little bit of texture in the background of your images to help improve the look of them overall. The second backdrop, will be making is a stained wooden slat look to a place the feel of a wooden table without having to buy a whole wooden table and figure out where to store it. Then the third backdrop we'll be making is a rusty metal panel. We're going to be mixing different household liquids to facilitate a chemical reaction on the surface of the metal. Then we'll seal it and finish it off, so that we can use it as a grungy feel in our images. Yeah. My name is Tabitha. I'm a lifestyle photographer, a content creator and a teacher here on Skillshare. I'm really excited to share these ideas with you, so let's get our hands dirty. 2. Project Description: Thanks so much for joining me. Let me show you what will be making today. This is my painted backdrop. I paint this on an MDS board that only costs 399, and I do both sides for extra versatility. The next backdrop we'll be making is a wood slap backdrop. Here's what it looks like. It's ultra portable. I do about eight pieces per backdrop and you can do the front and the back. Then lastly, I will show you how to make your own oxidized rusty metal panel. I'm super excited to show you what we've got. Don't forget to share your progress photos as you go. Pictures of you painting, pictures of your finished backdrop, and then actual final photos where you're using your backdrop in your work. I can't wait to see what you create in the project section. Let's dive right into our peanut backdrop. 3. Painted Texture Tutorial: First off, we're going to make our painted texture backdrops. I'm just going to lead you through my whole process, and I actually made a couple of different ones so you can get a good idea of the varieties that this offers you. Then at the very end of this course, I'm going to show you my Pinterest board so you can see different backdrops in action that other people have created and used and figure out what's going to be best for you and hone in on where you're wanting to go with your backdrop. Let's get started. For this project. We're going to want to cover up our work surface. I use paper and plastic. You can use newspaper, whatever you happen to have. The supplies you'll need are a caulk gun, liquid nails, a putty knife, paint brushes, acrylic paint, it doesn't matter what acrylic paint you use, I used old sample paint left over from when we painted our house. In this shot, I only show one container, but I actually used two. I really recommend using two slightly different colors of paint, so a gray and then a slightly lighter gray is what I'll be using because it'll really add a lot of depth and dimension to your finished backdrop. We're going to finish it off with a matte finish ceiling spray, to protect our surface. Underneath all of these, you'll see I have a brown MDF board. It's a quarter-inch thick and it's 24 inches by 24 inches. This cost me 399 at Home Depot. To get started, we want to put some of our liquid nails down onto our MDF board. After we get a little bit on there, we want to spread it around using our putty knife. Keep in mind what we want is texture. Try and get lots of strokes, be messy, it doesn't have to be perfect because what we want is a haphazard rough looking surface. Once you're happy with how it looks, you can go ahead and let it dry. This takes a couple of hours, so feel free to do something else while you wait. When your board's all dry, it should be a pale, a fresh color, and then we're just going to paint right over it. Lay down some paint, it doesn't matter how perfectly you do this. It can be a mess, just we want a nice thick coat on the bottom so that you don't see any of the MDF or liquid nails peeking through. Next we're going to add our second layer of paint. This one is a little lighter than the first. I'm just throwing brushstrokes around, getting it evenly dispersed and then even doing more strokes with my putty knife to give it a scratched up concrete feel to it. Once you're happy with how it looks, double-check over the whole entire board and make sure you don't have any MDF or liquid nails showing through and then you can go ahead and seal it once it's dry and start using it as a backdrop. Next, I want to show you how I made my dark backdrop. I have just a random bunch of paints from different projects over the years. They're not new or nice paints, they're old and chunky. I'm just going to throw these down to get an indigo feel. I'm going to start off with black. You can see this black has had better days. It's super chunky, makes a huge mess, but it doesn't matter. We're just throwing paint around. We're getting this rough, crazy feel to it. I wanted to add some blues to give it a really cool indigo texture. Next, I wanted to add a contrasting color, so I did a gray, which was the lighter highlight tone of this piece. Then for this one, I don't know if you noticed, I didn't lay down a layer of liquid nails. Instead, I just did really thick paint and then made sure to use my putty knife a lot to get those beautiful long brush strokes that I wanted. Once that's dry, I went ahead and added another layer of black in a light dry brush stroke look. I did a cross hatching look all over the entire board and I love the texture that I added in the final piece. Once your pieces are all done and finished, you can go ahead and flip it over and do the other side. The other side I did another dark texture, but I do not recommend doing this. If I were to do this again, I would put a light texture on one side and a dark texture on the other side, and then purchase another board and do the same thing. That way I can flip them both to the light-colored side and do have a floor and a wall to work with. Then I can flip them both on the dark sides and have a wall and a floor to work with. But with what I have, I have one board that has dark on both sides and so I can only use one at a time. Anyway, you learn as you go. But for this one I wanted a green, almost like a dark teal look. I just put down a bunch of bright colors and realized it looked army greenish and I didn't really want that, so I added a lot of black to tone it down. I want to do an overall bluish stippling look and so I added some stippling to that with a paper towel and a sponge and then I mix some white with my paint for highlights and then put that down. You can see almost immediately I regretted that because it's insanely bright, so I toned it down with some black paint and just kept stippling till it looked how I wanted. Here's a close-up texture shot of how this one turned out. Really pleased with these and I can't wait to start using it in my work. Don't forget to seal your front and back side of your backdrop when you're all done so that it will help protect it when you use it in the future. Then here is a gallery of my finished images using these painted backdrops and how different lighting or angle of lights will affect how they look in these images. 4. Stained Wood Mock Table Tutorial: In this section, we are going to be making our stained wooden slats textures. So let me show you what I got. For this project, you're going to need a set of tongue and groove boards that you can stain or paint. This is a reversible wainscot. It comes with 12 different planks that connects together. One side has wainscoting, and the other side is plain. Here's an example of what the tongue and groove looks like. It doesn't necessarily click together, but it nests and that's super convenient. Here's a set of boards I bought a year ago. They are not reversible wainscoting. The back is just unfinished. These are just two different examples of what you might expect. These ones, I stained ebony. They're very, very, very dark brown, but you can still see the wood grain, which I love. Here's the stain that I'll be using for my new boards, it's called pickled oak. I don't recommend it because it's basically the same color as the wood. You'll see later, I paint over it. But anyway, great brand, just not the best color. This is my sanding sponge. I sanded my white planks, but not the black ones. This is a plastic drop cloth. For this project, I did a layer of paper on the table, followed by this plastic drop cloth, and then an additional layer of paper. To get started, you're going to want to prepare your boards. For these, I decided to sand them front and back. When [inaudible] all the boards there. You want to clean up your work surface to get all the little bits of sand up, so that you're stain doesn't pick that up and put on the board, making it gritty. Read the instructions on your stain to make sure you're doing it right. For mine, I needed to give it a good stir and then apply it straight to the board. Let it dry for about 15 minutes and then wipe off the excess. You can see it's looking not very different. This is why I ended up this painting over it with a white paint in the end. Here's a different boards. You can see what it's like with a completely different color. This is that same ebony black for me a year ago, and I am applying it to the unfinished side of this board. The one must have been very absorbent on this side because they ended up turning really dark, and I love this rough saw blade texture that I was able to get from this. So go ahead and paint all of your boards the same, wait the 15 minutes, wipe it off. You should wear gloves. My hands were disgusting by the end of this day. Wear gloves if you want to protect your fingers. Then once it's all done and dry, I would give it probably four hours to fully dry after you wipe the excess stain off. You don't want that stain transferring to any of the objects you're going to put on it. Here's some example photos of this particular dark board in use. I love how this looks. It's rough, it's textured as great color to it. Then you can see this is a picture of the other side of these boards, which is more of a natural warm wood grain feel for a rustic look. Then lastly, here is how my white board's turned out. These are painted white. As you remember, the stain didn't really work. So I had to do a coat of paint on them, but I love how they turned out in the end because it's nice to have wood that is white. It gives you a little bit of texture in the lines, but it's not distracting and it's very clean and crisp. Yeah, tons of versatility with these boards, and you've got a lot of opportunities to make them your own. 5. Rusty Metal Backdrop Tutorial: Next up is our rusted panel. I just have to let you know not all metal is going to rust, you have to be really particular about what you buy. Anything that says galvanized is going to have a coating or it's going to prevent the rust basically. If it's zinc or zinc plated anything like that, also it's going to prevent rusting. People don't usually want their metal rust and so it's actually a little tricky to find metal that will rust. But I found some at my local hardware store. I shop at both Home Depot and Lowe's here in the States. I picked a couple of different small pieces of metal that costs me about six or eight bucks each depending on the gauge or how thick it is, before I invested in a big panel, because the big panels are closer to like 30 bucks and if I'm not sure if it's going to rust, I don't want to spend the money on it trying to get it to rust. I definitely recommend getting small pieces, testing those and then investing in a bigger piece that will do what you wanted to do. You can also find a metal scrap yard, a place where they work with a lot of metal, something like that. My aunt actually recommended a place like that. There's one here but I didn't want to be like you have to find a metal yard for those class. I wanted to make sure that the metal panels were accessible. If you have a source for a good metal or steel panel that will rust, or you're getting it from someone who knows whether it will rust or not, I recommend that you can probably get it for cheaper also. But when all else fails the hardware store will usually come to save you. But let's talk about what we're going to need to make this happen. For this project, we are going to need something to scratch up the surface of the metal. This is technically optional, but I add a layer of texture that I think looks neat. I use this little metal dish scrubber and a sanding sponge. Next step we'll be using hydrogen peroxide. This costs a $ in the first aid section of pretty much any grocery store. We will also be using white vinegar. This is some salt, I have read that you're not supposed to use iodized salt, so I'll be using sea salt for this. Then because we'll be working with some chemicals, you're going to want to wear some rubber gloves. This is the my metal that I got. I went ahead and got two different sample pieces. This first one is called sheet metal aluminum, was really shiny and I was pretty sure this was going to do what I needed it to do, spoiler alert, it did not. The next one I got was called sheet metal plain steel. It is a 16-gauge piece so it's a little bit thicker and heavier. This one actually did rust. If you're going to buy new metal and you can find this exact one, get this exact one. Here is a shot of me standing down my edges and corners and washing the surface of my metal pieces. I'm removing any bit of oil or anything that might throw off my results. I actually got a little bit nervous about this and wanted to put down an additional layer. We're talking four layers here to protect my table. I use a garbage bag because I feel like with the liquids this'll help trap them rather than soak them in and damage my table. Next I'm going to scratch up the surface. I'm just using my steel wool adding scratches and scrapes here in there just to see what it will do after I add the chemicals. Next step, put your gloves on and get ready to put on our first layer of liquid. We're going to start with a layer of vinegar. I just applied this haphazardly. If you had a spray bottle, you could put this in that might work a little better to get it more evenly distributed. But I went ahead and pushed it around with my fingers just to see if I could get it to apply more evenly. Once you're happy with how that looks, you want to add a layer of salt and then top it off with your hydrogen peroxide. Once your hydrogen peroxide touches your vinegar, it will immediately start to react if the surface will rust. You can see just a drop in it's already starting to turn orange. This part is very exciting because the liquids will foam up as they start to build this rust on the surface. You can see as I apply it to the other piece of metal, it did nothing. That's how I know immediately that one of these pieces will work and the other will not. Here's some shots of the bubbling and fizzing and what it looks like as it deepens color. You don't want to add too much liquid to the surface because what you need to do next is just wait for it to evaporate and dry. I actually tried to speed up the process by taking some paper towels to it and soaking it up. I dropped some of the extra orange water onto my non rusting surface and hopes that it would force it to rust. It didn't work. After it dries, it'll look super crusty, and colored, and pretty. This is what we're going for. Keep in mind at this point, if you were to take your fingers and rub at the rust it would come off. If you like the way that your rust looks and you want to stop, go ahead and add a coating of spray seal. I would even do 2-3 coats of spray seal letting it dry in between to really lock in all of the texture. If you're not happy with how it looks, you can rub a lot of the rust off within the first day and start over. The metal panel that did not rust still looked really aged and warped and so it gave off a lot of cool bluer textures because it didn't have that orange in there. It's definitely still something you can use in your work, but it's not going to rust like you expect. Then here's some final photos that I took using my big rust panel. The look that it adds to your photos, it's this really vibrant beautiful orange color, and it can really make your photos stand out. 6. Lighting, Composition, and Styling Tips: All right, so here are some shooting tips for you that I just threw together in this video. We're just going to run through it all. The best kind of light to use for these images is beautiful, soft, natural window light that is diffused. Set up next to a window, have the blinds open, but make sure that if the sun's coming through the window, that you put up some tissue paper or white sheet or wax paper, tracing paper, anything that's going to break up those direct sun rays on your subject. You're going to want to shoot with the window light and make sure all the other lights in the room are turned off. Even if it's the room one over, turn it off, turn off all the other lights. You want to be just utilizing the light from the window. If you have those other lights on, they're going to throw weird colored shadows in the side of your picture and you don't want that. Window light only or go outside if it's an overcast day, don't shoot in the middle of the day with the harsh sun shining right down on your product, it's going to flatten everything now and make things look not their best. You can try to shoot in the shade, the shade of a really bright sunny day, but I don't recommend that either because usually the sun is hitting grass nearby and that's going to throw off a bright green ray into your photo and you're going to have still mixed lighting or mixed colors to deal within your photos. Shoot next to a window or shoot outside on an overcast day, or shoot inside on an overcast day, just know it's going to be a little darker. That's the perfect time to do your dark and moody photos. Okay? Just never ever use a light bulb for these kind of pictures. That's just my best advice. If you have to, use a lamp at an angle not from directly above and again, turn off all the other lights in the room, use a diffused sheet in front of it. I talk a lot about this in my donut flat lay class. If you really need to see that in action, I recommend watching that. Next, let's talk composition. When you're shooting, it's a really good idea to experiment with different angles and distances. Try getting a shot that's really far away or try getting super close and get a macro shot or shoot back later or shoot a flat layer. Just work around your subject really trying to find effective angles and compositions for your images. Next, I wanted to show you the power of a reflector. This is a piece of white foam core that I got at Walmart for about $1. You can add it to the shadow side of the photo and it will help fill in any of the dark areas and make your subjects stand out from the background. Next, I wanted to take you through an actual shooting scenario where I would put this technique into work. I'm trying to take a picture of this tiny little stitch marker on my knitting and the light is catching it a little bit but we've got a big heavy shadow right under here. I wanted to show you that everything can be a reflector. This is my little watercolor tray. The backside is completely white. So, while I'm shooting, if I just introduce this in the side of the picture, the light from my window bounces off of this white surface and into the shadow areas of the photo. I can hold this up while I take my picture and then I've got the shadow areas lit up and it will help define the shape of the stitch marker for this image. Welcome back to my office. I'm going to show you how I would set up right by my office window to make good pictures here. Let's do a little tour. Forgive me, I'm not a videographer. Here, I have the window in my office and this is about how dim it feels to my eyes. I'm going to go ahead and move some things. This is my cat's bed. We don't need this in the picture and then I will take my plants down. We're just clearing any obscurities that might affect our images and then I'm actually going to open this all the way. We lucked out with an overcast day today. I don't have to worry about direct sun pouring in my image. If it was sunny, I would bring my blinds down and then I would tip them like this so that any sun that's coming in won't land on my table. It's a little dimmer but I can adjust my camera settings to work with it. Overcast day, we are going to open these nice and bright. Then I'm just going to set up right here on this table. What I want to photograph today is my knitting. I want to use my painted white board. I'm going to use this one because I think it's neutral enough that will show off the color in the yarn without competing too much with it. For this I would set up my scene, including a couple of different props and then once I get it all styled, I will start shooting. I'm just going to bring this closer so you can watch me style. All right, so I want there to be a little bit of yarn going around. But not so much that it's like, wow, what a crazy picture. I want it to be subtle. The image that we're creating or the story that we're telling is like a work in progress. I happened to have this candle nearby. It has the look that I'm going for kind of the aesthetics. If I just sit that here, keeping in mind that if I do a flat lay, I want to lay it down and then at that point it might look weird because candles don't usually lay down. But if I shoot this direction, that will make more sense. Then, I happened to have a bag of reindeer moss. This adds a cool texture in your images. Mine's has lots of bits. But I could incorporate this in the photo, just dotting the image. I personally think that this vibrant green competes with the color of the yarn. I might clean that up and then opt for a different kind of greenery. This is my Swiss cheese pothos. I'm going to put it just off camera and then use these long vines in the edge of my picture. This way I have things are coming at different distances away from the cameras. Some things will be blurry and some things will be sharply in focus. Then, I might try to add something else, a safety pin or two or possibly a book, maybe my pattern is in there. Or if I had an actual pattern, I could fold that and put that in the picture. Maybe I've got this open, yeah, something like that. It's like part of it. But I think this white competes with this white so, I will actually stick with the black side. Something like this and basically I will tweak it as I shoot so that it looks the best it can be. I can shoot directly from above, shooting down. I can shoot this way, keeping in mind that all of this is going to be in the background. I might want to move my plant over so that it's just like a soft green in the background here. I can shoot toward the window and just be mindful that this shelf right here is going to be in the picture and can do lots of close ups, at a 45 degree angle from really any direction my backdrops big enough so that will totally work for me. Lots of versatility, be mindful of colors. You don't want to have too much going on in the picture. Let me just show you what I mean. All right, so just gathering a few random things from my desk. If I had my watercolors over here and my nail polish right here, and another pen, some more watercolors and my lotion, this is a lot of stuff. This is overwhelming. Your eyes are darting from all the different things, trying to figure out how they connect and so it's not effective. This doesn't have anything to do with my picture and neither do my watercolors. Nail polishes, you might be able to get away with because these ones, these are both black. I have a theme. You could probably get away with this if you're doing an ad and you're like, "Oh yeah, me just knitting and painting my nails but not at the same time because they don't want nail polish on my yarn." I don't know. Or this could be an ad for nail polish. Take this out, throw these in here and it's like, "Oh me and my favorite color aesthetic here." We've got all these black instruments in the picture with greenery black book basically. That's how you would convert from one to the next and then again, how you might convert from this to this. Instead of pens, we would want to use paint brushes. Then instead of a candle, we would have a jar of water and a nearby paper towel where you can see you dried off your paint brush. This one it might be like, "I'm about to paint on this page." It's not really the appropriate painting paper, but you get the idea, mixing it up. You can use very similar setups for lots of different pictures. 7. Gear and Prop Ideas: This lesson is all about different tools that I like to use to hold up my backdrops. In this video you can see I have two red spring clamps and two corner brackets. I put these along the backside of my heavier, more rigid backdrops to hold them up so that I don't have to worry about them falling over, and then I also have a couple of mini clamps that I use on the bottom of my foam core reflectors. This is just enough holds to keep it upright when I'm trying to shoot. Keep in mind that when you are using this setup, your backdrop can still fall forward, so if you're worried about it falling forward, you can get an additional two corner clamps and put those in the front, but that might get in the corners of your photos. Using these bright red clamps also gets in the corner of the photo, so when you're cropping and framing your shots, make sure that those are out of frame. This is just a random sprinkling of all the props that I like to use, which can range from sprigs of greenery that I happened to have, this is eucalyptus. This bag is full of reindeer moss which is preserved, so it's not real, but it looks real. We have this cool measuring cup, this cool glass vial, different copper bowls, a black bowl, a black plate. This is ginger. I pretty much just use any produce I randomly have around the house. Candles, fancy measuring spoons. These are Cheese boards, I have a slight one and a wooden one. This is a living air plant, I use him in pictures sometimes. Books. These are different tea towels that I like to use, and these are sea salt flakes, you can just use choose chunky salt. Salt will add a little bit of texture to your image. This is a wood slab, that is a cigarette box, I guess. It's like a little wooden cigar box. These are different twines and ribbons and things that I like to add to images. These are little strawberry baskets, so tons of different ideas, we have tape and safety pins. Just different things you can find around your house that'll add a little something to your picture. One thing I like to keep in mind is make sure that what you're putting your picture contributes to the story, and isn't just random filler, if that makes sense. 8. Edit Your Photos!: I am a huge proponent of editing your images. Every image on my entire Instagram feed has been edited. I never release an image into the world that hasn't been edited, because to me that's like if you bought a brand new puppy and then never put a leash on it. It's just like, oh see here hopefully it works out. It's a bad analogy. Let me think of something else. It's like an on frosted cake. It's going to taste good. It's a cake. It's got a lot of potential, but man, that frosting really takes it to a whole new level. Please edit your images. I'm going to show you really quickly how you can make your photo a little bit better or a lot a bit better using the Instagram app. If you're already in Instagram and you're about to share your image, think, maybe I can make it just a little better with a couple tweaks. Here's what I mean. Pulling up the app, we're going to hit this little plus sign. This will pull up our recently taken photographs. We're going to hit this little picture of these apricots. I'm going to adjust the crop by pinching the photo right here. I want to adjust the crops so that it's not cutting anything off and my picture is nice and centered. I'm going to hit the next button when I'm happy with that. It automatically takes me to a menu where I can choose through a variety of beautiful filters. You can just toss a filter on this photo, hit "Next" and post, or you can actually hand edit. Sometimes I'll take a filter and then click on it again. It'll pull up this slider. You don't have to apply the filter of full strength. You can apply it at like a quarter strength, long press to see before. Let go to see after, so this one I actually like a lot for this picture. I'm an applied 50 percent filter hit "Done" and then I'm going to switch over to this edit tab here at the bottom. This is where I do a lot more fine tuning on my images. I'm going to start with brightness. We're going to bring it up a little bit nice and bright. I want a beautiful and airy, crisp, bright photo. I'm bringing it up to 41. Hit "Done. " Next up we have contrast. You can see my picture is a little bit, it's lacking contrasts. I can make the dark darker in the light slider. We're going to bring this up, long press to see before and after. I do this every time just to make sure my photo was going where I want it to go, hit "Done." I skip over structure and then go to warmth. I feel the temperature on this is really good, but sometimes I adjust the warm slider just to see because sometimes it's hard to tell when your photo's too warm unless you can pull the warmth down and see what it needs. I'm actually going to pull it down a little bit because I like my images to be more of a crisp white. I can see the plane connects to the edge of the white in the app, and so I can keep myself in check using the white of the Instagram app. I run it down and I'm going to hit "Done." We're going to go to saturation next. I feel like the filter already added quite a lot of added saturation, but I may still bring it up just a little bit. I like my images to really be clean, crisp, bright, colorful, and pack a punch. This one only really needed a teeny bit. Done. I skip over color fade, highlight. Sometimes I mess with and sometimes I don't. In this particular situation, I think bring them up a little bit is good. Shadows we may not need to adjust. If I really wanted you to be able to see the color in that bowl, I would bring my shadows down, but I don't know if you can tell, you can start to see my reflection in the shininess of the glaze. It looks like he didn't see it, even if the shadows are up. I'm just going to leave them at about eight. Next, we're going to end with sharpening. Sharpening is super important. I usually bring it about halfway. If you over sharpen, you can tell your image starts to like, look really crunchy. It's subtle. I'm long pressing and then letting go. It's a subtle edit, but again, I still like to just do about halfway and then hit "Done." I like where this is at. Sometimes I hit this little sun at the top. This is Lux. I'm not exactly sure what it does. It looks like it adds some contrast. A little bit of punch to the photo. Sometimes I like it, sometimes I don't. It just depends on the photo. We're just going to leave it at about, I don't really like it. I'm going to take it off, cancel, and I like where this is. Sometimes I go through and just do some last minute tweaks, by bringing the brightness up just a little and the contrast up just a little. Maybe even my shadows because it seems like those apricots are a little bit dark in the shadow areas, so we'll bring the shadows up and I love that. Here's before and here's after. It is so dramatic. How much of a difference a teeny bit of editing can do. This is right before I'm about to post. This is not an extra app. This is just right in the Instagram app. Super easy edit. I'm going to take you through an edit in Lightroom CC on the phone. After you launch the app, you're going to hit this little mountains with the plus sign. This will access your camera roll. We're going to choose this image, and this is just with no edits at all, is totally ready to be worked on. Starting off with this little sun, this is our lighting adjustments. We're going to bring the exposure up. This will bring everything brighter all around. We're going to bring the contrast of the summit that dark, darker and the lights lighter. We're going to bring the highlights up a little bit. We want a nice bright white background, so I'm okay with my highlights going brighter. If your image had some spots that were way too bright, you could bring the highlights down and that might put more information there. Shadows, we want those to come up a little bit. Why it's up a little bit, and then blacks were actually going to take down. Let me close this drawing. You can see what we've done. This is before and this is after. Already our images a lot brighter and cleaner. We're going to do some color adjustments next, so hit the little temperature gauge. This will open your color adjustment drawer. Temperature will make the picture warmer or cooler depending on what you're going for. My temperature was pretty right on, so I'm going to leave it at zero, same with my tint. That would bring it more magenta or green. Again, I'm just going to leave it at zero. Vibrance and saturation are both very similar. They just make the colors more vibrant and saturated. I'm loving how this is looking. Again long press this is what we had before, and this is after a lot of super-simple edits in less than two minutes. Let's do some cropping. We're going to hit the "Crop tool" open up this aspect ratio drawer, hit the one-by-one square. This is the crop that I would choose for Instagram. I'm making sure not to get too close to these lines on my wood plank and also not to cut off my artwork. I'm going to cut off the corner of my watercolor palette. Maybe it just straighten just a little bit and then hit the "Check box" to accept. This picture is ready to post on Instagram. I hit this little share button, Save to camera roll, maximum available and it is saved. That is just a super quick edit in Lightroom CC on the phone, it's a free app. I totally recommend it. I would edit every photo that you post. It'll just make them so much better and it'll take them to their maximum potential. That's my really quick edit with Lightroom CC.v 9. Pinterest Board: Before I let you go, I just wanted to let you know I have a Pinterest board called DIY Backdrops. This is where I've collected a bunch of different backdrop ideas from beautiful images across Pinterest that I found inspiring. I've separated them out into three different categories of backdrops that we make in this class. You can just jump in and maybe if you're trying to decide between pink colors or technique, you can come in here and get some ideas for what you might like to make for your prop arsenal. There's tons of stuff in here. The other folder is filled with things that I either didn't know what the backdrop was or this one's marble. This one is paper, burlap. Cool ideas in here. Feel free to browse through these if you are looking for ideas. 10. Final Thoughts: That's everything. Thank you so much for taking my class. I hope that you enjoyed it and I hope you feel inspired to make your own photography backdrop to improve the look of your tabletop and product photos. If you do decide to make a backdrop, I want to see it. Don't forget to share your project here in the project section on Skillshare or if you share on Instagram, just tag me so I can come over and take a look. If you have any questions or you need help, you're running into issues, anything that photography related, feel free to go to the community discussion section and ask there and I will totally respond and we can work through your whatever issues you might have a need do. If you want to get an email next time I post another class in the future, you can hit that follow button and you'll be notified next time I put up more content. You can also follow me on Instagram, I usually post it there too. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and I will see you next time.