Lifestyle Product Photography: How to Take Images Brands Will Love!

1. Introduction: Product photos, branding, lifestyle ads, and so much more. In this course, you're going to learn how to take a compelling product lifestyle photograph. Hello and welcome. My name is [inaudible]. I'm a commercial fashion, portrait, and lifestyle photographer. While a lot of my work does consist of working with models, there is a solid amount that has a product element to it or is very product-based. Whether it is adding some product photos in for a client or if it's a client coming to me with a vision for how they want their product to be showcased. It is with that experience that today I'm going to show you how you can craft and take a beautiful lifestyle product photograph. Whether you are a photographer looking to dip your feet into the realm of lifestyle product photography. Or you even have something of a beauty blog, and you just want to be able to take some high-quality photos for your page. Or even if you just want to take some incredible photographs of some of your favorite products in your life. This course is going to show you how to do just that. In the ever-changing digital landscape, brands and companies are needing high-quality compelling photographs of their products more than ever, and who better to deliver those than you? Today, you are going to learn just that; from concept to preparation, to styling, lighting, and finally shooting the final photograph. You are going to learn how to craft this image from start to finish, and not only learn how to, but also the why, of why you are making these certain decisions in crafting your photograph. If you are a seasoned photographer, then this course will have a lot of solid tidbits that you can pull out of it and apply to your own work. If you are just starting out in photography and you're really wanting to get into the product realm, then this will give you all the tools and techniques that you will need to create a compelling and beautiful product photo. Without further ado, let's get shooting. I hope to see you there. 2. Concept & Ideation: First of all I wanted to thank you so much for enrolling in this course. Without further ado, let's get into the meat of this. Let's say you are approached by a company or even you just have some products at home that you want to take some beautiful photos out of. Well, where do you start? It can all be pretty intimidating when you're just looking at a blank canvas wondering how you can pull this image together. But fear not, that's what we're going to break down right now. When looking at product photography, really what I like to look at first is the company and the product itself. Who is the company's audience, what's their target market? Also looking at the product itself. What themes are present in this product that we can tie the whole shoot around to create something that flows naturally and works well, where all elements compliment each other and work to serve the final image. This is where you wouldn't really want to have things that really clash a whole lot. There's nothing worse than when you have a beautifully crafted product and a beautiful background. But the two seem to be on different themes and just don't work for one another. That is why in the next section, I'm going to break down how to actually prepare your elements for this shoot. How to create it all so that it flows naturally and works well together. 3. Planning & Preparation : Crafting the perfect lifestyle product photograph all comes down to preparation. It's something that is often overlooked but will pay dividends if you actually put the time and effort in to figuring out exactly what you want for the shot and then creating all of the elements, sourcing everything to bring that shot together. Without further ado, let's start with the product that we're actually shooting today. What we're going to be looking at today is this hydrating body butter and shower gel by the company Orchard and Vine. For disclosure I'm not sponsored for this or anything like that. I just wanted to find a nice product that had a good theme to it that I could work with for the purposes of this. That is why I went with these guys in particular. I think it'll give us a lot of room to show you what you can create at home, as well. Now, with these two products we're going to be showcasing them together in a beautiful lifestyle photograph. Let's talk about how we can actually start preparing this shoot to complement these products right here. Being a hydrating shower gel and body butter these fall into the realm of beauty and skincare products and that thing. The overall vibe for this is going to be pretty light and airy and maybe even have a little bit of a feminine touch to it especially, because the fragrance that this is an English lavender. We can build the idea of the whole shoot around that, so that compliments the actual nature of the product itself. Here's the thing with this product being that skincare airy, feminine vibe. This isn't something that I would want to have a really grungy look for or anything like that. Similarly, the way I would style with this, if you were shooting something like a ax or hunting tools or something like that you would not style them the same way that I'm going to be planning this. You really want to look at what audience your product is being marketed towards and then surround everything with the photographs around that. I'm not going to be having a really gritty, grungy background for this. I'm not going to have it be really rough or rustic or anything like that. I'm going to be keeping this pretty clean and something that is really soft and elegant for this type of product. Now, that's not saying you have to do the same for yours. Look at the product that you have and what you can do to build everything around that. In preparation for this shoot we want to think about the background that we're going to be using. I could do a simple white background, something like that but I want to make it more of that lifestyle feel. I could shoot it in a bathroom or something like that. But I want this to be pretty clean maybe, a little towards the minimal side and something that always works well for these types of skincare products these skincare brands is having that elegant marble background. Now, this is something that you may think but I don't have access to marble right near me and it is quite expensive but there are ways around this. For this shoot I actually just went down to my local hardware store and looked at different tiles they had. Now, I wasn't looking at marble because I'm not trying to break the bank here. But something that works very well is porcelain tile. Usually these hardware stores have singular tiles that you can pick up. Myself I just went out and grabbed this two foot by two foot porcelain tile with that type of marble finish on it which is going to work perfectly for this photograph. Again, if you're shooting something like any hunting equipment, anything like that maybe, you'd want to pick up some barn board or something like that. A little more rustic, a little edgier, so that way it compliments what you're going for. Look at what the product is and how you can work with that. Actually there's a lot of fantastic things that you can find as props, as background at your local hardware store, your local hobby store, anything of that variety. They have a lot of different options that you can go through and just peruse, look at what they have and what would work for the shoot that you are doing. Now that said this particular photograph, I'm actually going to be shooting indoors in a type of studio setting. I'm going to be shooting this from the comfort of my own home. But that is not to say that you have to do the same. I'm doing this in the effort of accessibility. That way you can look at this and be able to recreate it in your own environment but by no means do you have to follow exactly what I do to the rule. This is something that you can actually even get away with outside if you wanted to. Actually this product we could even go out and shoot it in something like a lavender field. But for the purposes of this course I want to do it in that type of studio environment but do not fret if you don't have studio lights or anything of that variety because later in the course we're going to get into how you can use what you have in your environment to create the best photo possible. In the effort of preparation I also want to talk about how I plan on lighting this and how I plan on styling this before we actually get into shooting it, so that way I have a plan going in. This is always something that I like to do. If you can have a mental image of the final product that you want you can work backwards from there and plan everything accordingly, so that way you get the final desired result that you're going for. With this like I was saying, I want a pretty clean, minimal feminine look here which is why I went with the marble tile that we have going on there. Now that said, I also want it to feel like it is a nice sunny day. Maybe the sun filling the sky coming in almost as if you're in your bathroom just enjoying a nice sunny day, just relaxing, giving that very soft elegant vibe. For that, I'm going to light it accordingly to get that direct harsh sun look that's low in the sky. We'll play around with some shadows and textures and things like that to give that overall feel. Now, I could shoot these separately upright or anything like that. But I want to change it up a little bit to make this image stand out from the other ones that are out there. For that, I'm planning on laying them down almost doing a top-down angle on this hero shot. The hero shot is what is going to be the main image that a company would use for something like this, so that is why I'm incorporating them together. This is the type of shot that would maybe go on the front page of a website or maybe even be printed in a store window or something of that variety. That's why I really want to concentrate on this hero shot to make it the best image possible. With that, I may add in some props in different styling in there, as well. That way it compliments the product itself and the overall image. For that, I'm planning on laying them down together, like I said, getting that top-down view of them laying down and I could have them upright but that's not what we're going to do today. Without further ado, let's actually start putting these pieces together and show you how an image like this is going to be styled. 4. Styling: We can see here that we have our marble, porcelain tile here, works very well for the vibe that we're going for. We have our different products here. We got the shower gel and we have the butter. Now based on the look of these part of why I wasn't going to do them standing up is you would also want a second tile here or a different background, something like that because you wouldn't just want a blank wall behind it, especially because we are going for that lifestyle product look here. Something that we could have done if that were the case, is stand the butter upright like so. But again, you're still dealing with that issue of the background. Also, it is very important to keep in mind whatever you have behind this because it is a clear liquid, you are going to see through behind it. You can see my hand there. You can see it through the bottle. Anytime you're shooting any clear liquids, that is definitely something that you want to keep in mind. Now, with that said, we can lay them down and start building our shot from here. But if I stand up and take a look at it, while it does look good, it's missing a little bit of something which is where our styling will start to come in. Now before we start putting different props and that sort of thing in here, there is something that I do want to do and that is to make sure both of these products are looking their absolute best. This is something that is often overlooked, but product preparation is a huge part of styling. It's going to have these looking their best. Five minutes of this will save you hours in post-production. I know I'm guilty of it myself. We all say fix it in post, but trust me, if you take these couple minutes, you'll be saving yourself a lot of headaches in post. Now to clean these off to the best of our ability, we want to use something that isn't going to leave any lint or any residue like that. A regular tissue or paper towel may not be the best option. What I'm going to use here is just some lens cleaning tissues. Now being photographers, usually, we have these hanging around, so you should already have access to them. If not, you can definitely make use out of them for also cleaning your lenses, a microfiber cloth or anything like that will do pretty much the same thing if you have any of those lying around as well. Then the other thing I'm going to use for this is some isopropyl alcohol just to make sure any residue, any lint, any dust, anything like that is taken care of off of these products so that way it won't show up in our final photograph. Like I said, this is often very overlooked, but it is something that is so crucial and will save you so much time in the edit. I just want to take a couple of these, fold them up nicely. Make sure that's nice and coated there. Then all we're going to do is just wipe this guy off nicely. Makes sure to do all the bits that are mainly going to be on camera. We're going to get the top there. That's looking a lot better already. This is just going to take care of any little imperfections that are already on the product and make it really camera ready. We're just going around. We want to make sure to get all the little areas here, make sure any little imperfections we can take out. That way we don't need to worry about them later. If you notice, I'm also wiping off the backside of this because like we said, we are going to see through it. Anything that shows up on the backside will show up in our photograph, just something that you want to keep in mind there. Now with all that taken care of, that's looking pretty good and we'll continue with our styling process here. Something I will also like to do is just give the actual tile that you have a quick little wipe down, just so that way, it's not going to be an issue when you go to actually photograph it you're not going to have any smudges or anything weird on it. Once we get them there, we can see right off the bat, it's looking pretty good. The marble works for it very well. But I think we can add a little more to this. We can dress it up a little bit to make the shot look a little better overall, especially because currently it's looking just a little plain and a little flat for my liking. With this being an English lavender product, we want to incorporate a bit of that in there. If this had some different elements like honey, something like that, and maybe you'd want to put that in there as well. But this is just a simple lavender product. That's what we have to work with and that is what we want to stick to here. These are fake plants, but these are a couple of different lavender plants here that we can use to dress up the photo. What we want to do is have them around the product, something almost like that so they can frame it up nicely. Something else we can do is if we want to, we can even prop the products up on it like so. Then that way you're just getting that nice, really beautiful and more dynamic shot there. Now, this obviously isn't something you have to do, but I like to do this because it does add that extra level to the photo. Really that's what's going to make it feel like that lifestyle photograph as opposed to something that we just shot in a studio. Like I said before, it did fall a little flat, but now it has a bit more of a dynamic to it and really worked for the overall vibe that we're going for here. This is something where any product that you're working with, you may want to look at what can work with that product, so you can get the best result out of it. Like I said, if you're using something with honey as well as on under, you may want to incorporate some honey, maybe even put some drops on the marble itself. If you're using something like a eucalyptus t sent something like that, or eucalyptus spearmint, maybe you want some mint leaves, you'll want some eucalyptus in there, so that way it highlights the product, but the main emphasis is still on the product itself. You can see here what I'm doing is I'm really framing the product with these elements. That's really going to serve to dress up this photo and give it that lifestyle edge that we're looking for. Now that we have this sorted out, the one thing that isn't quite right here is although I love a nice soft light, it's something that I think we can add a little more spice to for this final photo. With that, let's actually get behind the camera and start looking at how we can light our scene here and make it the best shot possible. 5. Lighting: Now we're actually going to light the image and work out how to bring everything together for the final product. If you've watched any of my other past skill share courses, you would know myself am a big fan of soft light and have shown you different ways that you can use a soft indirect light to create some beautiful images. Now for this particular image, we're going to throw all of that out the window and do the complete opposite. For this, like we said earlier, we want that really direct, harsh, beautiful sunlight coming through a window type of look. Actually, you can use a window to light an image like this, the only thing you might run into is that it might be inconsistent especially if it is a partly cloudy day and the sun is going in and out of clouds or anything of that variety, it may not be the most consistent light, which is why I'm doing it in this type of studio environment. Now, we can see currently we have a light going on in the back corner. This is what has been lighting this area for the past couple of segments here. We can see that it gives a nice, beautiful soft light on our product currently. It is currently angled into the ceiling, acting as a nice, soft bounce, giving a beautiful indirect light. Very soft, very flattering. But like I said, that's not what we're going for. How can we change this up to make it a more dynamic shot that we're going for. Well, let's see. Currently, we do have this pointing into the ceiling, but what I'm going to want to do is lower the stand all the way here and then what I'm going to do is rotate this so it is perfectly pointed right at our scene there. You can see immediately that does change up the look of things quite a lot, but that is only the beginning and we're going to work out how we can actually play with this to make it a really dynamic image. We can see there based on the way we changed the light, it is looking quite harsh and like that direct sun look. The only thing is, it might be actually a little too harsh for my liking and there's some things that we can do to change that up. Like I said earlier, we want this to look as if the sun is coming through a window or something like that. We want those refracted light rays to really add a bit of pop to this image and my favorite way to do that is take a bunch of glassware and put that in front of the light. This is precisely why we are using a harsher light because it will refract a lot more than if we just use something like a soft light. We won't get the same light-bending effects and it just won't have the same end result. Let's grab a couple of glasses, some vases, put them in place and see what we can do here. For the record, these can be just about any type of glassware that you just have on hand, it doesn't need to be anything fancy, but the more you play around with it, the more different light rays you will get and it'll look pretty cool. Right off the bat, we're going to throw a vase in there, we can spin it around and immediately you see how the light coming through it bends and affects the overall image. We have a couple more that we're going to add in so you can see the overall effect that we're going to get out of this. We can see here how we're actually really starting to get that look that we're going for, but there's something that I want you to keep in mind with products like this. Currently, you can see I have the bottle on the left and the little hydrating butter container on the right. I'm actually going to switch them, but I put them in this orientation to show you something that I noticed. On the actual logo of the butter container there, because it's facing away from the light, we're not getting anything on that logo itself, so it just blends in with the rest of the pattern there. But if we swap them, you will be able to see how that logo actually stands out. If this were something for a brand or a company, you'd obviously want that logo to stand out. This is something that I'm actually going to shift around right now so you can see the difference that you get between the two. This is something that, if it's for a brand or a company, you really want to make sure that logo comes out because after all, it is their product and they want to show off not only the product itself, but also their logo. We want to make sure that is front and center there. Let's swap that out and I'll show you what it looks like. You'll notice there how looking for the light on that logo really does make a difference. There is something I want to address here, which is the light that I'm using behind me. It is a fairly bright COB LED style light. Now, you don't need to use the same light that I am using. This is a fairly expensive studio video light, but you can get away with a lot of different types of lights for this type of look. If you have a speed light or anything of that variety that you can use off-camera or a flash studio strobe, anything of that variety will work very well for this type of image or like I said, you can also get away with a window and some direct sunlight, but also something to note is that this light is bare bulb on a seven-inch reflector just going through and then modified by a couple of these pieces of glassware that we have going on here. With that in mind, you can actually get away with one of those simple household light, goose-neck style types of household lamps that you just have laying around. This is something that is pretty versatile and you can recreate with a large budget or no budget at all. For these images, I will also be sharing my camera settings just so you know what I am working with here so that way you can maybe gauge a similar type of thing with your images yourself. I know some photographers like to see that, so I want to provide that to you. Additionally, I am shooting these images on the Canon 60, and this is actually being recorded via the Canon EOS R just so that way you get the most video quality; so that way you get the best experience out of this course possible. The Canon 60, although it is a bit of a older camera, still gives fantastic image quality and is something that I used for many years as my main primary photography camera. Now, that I have the EOS R, has turned into a bit of a backup camera, but it still produces amazing images and will work fantastically for not only this course, but also if you were to use as a main camera for any client photo shoots or anything of that variety that you may have on the go. For this, I also do have a couple lights currently lighting me, but when we go to take this actual photo, I am going to turn them off; that way, there's no light interfering with the actual shot. This is something that you may want to keep in mind as well. If you are using something like a household lamp, it will be a little dimmer of an actual light compared to what I have going on here. Because of that, you will want to use a tripod so that way you don't have any camera shake, especially if you need to open up your shutter speed, if you need to slow that down to let more light in, remember that the slower the shutter speed, the more blurry you're going to get, but also the more light you are going to allow into the camera. With that, if you have that locked up on a tripod, then you'll be able to open up that shutter speed a bit and you don't have to worry about the blur because it's on a tripod and you're going to be taken care of. I'm going to turn these lights off. Also a friendly reminder that when you have your studio set up like this, or if you're using a window, household lamp, anything of that variety, make sure to turn off all the other lights that you have around because they will interfere with the light that you have going on in your photo. We'll see how this looks. I might need to add in a second light or maybe some fill, but I'm going to try to get away with just this light and maybe if we need to adding in a white balance card, because there are some pretty harsh shadows going on in the scene so that way we will be able to mitigate those and lift those a little bit so it's not quite as harsh and dramatic of an image. But we'll actually see what this looks like first and then we'll cross that bridge when we get to it. Let's get behind the camera and actually look how this shot is going. 6. Taking the Photo: We have our final setup here. What I'm going to do is I'm actually going to manually focus this, zoom in, nice and close so that way I get the focus right on the logos here. The reason I'm doing that is to make sure everything is as tack sharp and perfect as possible. Now, I am shooting this on the Canon 85 millimeter 1.8 lens, and I am using an aperture of 3.5 and that is so I get enough detail in the actual logos of everything going on here. But also because we are using fake plants and we don't want it to look so much like we are. The shallow aperture is going to allow for these two blur nicely and we won't actually be able to recognize that they are fake plants. This is something where you may want to use actually real plants, but for the purposes of this as well as making sure they don't wilt or dry out when they're out of water. We're going to be using some fake plants, and our settings are going to allow for that. This is something that you want to keep in mind, especially when you're doing preparation. I knew that I could get away with fake plants because I was using a very shallow aperture. But you may not be able to get so lucky depending on the type of shot that you're going for. If that were the case, then I would just make sure to have a bunch of different plants that are lavender and just be swapping those in and out of water so that way they can still remain fresh and they're not going to wilt or die on you mid shot because that's what nobody wants. It's not going to look near as fresh or anything like that. Right after that, let's take a shot here. We have it focused. Actually something that I like to do when I'm doing photos like this is I'm going to set the camera on a two second timer. That way, when I take the photo, my hands being on the camera aren't going to cause shake. Using that two second timer, it's going to allow that camera shake to go away by the time the actual photo is taken. That way that camera shake isn't going to be there and then our photo will come out nice, sharp, and beautiful. Without further ado, let's take a photo here. There we go. Now that's looking pretty great. But like I feared, we are getting a little bit too much shadow down here for the type of look that we're going for. Because of that, I think we're going to pull out the handy-dandy 51 reflector, and then we're going to be able to lift that up a bit. Let's get that going and then see how this is going to look. Now we have our handy-dandy 51 reflector at the ready. For this, I want to keep it nice and soft and subtle as that feel. I could use the silver side, but it might be just a little too shiny for my liking for this. I'm going to start off with the white side and see how that looks. Now, if you don't have one of these around, you can use something as simple as a white piece of foam core from the dollar store. You can also use white Bristol Board or you can even use a white sheet of paper. Actually, this is the trick that I used in my very first course on here, talking about lighting fundamentals and that thing. If you want to check out some more lighting courses, once you've done this course, be sure to check that out as well. Because there are a lot of little tricks like that in there that can be carried over to something like this. All I'm going to do is walk the white side of this in, and then you'll be able to see the results before and after for how this is going to actually look here. You can see right off the bat here it is fairly dark. But then I just pull this guy up and right away, you can see those shadows get filled in really nicely. If I pull it away again, you can see it's really dark. It's better. Dark, better. This is just something to add a little more shape, a little more dynamic to the actual shot. I like it maybe about there. You can really play with the angle of this to find out where you want it. Because you may not want it directly at the side here, but you may want it just angled a little bit like this, giving a little kiss of light as it were. Let's actually get this in position and craft our final image here. Based on the nature of this, I would usually have a stand holding this into perfect position. But for what it is, honestly, I'm pretty comfortable holding it just where I want it so that way it stays at the exact position I'm thinking of. I'm thinking right about there is probably going to be what I want. Actually I'm a little bright in the exposure here, so I'm just going to up my shutter speed, just a hair. That's looking pretty good there. I'll take a shot, and that is looking pretty amazing. Like let's see there we can see the logos are nice and lit properly. Everything just looks really clean and crisp. We're not getting too much of the actual fake plant in there. It's just a overall really interesting image. Now, I do want to double check my focus a little bit just to be safe here. Thinking right about there is going to be good. Make sure it's good on both of the products here because I don't want it just to be okay on one of them and then have the other one be completely out of focus. That's actually looking pretty amazing. I'll take another photo and I think this is going to be the one. There we have it. Honestly that is looking pretty amazing. That about wraps it up for the lighting and shooting side of this image. But I think we may tweak it a little bit, but right out of the camera it's looking pretty good. We're going to have a very easy time editing and we're just going to clean up the overall image a little bit and show you how you can bring everything together in the final edit for this. With that image taken, let's hop over to the computer where we're going to bring this into Lightroom and Photoshop. That way you can see how to bring an image like this to life. 7. Retouching in Photoshop & Lightroom: Here we are in light-room and we're going to look through some of these different photos we took, show the differences between all of them and then how you may want to edit this to get your final image here. We can see here where we started off. As we're going here I'm just going to rotate all of these, so they are upright. We'll just go through and we're just going to rotate left. If you're wondering the reason that happened is just because of the gyroscope that's actually in the camera. It just got thrown off a little bit, so sometimes you just need to go in there and rotate that, so it all makes sense and nothing's confused. Now, we can see here this was pretty decent off the bat. We are getting those harsh shadows and the logo is okay and we are also seeing just a bit of the open part in the actual butter there. Then as we're going we can see we moved a couple of things around, we moved some of the actual light rays and stuff and moved the other lavender plant a bit and we can see how this has all changed everything and how moving the light really changes the overall image here. We can see this was a big change here because now we're really getting that nice glow on the actual body butter there and the shower gel is looking pretty good but it could use a little help, so that's when we bring in the fill and that's when it opens things up a little bit. Let's actually start processing this image, so you can see what we're going to want to work with here. First right off the bat I do want to open those shadows up just a bit. With that I'm also going to bring down the highlights a little more just to get everything a little more even. Then because of that we can also add a little bit of punch just up that contrast a bit here. Overall, that's already looking pretty good. If we reset this and then you can see that brought out a lot of detail there. You can see that shallow aperture really worked to make a lot of these plants out of focus. But I may want to add a bit of a blur when we actually get into Photoshop but we'll cross that bridge in a little bit. With what this is I want it to have that sunny type of glow look to it. I'm going to warm it up just a bit, not enough to completely throw off the actual look of the product but just enough to give it that sun-kissed look there. This actually is looking a little too magenta for me off the bat. I want to introduce a little bit of green there, zero that out and that's looking pretty good. It's not too magenta, it's not too green or anything funky. It's looking pretty good there. We can go down the vibrance. I'm not really going to play with too much, same with the saturation. I'm pretty happy with it. It's a nice punchy look. We'll zero those guys out there and you all know, I like giving everything a little S curve just to add a bit of that look to it. It gives it a different quality that I quite enjoy. We can see if we turn that on and off it flattens things out a little bit but still keeps the contrast in there which is something that I like. Honestly, because this is a fairly simple and minimal shot and that product style we're not going to play with too many other settings like the color or anything of that variety. Then from there with this being the photo that we're happy with we're going to come up to the photo tab, edit in Adobe Photoshop, so we'll wait a minute for Photoshop to open. We have Photoshop here and this is where we're going to get to some of those finer adjustments. We have our background layer off the bat. Here's the thing, this area is looking a little dark for my liking. What we're going to do, I'm going to bring a curves layer and just bring up those mid-tones a bit and maybe drop the blacks just a hair to keep some of that contrast there. I probably won't go full intensity here. I'm out of flow of about 10 percent and I'm just going to lightly paint in along here just to add a bit of pop to this label here. The other one is perfect, so I'm not going to touch it too much but this one we just want it to match that overall feel that we're getting from the other product there. We can see if we zoom out give it a little before and after that makes a huge difference. I may even back it up just to hair and decrease my brush size a bit and just painting around the top there and that's looking pretty good. Actually, the butter here it's almost a little hot for my liking. Hot, meaning it's a little bright. I'll just bring a very subtle curves layer N and I just inverted that using Command I or Control I, if you're on a Windows. Myself, I'm using a Mac computer, so anything that I say command this it's going to be Control on a Windows machine. Let's take a look there and we can see that just levels everything out a little bit and makes it a lot better there. With that said, let's take a look at what we may want to remove here. This line is part of the marble but it actually almost looks like it is a hair or something that's not supposed to be there. I'm just going to go through and take the Clone Stamp and we're just going to clone this guy out entirely. You're going to want to hit o or option-click and then that sampled area you'll fill in where you want to there. It's just a very simple and easy way to get rid of something like this. You can also use the Content-Aware Fill option. But I like a good old Clone Stamp myself. Actually this little bit here, I'm fine with that but that main trail that we had going along there is taken care of which is what I like. We are getting a little bit of a bright spot down here, so I'm going to take a bit of a larger size stamp there, bring the opacity down just so it will blend in a little bit more and stamp that guy on there. You can see that's looking a lot better. For this Clone Stamp, I do have it set to current and below. If you put it to current layer it's not going to do anything because you're on an empty layer and I don't always want to go with all layers, so I just set it to current and below. I will adjust my opacity and my flow as needed. That's looking pretty good there. I'm going to make a new layer and this one is one we're actually going to come in and touch up all these little areas that are giving us problems like you can see the different dust and dirt that we have on here. This would be a lot more intense if we didn't wipe off the bottles, so that is why we did that. We can see we have this little hair down here. I'm going to take care of that right away again, with the Clone Stamp here. But for these little specs and little things like this I'm just going to take the spot healing brush and that you don't need to hit any buttons or anything for. You just give it a little quick it'll sample that area and get rid of it nicely. I'm just going to speed through this section because there's nothing really of importance. You're just going to watch me hit a bunch of buttons and get rid of a bunch of dots. We'll go through this. You can see here if we turn that on and off, we got rid of a lot of those specs pretty quickly. Now we are getting a little bit of scratchiness here. For that, I'm just going to come up here with a fairly large brushed clone stamp. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to copy this and stamp it all the way along. This is a bit of a rough way to do it. But what it's going to do is it's going to really smooth out that light streak that's coming off of this. It's just going to make it look a lot more flattering. Now there are different ways to do this, but this is just my personal way of going about it. You don't need to actually do this particular way. But like I said, this is how I like to do it generally. You can also develop your own workflow with these type of things. But this is what I like to do. Because you can see as we're going along, it just really smooths everything out and makes it really cohesive, which is what we're going for. We don't want anything to really look rougher, grittier, anything like that. We want this to look like a pristine bottle that you would pick up right off the store shelf and it makes you want to buy it. That's what we're going for. We want this to be the type of image that somebody would look at and imagine themselves using this product. Then that way the client will be happy and you will be happy because the client is happy. If the client is happy, you're happy, that thing. Up here, we can also do the same type of thing to the top of this bottle just because it has that same glossy finish. Products like these they are finicky because you will need to go in and retouch quite a bit. Myself, I am fairly particular with these type things. I've had people watch me when I'm retouching these in-person and they have said to me like, why are you doing that? Nobody will ever notice it, but part of it is I'll notice it and it'll bug me. That's part of it there. But also, I'm of the belief that the client sees it and those little things stick out to me, they might stick out to them. That's not what I want. I want to deliver really high-quality work that the client and myself will both be happy with. Even just that little spot there. You can see I'm just looking for little imperfections that I can smooth out here. We're going to group these together. Just Command click both of them and Command G. Control G on a Windows machine. We're just going to name this layer. If we double-click on the group there, we can name this, we'll call it Touch Ups. We can see it does make quite a difference and even that nice light streak, it's smoothed out quite a bit. It is just made to look a lot better there. Now, there is something that I want to do which is just blur some of the lavender plant there, just to make it look a little more smooth and cohesive for this final shot. To do that, I'm going to create what they call a stamp visible layer. To do that, I'm going to hit Shift, Option, Command E, or Shift or Control E if you're on Windows. That basically combines everything into one layer where I will go to Filter. I'll go to Blur. We want to go into Lens Blur. Sometimes I've used the Gaussian blur, but what that will do is it just creates this artificial blur, whereas lens blur, it takes more time and it's a little more RAM heavy. But it's going to give you a much more natural looking blur. It's going to be something that is more desirable. You can see it does just blur enough of what we need there. Now, I'm actually going to drag the radius up quite a bit. Again, this is just to give a nice soft overall look here. We'll give a bit of a curvature to the blades. Basically what this is, it's emulating an actual blur that you would get from a lens. I think that's pretty good. We will hit, "Okay" there, let this do its thing. Then we will start masking in. What we're going to do is we're going to create a mask and then just paint it over some of those flowers. So that way, it only affects a certain part of the image there. We can see that we have that there. What we're going to do is hit Option and click on the Add Layer Mask. What that does is it automatically inverts it. Anything black is not going to be used here. Then I'm going to hit B for the brush tool. Create something with a fairly large size and a fairly low flow. We're going to go about 700 on the size there and our flow is at 10 percent. We're going to have to go over everything quite a few times. But what that's going to do is it's going to feather it out nicely and make sure that it just gives that nice, glowy, soft look that we want here. We can see as we paint it in, it's really working quite well to soften everything out. If there is any doubt that these plants were fake or anything like that, this is going to take care of that as well. I'll shrink the size down for some of these smaller petals here. Just blur them in nicely like that. Now while this is a bit of an unnatural blur because it's on that same focal plane, we're keeping out in a nice low flow and feathering it out. If I'm getting this here, I want to feather it out a little bit onto the marble so that way it doesn't stand out quite as much. This is the type of thing where if you were using an older lens that's only sharp in the center, this is giving that same type of effect. It still looks quite natural and isn't going to throw anybody off when they see it. We're just going to come here across the leaf and we can see when we blur it and actually suddenly looks really nice and natural there. We are getting nice light coming through the bottle and everything like that. It's just turning into a really nice image overall. We'll come down here along some of these smaller petals down there. Then let's take a look at the before and after here. We can see that just touches up everything nicely. Maybe with that reflector, it did bring a lot of that detail back, but maybe I just want to come in here with a soft brush. Again, keeping a low flow we're going to go about 1,000 on the size. All I want to do is softly paint in and get some of that marble porcelain detail out of there. Because that is why we did go with that background in the first place. We want to make sure that that comes out. But we're not overdoing it here. It's still nice and natural. We're going to drop the opacity on that a little bit. We can see the before and after there, it just adds to that overall light and airy vibe of things. We'll go full screen with this. Here's our overall final image. Myself, this is something that if I were a company who made products like this, I would be very happy with this image. These are the types of things that you can keep in mind when photographing products, especially in a lifestyle of settings, so that way you can attract the right clients that you are looking for. 8. Conclusion: If you've been following up until this point in the course, I wanted to thank you so much for your time and I hope that you learned a lot during all of these lessons. By now, you'll have the skills to craft, create, prep, light, style, and shoot a beautiful, compelling lifestyle product image. These types of photos are only becoming more valuable as the digital landscape is shifting and more companies are starting to value professional, high-quality photography, especially companies making these types of products. These tools and techniques you can adapt to any type of product that's out there and craft a photo shoot around them. Take these tips, techniques, and apply them to your own photography and I can't wait to see what you create. If you enjoyed this course and you got some value out of it, be sure to check out my other courses on Skillshare as well, where I go into lighting, as well as how to pose and work with models. As well as I'm a cinematographer and work in the film industry, I also have some courses breaking that down as well if you are a video cinema person as well as a photographer. Now with that in mind, if you would like more smaller bite-size pieces of content from me, makes sure to follow along on my YouTube channel, as well as my Instagram, as I'm showcasing a bunch of different things on there. If you're on my YouTube, you'll be sure to gain some smaller, more bite-size lessons and different things that I will be teaching along the way, both photography, cinema, and just life-focused in general. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you for watching this course and I hope you have a very creative day.