Mastering iPhone Jewelry & Small Product Photography

1. Introduction to Course: Hi, I'm Ferdy Neubauer. And I sincerely, thank you for taking this course. In this course, we're going to be using our phone's camera to do our jewelry and small product photography. And as good as our cameras are today, there's a good chance that in a very, very short time, they're going to become, maybe not obsolete, but there's gonna be a lot better and newer technology that are going to be available for our phones. But don't worry, I'll camera is just one of the tools that we need to take great looking photos. Another important tool is your lighting gear. In this course, I'm going to cover several pieces of lighting equipment so you can look them over and decide for yourself which one will be best for you. Even if you're on a tight budget, there are several lighting techniques and gear that you can use, that are very low cost and some of them free. More important though, is your ability to see light. And if you are fairly new to photography, you're going to love this. I show several examples of what to look for when you're lighting your products. And I may start with a simple lighting setup and then add different light modifiers so that you can learn what each modifier does and how you can use it to your advantage. I do this several times in the course as we photograph different items so that you can see how your light can be managed and modified. And if you're already advanced, you may want to skip some of this. But on second thought, if you can pick up one good idea and it's gotta be well-worth it. Even though our cameras technology and specs are going to improve down the line. One thing that's a staple and it's not going to change would be your lighting system. So concentrate online learning to see light. And then no matter what type of camera you use, you're going to be able to take great looking photos. So we have a lot of neat stuff to photograph. So let's get started. And I thank you again. try to give you an idea. 2. A Look at Camera/Phone Gear: So let's take a look at the gear that we're going to be using. And currently I'm using the iPhone 11 pro Emax. But anything that's within two or three years, maybe even older, is gonna give you outstanding quality. But it's just that every time they come out with a new camera or a new phone, they just make such improvements on the camera. And they also had the iPhone 11 pro max also has some, some wonderful features on their, in their app. They're built an app that allows you to take a photo and you can make all kinds of neat adjustments. Now when 11 pro Max came along, I decided that I could finally uses camera because I was so amazed at the quality that this gives you. But I don't want to get into much of that because there are other manufacturers that you can use just as well. I just decided on the iPhone because on unfamiliar with the iPads, I've been using them for many years, any iPods. So the first thing that I wanted to do was get a good case for it and undecided on a really heavy duty case. So you could see this is quite thick. And that case it's called the on her case. And because it's so thick, I needed a certain type of a holder and many holders that I had where I actually too small or didn't grip enough. He was kind of just sort of hanging on so I didn't trust it. So when I started looking, I came across the selfie stick for the tripod for smartphone. So this is a nice little unit that gave me some of the things that I needed, like the extra thick holder. And it also came with a wireless remote control. And although I don't really need them selfie stick, I have it and it seems to have a GoPro adapter on the end of it. And of course this folds down into a small little tripod also. And it also came with a GoPro style tripod mount that I mounted onto a quick release. And to me, this is important because I use several different cameras a lot of the times. And by using a quicker lease on, just able to just snap it on. Really good. It's quick and this is one of the best ones. This is a Manfrotto one. And with that said though, I would probably recommend maybe a little bit smaller one because this is made for a larger size camera. Maybe with heavy lens. You can get this if you want to, but I'm going to recommend the next size down. And many tripods made by Manfrotto and other companies have quicker leases that are attached to the top of the tripod. And I know that Manfrotto has a really solid quick release. Manfrotto is actually the old company known as Bogan. But anyway, so a good quick release is a must. Under separate resource section, I'm going to put links to some of the products that I really like and that are still available. I know that some of these products, they just changed so quickly. Sommer made one day and the next day they're out of business, but they are substitutes out there. So I'm going to do the best I can with the links that are currently available and that I'm using and that I really liked. Another great holder that I purchased was made by Joby. And this is a really a solid holder. However, it's not quite thick enough to grasp the IRA case all that securely. So I I chose not to use this one because it's there kind of hanging off the edge and I didn't trust it. And this has made really well good material, easily adjustable. And then when you get an adjusted, you can tighten it down really solid and it's going to stay. So this is Joby. Underneath our quick release, we have another important part of the tripod system and that's your tripod head. Now I personally like using a pistol grip. This is the Manfrotto 32, 65. It makes it really easy to adjust the angle of your phone. You just simply press down the pistol grip here and then you can move it around to the angle that you want. How cool is that? Yes, it those Squeak a little bit, but sound, there's no extra charge on the sound. Now, this may be overkill for you, but I would probably recommend if he can at least get a some kind of a ball head for. A ball head is very similar to this, is got one knob and the side, you loosen it up and then you can make your adjustment that way. That's actually a lot easier than working with a tripod system or a tripod head that has the two levers on. They're going from left to right and top and bottom. That's kind of awkward. So at least look at the ball head system. And underneath my tripod head we have our tripod. Now, I do want to mention that phones today have such great image stabilization. You may not need a tripod. However, if you're going to be using a weaker light source, it may turn out that the your shutter speed may be a little bit slow. So if you haven't a problem of getting things clear, then of course use a tripod or if you kind of shaky tripod is good to use. And there is also a another reason for using a tripod. Once it's set up, you don't have to move it. Or say for instance, you're working by yourself. You don't have an assistant. You may want to use a reflector holding it at or strange or unusual angle. Or you may want to hold a diffuser over the product if you're working alone. So these are all good reasons to use a tripod. There are so many different tripods on the market. I really like, well, the one that I have, it's called the unit block tripod. It's made in Great Britain. I'm not sure if they're still available. I haven't checked for a while. But this is a super heavy and this is something that you may not need also by actually use it for doing outdoor assignments or even on occasion assignments like portraits or other jobs. Because it's so sturdy ICUs this exclusively for weddings all the time. And even though people tripped over, it remained upright. So this is really a great tripod, but very, very heavy, very, very heavy. And if you can, I mean, if you do like this style, you know, feel free to get it. It's also a little pricey. There are many tripods that I can recommend. I really do like the Amman fraud or tripods because I think I mentioned earlier they do have a quick release on top and he also come with a ball head. If you get the right unit. So get a good tripod that already has you ball head attachment and then also comes with a quick release. Usually the Manfrotto is available with all three. 3. My Main LED Light Source: Next we're going to have a look at our lighting system accessories and some light modifiers. Now I chose the dad's knee, D2D. These are great units, just the right size, not too big, not too awkward. But they're able to give us a nice soft lighting source and we can even improve that, make it a little bit softer. And if we add certain light modifiers, which I'm going to show you in just a minute. But these are national units. They come with. Actually, I got these individually. It was sold individually. So how you get two of them, but each one came with a battery. There was no AC adapter for it. I do have one that I use all the time, but I also had the batteries because I've batteries not lashed railway. Mom, I'm guessing probably at the most a couple of hours depending on how bright you have, year flash or your LED lights set to. Now this particular one comes with you can adjust the power setting on here. This is set to right now, 75%. Let me just turn it saw so it kinda bright, doesn't interfere. And this particular one I have here, I have set to 1%. So you can see you can adjust it to the light strength that you need. If you're going to be using these two lights, you may want to add a kicker light, but you may want to add it maybe not quite too strong. So that's nice because this way, with a continuous light source, you can always see what you're getting. So you can adjust it to the way you want. And then also you can adjust your Kelvin temperature on here, which is the temperature of your, your white balance. Now I can take this from 5600 K, which is pretty much normal daylight temperature, and then I can bring it down to less. So watch what happens. It's gonna warm. Ok, so if you want to maybe add a little bit of a oneness to your product, or if you're going to use these for portraits, you certainly can. So you can see how now we're getting, we're at 3200. And if I wanted to take it back up again to 5600, notice how the warmth changes because now it's a lot cooler. So now we're back to 5600 k. So these are nice units that I do like. And I didn't notice that the light units are no longer available from the Amazon sourced I got it from I'm still going to I'll see if I can put that link in there. But I have several other lights that I was considering that did a lot of research on these. So I'm gonna put a substitute light on if these are not available in the US anymore. But I think I saw them there were advertise on Amazon. I believe it was over in Europe somewhere, but I'm going to put my boss sent a substitute. There's newer, has a couple of different lights that are very, very similar. Veiled trucks, I believe it's pronounced. Built trucks also has several different light sources very similar to this. So that's our, that's one of our sets of whites not reusing. And before we go into other lights, you'll notice that I have this because I do use these on the lifespan. And you'll notice on the light stand that I have a sleeve, it's called a shoe mount umbrella holder, which you can put onto your life stan OR tripod if you want to. And then you can put your light on top. And that's a place to put an umbrella here, which I use quite a bit. In fact, I'm using one as I'm recording this, I have an umbrella, a translucent umbrella that I'm shooting through. So let me just hope this up for you. I'll show you. So you can either shoot through the umbrella because this is translucent. So I do that quite a bit. Or if you're going to be using a silver umbrella, you can just bounce that. So instead of shooting through, you can also bounce this or you can bounce a silver umbrella. And of course this is adjustable. So this is kind of nice. So this is really something that I have and I have several of these that I use all the time. And you'll notice also that I do have a quick release on my nightstand also, and of course, lifestyles. Now some of these like kits come withstands. So if you don't have any of that, you may be better off and may be a bargain for you if you get the whole kit, meaning maybe two or three lights, light stands included, and some come with a gun carrying bag too. So that's a pretty good deal. So I'm happy with using these lights. And let's take a look at another set of lights that are really spectacular. You're gonna dig this. 4. An Economical Light Source: Now these are pretty amazing. I picked these up, I've got a couple of these. They were sold as a pair and it's called a ring lie or sometimes a column, a selfie lines. So you can put this, I think it's actually made to attach onto your phone. But I always like using light off the camera. So and I tried this out and these work spectacular. And for the small size they are, they're reasonably bright. And of course these are adjustable to. They have low setting, medium, and high. So you can set these up all different ways. And with the addition of light modifiers, you can get some pretty amazing lighting effects using just these two light sources. They ring light, and of course these come in all different sizes too, but I like to experiment quite a bit, so I get different things. And these do work very well. However, because of the limited amount of light that these ring lights put out. And if you're going to be shooting with your, your phone's camera and he auto mode. It may choose a relatively high ISO for you, which means that you're gonna get a lower image quality because generally a higher ISO is gonna give you a lot more noise than a lower ISO. Well, now there are some benefits and shooting in a higher ISO that you can get. However, that's mostly for when you shooting with say, a full-frame camera, like a Fx or, or even a crop sensor dx camera, you can get really good image quality onto these cameras because of the larger sensor that they have compared to a very tiny sensor in these fonts. Currently, maybe sometime in the future they'll increase of sensor size. And you can get some really amazing images at super high ISOs, but as of right now, null. So without getting too technical and too confusing, especially if you're new to photography, you wanna shoot at lower ISOs with your camera to avoid the additional noise which is going to deteriorate your image unless you're trying to do something. I'd see, Of course that's a different story. But for the most part, this holds true. You want to get a beautiful clean image. So if you want to use these lights, there are certain things that you can do. And number one is a CAPM fully charged when you use them. Number two, when you do use them, set-up at full power, so you get maximum power out of them. Now the other thing that you can do would be to use an app. Like for instance, I use camera plus two. And with that, you can set it to shoot manually. So I can select the ISO that I want to use along with the shutter speed. And usually when I'm using this app to do my photography, you don't really have to go to 100 ISO all the time. You can try two hundred and four hundred. And you should be able to get some really nice-looking images at those lower ISOs as compared to if you go say to ISO sixteen hundred and thirty two hundred, you're gonna see a lot of noise in your image. Now the other thing to keep in mind is if you're going to be using these lights and you're going to be shooting manually and you're going to be set at a slower shutter speeds, a 30th, tenth of a second, then you wanna put your phone on a tripod to avoid camera shake. So in a nutshell, use the lowest ISO that you can to get the best image quality out of your phone. 5. Additional LED Light Source: And another light that I use occasionally I might use this as a background light for certain products or might use it as a, as an additional Keiko light if I need it. And this is the made by near CN 126. This actually runs on six double a batteries, or I can also get a battery, a larger battery that I can put into here. Unfortunately, it doesn't have an AC adapter, but these batteries last quite a while and this is also nice. It's adjustable. It has like a little lever here that I can adjust this manually. Very simple. And you could, this is actually very close to the size of the data units that I'm using, just a little bit smaller, but I suppose you'd probably could use these for your small product photography. And then you can even solve in a line up a little bit more by using an umbrella or of course, your diffuser over the light. So these are nice and these come with a set of filters, frosted and there's also one, it's like a pinkish or more like a purplish color that you can adjust if you want to get different, like a warmer tone or cooler tone. You can do that. Just make the adjustment on here. So this is the cn 126 and you'll notice that I also have this hooked up to a shoe mount adapter, which I can put an umbrella through here. And of course, those hooks into a lifestyle. And also this is a great little unit, both for maybe adding a kicker light or if you want to use these as your main light, I suppose this would work as well. And this is the light that I was using earlier as a hair light. I had this mounded behind up on top coming in from the side and way above overhead. So great little unit. 6. Fluorescent Light Source: Another light source, and this is a good light source that you can also use would be a fluorescent light. And I pick this one up online years ago, so I'm not sure where I got it from, but I see that there are several manufacturers that make this and make sure that you get one that you're able to hook it up to a light stand. And this particular one also has a setup that I can put my umbrella in here if I want to solve and not the light. So now we have a nice, beautiful soft light source that we can use. 7. Window Light: Another great light source that you can use for your small product photography would be window light. In fact, back in the early days of photography, many photographers loved using window light when they did their portraits. Specifically north when the light, you probably heard that term knower flight or north when the light, so what it is, there's light coming in from the north. If you're from the northern hemisphere, if you're from down under light coming in from the south, this way you're getting a reflected soft light coming through your window. Instead of your window facing towards the east or the west, you could get direct sunlight and it's not a very pleasant look. Now, even some of the early painters use window light when they let their portraits. It's a beautiful light source. I do have a window that I use occasionally, and it faces the East and in the morning, the sun is out. I'm getting a harsh, terrible lighting, so I can't use it. If I wait until the sun goes up a little bit behind us, then I get more of a softer light coming through, more of a undirected light source, almost like a giant soft box. And when the light is especially good, if you're just starting out, you're on a low budget and you can't afford expensive lights yet, this would be a great way to get started. And of course, you could still use your light modifiers to fine tune your images. So here we're photographing our egg again using just when the light, and this is how it looks. And the window lights coming in at about a 45 degree angle, 2D egg. And as you can see that the left side of the egg is a little bit in shadow, so we're going to bring in a reflector to brighten it up just a little. So first we're going to bring in a foil reflector, one of the ones that we made. And of course, by moving this around, we can see where we're getting. So we're going to adjust it the way that we like it. So let's start with right about there for now. And as you can see, we have a little bit of a darker area as we look behind the egg and further back. And that's light fall off. So it's getting a little bit less light back to you and therefore it's getting darker. So who says we have to use just one reflector? So let's bring in a another reflector. And this time here we have a mylar reflector and we can adjust these two. So we get nice even lighting. Now later on we're going to be looking at a background that you can use if you want to get shadow less images. But for right now we have just when the light. So let's see if we can adjust these reflectors to get even lighting on the background here. I kinda like that. So let's bring the iPhone in a little bit closer and see what we come up with. So now we have an adjusted where it looks pretty good, but we're going to fine tune it in cropping even more. But let's go ahead and take this photograph here. When the beautiful light source. 8. Making a Reflector: For years I've been using the same reflector. I took an easel back from an eight by ten frame, attached a piece of Mylar to an 8.5 by 11. Now began at a crafts shop. Now one thing you want to keep in mind is if you do something like this is they use a piece of material that is kind of flat mat looking so it's not too shiny. If it's sewage shiny, you may get certain Claire's and hotspots and it might not be the best type of a reflector, but this works out great. I've been using it for years and actually still using it. However, I figured it's time to make a new one. So I saw a couple of reflectors that people were using. So I'm going to attempt to make my own and I'm going to share that with you. So let's go ahead and make one. And we'll start by taking a look at the tools that we're going to be using, some of the material and the tools that we're going to be using. We're going to start with a piece of cardboard. You could use a plain box if you want to. However, I saw that resolve store had exactly what I was looking for. And you're going to need a box that has a crease, a fold in it, and that you can use where you can embed your reflector. So instead of wasting time looking around for a buck, it was a good deal. $0.5 store. It's called a product display board. So you could probably get these there would maybe had across shop as well. And the other piece of material that we're going to be using is aluminum foil. I purchased this up my local publics food store. This is the heavy duty and it's a larger size aluminum foil. And it does have the mat kind of a flat finish on one side, so that's what you want. So the other thing, you're going to need a utility knife so you can cut your cardboard up. You're going to use a straight edge ruler that you can also use to measure the size and also use this. Where are you going to make your cot? And then of course you want to mark it to where you want to cut it. Simple stuff. And I'm going to use packing tape to attach them foil, you can use glue or if you want to. But I think packing tape will be less messy way, an easy way to go. So let's get started. Well, the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to put a piece of cardboard over the table, just so I don't slice up the table. And then we're going to put a door down. And notice here that I already have this measure loud here. I have actually from the fold, we have about 9.5 edges, exactly a 9.5 inches. And then the height is going to be 12 engineers from here to our mark zeros, 12 engineers, 12 inches. And from misfold to the end of the reflector is going to be 12 inches also. So this is going to be the first one that I make and I may want to make up a smaller we're due for rural small items not we photograph. Alright, so let's cut this up. Well, as it turned out, I made three reflectors versus the first one was measures 12 inches high, 12 inches across on the long end, 9.5 inches on the short end. And then I made a medium size. We're also and this is about eight inches high, six inches on the small side from the fold to the end, and 9.5 inches on the long side from the fold. Pity and and, and I also made a small one just in case for real small products. But also the main reason I made somebody's was in case I wanted to use snare roll reflectors and you can do that also, nothing says you're limited to one reflector. So small one here actually runs about seven inches high and four oranges on the short side from the flow to the end. Sixth Century, on the longer side from the fall to the end. 9. Reflector Demo: For the sake of simplicity, we're going to be using just one light. And we're using our Daphne D2D, which is about a five by seven inch LED light. And we're going to be photographing this decorative egg that we had on our Hutch. And we placed it on a sheet of heavier watercolor type paper. And here you can see the result of using just one light. However, we're going to be using just one legislate demonstration of how the reflector makes a difference and all of different types of reflectors that we're going to use and how each one is different, giving you a different quality of light. So here you can see we have a heavy shadow. And most of the time they heavy shadow is not really all that welcome and a good product photograph. However, sometimes it sets the mood for certain types of photography, but usually we want to eliminate some of the shadows. So let's bring in our first reflector. We're going to start with the reflector that we made using a piece of cardboard with the aluminum foil. And this is kind of nice because this as the two sides. So we can command and watch the difference that this makes. And we command, we can light the side up slightly. We could also angle list, so it gives a little bit of light coming in from the back. And this acts almost like an additional light source, giving it, given the egg a little bit more of a three-dimensional look to it. So this is using that one light with our aluminum foil reflector that we made. So let's bring in a white reflector, just the white board that we have mounted onto the easel back. And this is gonna give us watch. Jazz a little bit of a brightening up all the shadows on that egg. Just that little hint. When you need it, this would be good to use just a simple white reflector. So let's bring in our texture silver reflector. Now you see here again on the easel back and watch what happens. This is actually more of a medium strength Reflector also gives us a nice reflective quality. Okay, now we're going to bring in the silver. That's kind of a flat look. And this is gonna give us a lot more specular highlights as you could see. And of course we could change this. We can move this around to suit our taste. And for certain situations this may be a little bit too much, but if he needed, it's there. But by using this though, we can also get some nice highlights on the back as well as you could see here. Something else that's really interesting is I also picked up a goal, THE mylar here. And we can also use this as a reflector, so we can put this onto the easel back. And this is gonna give us a warm reflect. Her years ago I used to use a slight goal reflector when I did some of my portraits. And here we could do the same thing. We can add a little bit of a warm tone on the shadow side of the object if we wanted to at Cisco and throw off the color balance. But sometimes it could bring in a nice touch to your object. 10. More on Reflectors: One of my other favorite light modifiers would be a reflector. I have all different sizes here. And I have little panels I put together. Because sometimes say My life is photographing che, a center of earrings. I might set these underneath of bringing a little bit more lighter a certain area. And of course, I have my favorite easel back, which I have velcroed onto it. I could change this to a wide if I wanted to, but usually I'm using this almost all the time. I got this at a craft store. It's like a silver mylar, kind of flat so it's not too glossy. And this particular one here, I can adjust even more and this edge to panel so I can bring it in, turn it around so I can get a kicker light. There's a lot of neat things that you can do with reflectors. Definitely one of my favorite light modifiers. 11. Soften and Diffuse Light Modifier: You saw the umbrella light modifier that I use sometimes when I'm using this light. However, there's another one which I use quite a bit, and this is a diffuser. Now this is something that's very useful when you want to take your light and you shine through it. As an example, let's just say you're photographing silverware or say gold jewelry, or even gold anything really. And this just takes the glare off of that, which even a C. So if we shoot through this, It's a really nice soft light source. And that just brings out the goal tones and if silver tones really well. So this is something worth using. So right now this is set on a reflector extension that you can actually set onto a live stand and you can adjust it all different ways. And however, I don't usually even if I'm working alone, are not usually uses too much. I do occasionally by 2.5, but it's so much easier if you do work with an assistant. It's so much easier to have that person just hold this and there's something else you can do. Where do you see this? So here's what being resourceful really helps. Notice that my diffuser here has a like a little Lou material here that you can hook things through. So I decided instead of using another stand and invent another arm extension, all that stuff, you know, just getting in the way. I wanted to see if I can hook something up. So I found this bungee cord, and I just put this through this loop here on the end of the bungee cord. And then I just set this on the life stand here. And now I can set this and I can adjust my light. And now I can shine this write-through and I don't have to hold it or have an insistent hole it or had the awkward life stan with the extension arm in the way. And that's going to give me a beautiful light source. So this is really a grave tool and it's really a must-have if you're going to be photographing a lot of gold or jewelry that you want to bring out those beautiful tones on. 12. Setting Up Your Table: In this section we're gonna be looking at tables. And I know you're probably wondering tables, big Dale, how interesting can that be? Well, it's not too interesting, but it's what you do with them that counts. The first table is going to be basic. Second one is a lot more interesting, but let's get to the basic table first. You can basically use any table that you want that you comfortable using. Many people use those folding tables that you see, however, they're quite low and it's a little bit awkward if you have to shoot down or sideways. If he using that particular table, I decided to be using a posing table here. And I have raised pretty much as high as it goes. So on here, we're using the set down our background. And for the most part, I'm using a white foam board as our background. I had different sizes. Sometimes I just need a small one or I may need a black one if I need a black background here. And the reason the larger one is nice is if you're photographing something, say we have this egg here and then you'll want to issue that it sideways. You're still going to be getting in a white background here, where if your background is too short, you're going to have run off and then it's going to interfere with your background. It's not gonna look good. So on larger foam board is going to look really great if you want a White, a decent white background. And we're going to look at that. So let's say that you have something larger that YOU photographing and you need more of a sweep back here. Well, something else that I use quite a bit. And that would be a thick paper. This particular case, this is a watercolour paper, a reject Cretan that I used to have a large format x and printer. But I use this if I need a small sweep back here, thank gives the appearance of a seamless background. So let's say photographing this or, or something larger. And I need more of a sweep to avoid the, those horizontal lines going into the object here. So what you can do is jack this up a bit. And for that we're going to need one more little piece of gear. And that would be even advocate yourself a small table clock. And this comes in very useful if you want to put it in a little sweep and your heavy paper here, now this is one of the color paper by you didn't. I have other papers I I use sometimes also. And of course these you can get at the crash shot. You can get the watercolor paper more unlikely at the art store. And even a dollar store has some thick paper that you can use all over. Watercolour papers, kind of nice because it does have a nice texture if you want that. But here you can see now we have a suite. And of course you can adjust this also. How cool is that? So these clocks have many uses. So this way you can chew way down here. And then you're still gonna have that sweep. You still got to have a white seamless paper background. 13. More on Background Sweeps & Seamless Paper: Another way that you can create a sweep would be to put this all the way against the wall and then you can bring your heavy duty paper against that wall. And here you can adjust the degree of sweep that you want to make it higher up there if you're photographing something taller, and then if you need something real tall, of course, and you're going to have to get a larger sheet. Or you can use a seamless background paper. So let's look at that. Seamless background paper is something that I used to use quite a bit when I did portraits, except I would have large ones. But for your small products, you can get by with using small, maybe like up to 48 inches in width. And background paper comes also in all different sizes and all different colors. So if you want to use a seamless background paper instead of using light stands and, and all that, you can set it up rather quickly. I know some people that dealt tape a section to the wall and then they'll sweep it down. But you can make it even simpler if you want to. You can actually set up a foam board in back here. So we're going to bring this against the wall. We don't have to put a little clamps work. Yet. Willingness to put a little clamp here so it stays on the table. Ok, so now we can take our background material. And this is just simply why I like to say union all different columns. You just take the one end and you fold it. Let's do it like this. I'd say take your one end. It is full it back on the top of the foam board here. Alright, so now you have your background paper folded over the back of a foam board and now you can just roll it out. And you can also clamped this on his new one. And now you have a beautiful sweep. You can use this a photograph larger albums. And again, you're going to have to just clamp this onto. You're all here. I have cows everywhere in my room here. But so now you can see you get a nice sweet, and again, you get these beautiful colors like you might want to grey, Even a black or all different colors in between. So this is another neat way of creating a large sleep. If you need it. 14. Using a Plexiglass Shooting Table: So here we have a flashpoint shooting table. This thing is amazing. I love using this. It's easy to set up. There's a Stanford folds FlatZinc PUT this anywhere. And it's easy to set up and that's pretty much it. And it also comes with a plexiglass sheet, which is believed 24 by 40 inches, and it has two sides to it. One side is a high gloss and the other side has more of a matte finish to it. So we're going to use the matte finish. And this is easy to assemble. It just slides instead of little grooves here on the bottom. And there's two on top. Just snaps right in. Now also a comes with Eclipse, but you don't really need them because once it's set off is pretty much stationary. But they're there if you want to. And there it is. Now the neat thing about this is you can make this. You can make your products shadowless. So if you put something down here, you can shoot straight into it this way. And you can put our wind coming in from behind and that's going to take care of all the shadows. Or if you're shooting down on something, you can actually put a light shining upwards. And that's going to take care the shadows on your product that way too. So this is really, I just love using this. It just makes a product looks so good and so easy to use. I got this one actually at, at aroma. And I looked and I saw that it was cheaper on Ebay than if I were to buy it on their company website. So i ordered mine on eBay and I just wanted to mention it to you that a couple of times I saw it at two different prices. I got this when that 1995 I just check currently is 2995, but it's still a great bargain. But I saw that occasionally. Maybe don't take it back to 1995. So if you're in the market, if you want to keep your eye on it, if not 2995, though still a great price to pay for this. So this is an amazing piece and I love using this. Sometimes I'll set this up on a table too, if I wanted to shoot up little bits, like more sideways. So non-narrative, scoot down all the time. But under floor normally if I'm shooting down and of course I can just still shoot sideways at it. So great pj. So let's go try it out. 15. Background Adventures: While somebody online selling platforms call for a white background. As an example, eBay specs call for a white or gray background. And Amazon says pure white background there. Of course, if you sell it on your own website, then the sky's the limit. Do what you want and I Robot you. But to me, a white background after awhile looks kind of monotonous, gets really boring after awhile. And there are certain pieces of jewelry or certain products and look really good with a dark background. As an example, if you're photographing a piece of goal, a goal watch or any kind of a goal product. It looks really good against a black background. And the same with pearls. Pearls look really good. A really stand out when you're using that black background. So you want to be careful of the specs that you're selling with. So you went to abide by their rules so they don't kick you off of there. And currently, we're using different color backgrounds and eBay hasn't really said anything about it, but that could change anytime. So just be aware of that. But the backgrounds that we're using, we have several. In addition to the whites that you're gonna see throughout the course. These are some of the other ones that are different colors. First of all, we have to acrylic backgrounds. One is black and NIS WE photograph or item straight down. Well either photograph at a slight angle or sometimes straight down. And you do have to watch because of reflections on this. So you may have to adjust your angle. And the same with the white. White also is a nice background to use because one thing about these acrylic backgrounds, you're seeing a little bit of a reflection of your product. So that's kind of interesting. And some of the other backgrounds that we have, we have different kinds. This is like a felt material. You can use velvet. And this has like little sparkles in here as black with little sparkly. And then we have all different colors. These are 12 by 12 inches. And you can get these at your craft store, I believe it's on their scrapbooking. We have so many of these, all of these different colors. So we use these quite a bit. And when we use these, we actually say we're photographing a while, whether it's a, say, a pen as an example. And what we have little holes here sometimes that we just have to poke that little pinhole through so the pin stands up or we can bring our bracelets or watches or any small product we can set against this to give us color. Another advantage of using backgrounds like this is say for instance, you're on eBay, you're doing a search and you're seeing all the thumbnails and they're basically all the same. Well, maybe not all of them, but a lot of them have white backgrounds. And they don't really grab your tangent and then you come upon a thumbnail but has a, a nice bright colors, a beautiful color. And it's going to grab your attention with the hope that you may click on that. So it's easier to see, grabs your attention and hopefully your seller or your buyer is going to have an interest on clicking on that product. So that's a, another huge advantage. Plus your item is going to look so much different. It's going to give you an item so much more variety instead of everything being with a white background. Now, like I said, white backgrounds. Okay. Because I do use it quite a bit, but not all white background. I'd like to mix it up a little bit. So with that said, well, you're gonna come across all the different backgrounds that we use. In fact, there's even some where I might have something sitting on a shelf that I might use as a background. So anything you can use anything as a background, as long as it looks good. With that said, wherever it is that you're going to be selling your products, you have to follow their guidelines. If you don't, they may reject your photographs. Keep that in mind. So the sky's the limit as long as they're being excepted on the platform that you're selling. 16. The Use of Props: So let's look at some of the props that we use. And these are for necklaces Course, the first two for larger necklaces and non ne N here we had the black velvet and this one photographs rarely Nice. And for smaller necklaces and factual even use Ashland sometimes for bracelets and for bracelets will use something like this where we put the bracelet and adjusts hangs over. And of course we're setting in our background right behind it. Well, we can use something like this where at the bracelet is able to be open. We can just lay it across here. And of course this holds true for watches and for bracelets also. And for certain types of bracelets that fit over here, we'll use something like this and we use this for watches also. And for hearings we have several different holders. And again, we'll put the background right behind earrings to keep it interesting. And we have the magic. And of course this can be used for anything, necklaces, even bracelets, rings, watches, all different things that can be used in different angles and different ways. And we can also use this with a white background or we can put a another background behind here just to give it a little bit more interest. And this is an interesting problem because we use this, this is just an eight by ten easel back. And I just happened to have a black velvet attached to it. Because sometimes we'll put pins, shall just pin a pin into here and it'll be against black velvet. And this shows a very nice, and then we also use this behind the object to have a photograph in here. Well set up behind. And then we'll just place a background here, and then we'll use different backgrounds to get different effects. Here's an overview of the many props that we might use. And you can get a lot of good-looking products at Michaels craft store or you can get them online. 17. Light Box Intro & Use: Here's another great way that you can photograph your small products or your jewelry, and that would be a lightbox. This one here is made by pollutes. Now there's other companies that make similar boxes. This one here is a 16-inch size or 40 centimeters. And they also have a smaller one and there's a larger one also. So depending on what your needs are. But for our case, this is the ideal size. I also do have a smaller one, but it's not, it doesn't photograph near as nice, as soft as this one here does. Now, this one here actually runs on a PC. It's got two cables here you plug into and it's adjustable. So let me before I show you the insides, I do want to mention that, you know, when you buy a new motorcycle or a new guitar, unless you getting it from the custom shot, a may not be exactly how you want it. Well, that's the case here. In fact, most things that you buy today may not be exactly to your specs. So there's a couple of things that you can do to make it a little bit better and make it easier to work with. Because one thing I really not like is been frustrated with equipment. There's no need for that. You can just upgrade or something that's going to work for you. But let me just go through here and show you what this does have a well-made box actually. And this is different than a light tent where light ten actually is translucent on the size and a top and you can shine light through it. Well, this is a light box and it has the LED lights on top. And just open this up. Now. So this flap stays here. I just put a piece of Velcro and attach that to the top of the box and also onto the flat. And then now you can see now it's sort of stay open for you. It has an opening here. So if you just open up the flat and you can shoot straight down. So if you're photographing something that calls for is straight down shot, you can do that. And this is adjustable from quite low. And you can go to maximum. And that's usually where I photograph it out, usually on maximum. But far say we're gonna keep it down so it doesn't blow everything out. And if you look on here, we have two strips. If you look on top, two strips off LED lights, I believe they're like 32 LEDs to strip, one on each side. And it also comes with a soft cloth. They call it, which is actually like a diffuser. So it's going to solve and alive up even more. And it also has a reflective sides on each side. And that's sort of light actually bounces all around. So you're getting even. Illumination when using this, so you'd product is always let softly and it's quite nice. However, I like a little bit more control over my lighting, so I prefer using a lighting system that I can add to it, maybe subtract or change a lighting around. But for somebody who is limited in space, and once you buy this, you're also you don't have to buy any additional lights. Everything that you need here is an OS to LED lights. And the other thing that I do want to mention, it does come with, I believe this one k-mer, three backgrounds, white, black, and I believe I believe it was red or maybe blue. But when you put the background in, I noticed that I just had the white when I keep out winning all the time. So when I looked at the bottom of the box with the background in there, it was kinda thin. So the black background showing through slightly, and I didn't want that. So I just got another piece of a heavy or light cardboard actually, and I've put that underneath the background and I slid it, I cut it to about the same size and I split it up. So now our background goes over a thin poleward whiteboard. And now we can see through it anymore and it's a nice solid white color. The other thing is that if you look on the bottom sides, both left and right side, there is a black Velcro strip that runs across. And if you're photographing something that's very reflective, that may interfere, you may get that reflection in there. One of the items that we photograph, I explain that and I show you what I did to that, but you can put a piece and now the pis over reflect her in air. And I think I just use a translucent vellum that I just Scotch tape in there and I took that away. So if that's a problem, that's something else that you may have to fix. And the other thing is that because you have a lip here and the background or the floor goes down just a little bit. If you're photographing is small item that you want to photograph straight on. Well, you can't really because of background on the floor here, goes down quite a bit lower. So you have to prop up that floor. So the way that I do that is so you're going to have to get a thick book and I recommend this one. Most of George Burns. And this is a good size for raising up that floor. And you just have to set this underneath the background here. And then now you have your floor quite a bit higher. So you can shoot straight at your object here. And that's one way of getting that up there. But for the most part it works out fun if you're photographing medium or large size, not next. But if you have two misses something to get, it's a good book too, by the way. 18. Light Box & Props: Now this particular lightbox, he is large enough that you can use some of your props in here also. And we have a necklace holder. Later on, I'm going to put it in a bracelet holder. Again, anything about using a continuous light source like this as also is that we can see what we're getting. So we can also add reflectors as need them. And that's always nice. Sometimes I may want to add one from the bottom. Bringing a little bit more highlight. If you're doing a close up, you can just so you can still use these who just kinda nice because you can concentrate on putting a little bit more emphasis of light on a certain point. That's going to make your Netflix look more attractive. So let's try. Let's get this one out. Let's put a bracelet on here. And then here we have a gold bracelet. Now, we're gonna put it into here, which is on one of our bracelet holders. And we can photograph that just as it is with a white background. And I want to see what happens if we bring in a small reflected and we place that in a little bit on the bottom of the bracelets and we bring in a little bit more catch lights onto the bracelets and let's see how that looks. And of course we can photograph this just the way it is using our white background. And we can make a little bit fancier. If we add a fancier background, like we have on rose colored background here. Because we're going to be concentrating on just a necklace area. So that would be good like that. And keep in mind with post-production, some limited things that we can do is vignette, and of course we want to crop it to our specs also. 19. Photoshoot: Ivory Heart Necklace (part 1): So let's start with a photo shoot of the gold and the Ivory heart necklace. And as you can see, we have it in a light box. We have it about halfway back. And I have it set to full power. And I'm going to be shooting this using the iPhone's camera in the photo mode. And we have it on the telephoto lens, which is two times. So we have it's centered and I'm going to be shooting, everything is going to be an automatic. And right now I'm going to set the focusing point onto the heart area. And exposure looks good. So we're going to take a photo. Ok, let's just do that again. Just I always take at least two, sometimes three, just in case something goes wrong with the focusing. So now we have our first image of the necklace on our necklace holder. And the next thing I'm gonna do is do a close up. So this is what we usually do. I'll take a full length or close to a full love showing the necklace so people can see that chain. And then we're going to come in close and I'm going to do it just the heart area and some other chain. So I'm gonna move than that glows holder read just a little bit closer. And I do have every flight are set in a corner of each side on the front. So I'm going to bring it in a little closer. If I bring it in to close, I'm gonna lose some of that light. So let's see what happens. Okay, we're going to set the camera down just a little. So this ought to be okay because I'm going to crop it just a little bit more. So I'm just going to place my thumb in the heart area. And remember if we have to make an adjustment of the exposure once we set are focusing and exposure point, you can see that little son to the right-hand side. If we move it up, It's going to make it brighter as you could see. And if we bring it down, it's kind of dark and our exposure. So let's start that over. Going to click on it again. So it's actually setting it for us automatic. And usually that's pretty good. But remember you can fine tune it. I'm going to bring it up just a little bit. Alright, so now we have pretty much a full view and then a close up. And let's do one lane down. 20. Photoshoot: Ivory Heart Necklace (part 2): So now we're going to photograph our Nicholas laying down on our white background. That's come in a little closer. And we're gonna set the camera to the photo mode. And we're going to use the telephoto lens, which is two times. So here you can see how it looks already zoomed in. Let's just take one more. Alright, so we took too, but let's just have a look at them. Sometimes it's a good idea to have a look at them and enlarge. I'm just a little bit, make sure focusing is okay and now it looks pretty good. So we're going to go back again. So next we're going to have a look and see the results that we can get when we're shooting in portrait mode. So you can see that we have our f-stop is set to 1.4, and that is considered a large lens opening. So with a large lens opening, we have a very shallow depth of field, which means that if we focus on a certain area and anything that's in front and a load bit behind that area is going to start to go out of focus, as you can see here. Now sometimes that's useful, but in this case, I think it's better to have the whole thing in focus. So now watch what happens if I go back and I slide the wheel from 1.4 all the way over to the end, F 16, which is going to give us a really small aperture effect. And that's going to put a lot of the area in focus, which is probably the best thing to do in this case. So I wanted you to see that. But if we photograph something else where we have something in the background and we want to not that background out of focus. This is very useful and we're going to be looking at that in just a few minutes. 21. Photoshoot: Ivory Heart Necklace - Using Hand Prop: Now as you can see, we've added the hand prop and we're going to stay in a portrait mode. And we're gonna go back to the f-stop. And if you look here, you could see it's still on F 16, which is our small apertures done. He give us more depth of field. So let's just take a photo that way. And now watch what happens if we move our aperture from f 16 all the way open to F1 0.4. So now we get a really, really soft, almost like a misty effect. So 1.4 is going to give us a very kind of a soft miss the effect, which is kinda nice. So let's just see what we come up with. So let's take a photo. Okay, so that's that 1.4. So just going back to the photos, we could see the last two images were taken at f 1.4. And you can see the end fingers start to go out of focus. And of course the background gets very soft and blurry, which is kind of interesting. And then let's go back to the setting where we had it on 16, where everything or as much as possible is in focus and that's what this one here is. So this is kind of nice too, because everything is in focus as compared to the previous one, which has our fingers and back coin slightly out of focus. 22. Photoshoot: Gold Bracelet - Shooting in Photo Mode vs Portrait Mode: So now we have a bracelet and its holder that we put into the light box. Now you can photograph this beautifully as it is with a white background. However, sometimes I like mixing it up using different backgrounds because I feel you could add a little bit more impact with a nice background. So let's put in a rose color background. Because all we're photographing really is a close up of the bracelet. So I can just slip this background in here, make a little adjustment so it fits. And when we're done with it, we can take the photograph. And after all, we take the photograph, we can crop it and then resize it to the size that we need. So right now we're still using a photo mode and I'm shooting on a telephoto lens. Now that's okay, but we had the option of doing something even nicer. Ok, so now you can see that we're shooting in a portrait mode. And we have our f-stops, that two f 4.5, which is giving us a little bit background blur. Now let's watch what happens if we move this all the way to 1.4. You can see our background really goes out of focus very dramatically. And that's usually what I like in something like this. However, sometimes it's too much and it may knock your item that you photograph and part of it I'll East auto-focus so you want to be careful of that. So I think I'm gonna go back to around. Let's try. We're at 3.2 and that looks pretty good. We'll try a couple that way. Okay, as compared to watch what happens now. If we move it again all the way to F 16. F 16 is going to give us a greater amount of depth of field, which means there's going to be more of the area in focus as you could see here. Well, let's take a photo. Now let's watch as I slide this from F 16, you can see it happening all the way to 1.4. So that's the difference. So like I said earlier, sometimes you have to find the spot where the item that you're photographing is sharp, but the background is nicely out of focus. So right now it's set at F5 and that's pretty nice to actually. So now you know how to knock the background out of focus so he can get more tension on to the item that you're photographing. And you can even do more in post-processing to 23. Post Process: Image Editing Intro: So now that we photographed are necklace and Bracelet, let's continue and we're going to go into post-processing. Now, let me just give you my take on post-processing. Unless I'm working on a special project with post-production, I wonder spend as little time as possible sitting in front and other computer. That's why I want to get it right or as best as they can. And the camera and what today's phones, cameras that are in there are just fantastic and making a proper exposure and also given you the correct color balance. And also you don't have to spend a whole lot of money on software programs unless you want to. But for the phone, there are some inexpensive apps that you can get to do the necessary promising that we have to do. While the phones cameras of today has some amazing editing capability built into it. There's just a couple of things that I wanna do beyond what they offer. So currently is not included, but I think in the future are they going to put something like that in their phones? There's three things that I wanted to do when I edit my small product images. Number one, cropping. You'll want to get rid of unnecessary backgrounds so you want to crop your product, they're specialized, you can, number two, would be re-sizing. Well, there's no sense in posting a full resolution image if you're going to be doing things for your eBay side or you have your own website with your products on there. Because for the Web, you don't need all that resolution. It's just a waste. It'll slow you down. It will take up a lot of space on your drives and so on. And then number three would be cleanup. As an example, sometimes we may occasionally pick up at pace that does particle on either the item or possibly on one of the prompts that we used. So it just takes a few seconds to do that. So there you have it. That's my take on the three things that are necessary and anything else you can do for maybe fun, adding a few things in there. So you don't want to spend a whole lot of time doing your editing or at least iodine. So let's go ahead and have a look at our first image of our necklace. 24. Post Process Heart Necklace part 1: Okay, so we look at our first image. First thing we're gonna do is crop. So we're gonna go into edit. And on the bottom right-hand side we have our cropping icon tool and we're going to tap that. And we could do all kinds of cropping. And I prefer doing a free form kind of cropping that's not fixed on certain aspects. So in other words, it doesn't have to be four by 316, by nine, and so on because many times it doesn't fall into that category, so I like to free form. So let's go ahead and we're going to crop some of that top away here. Same thing on the bottom or bring it just a little closer and also bring us sides and just a little bit. And then of course we can move it around as you see making just right. We're going to make it so it's centered. And it looks pretty good. So we're gonna click on Done here. And there's our first image. And this is done using the cameras app that's in the iPhone 11 pro max. So let's continue. Now we have to resize this. So for resizing, I'll use an app called image size. And then once you go into image size, will click on the left top icon. And that's gonna take us to our folders. And of course, the one that we're ready crop is this one here. And as I mentioned, depending on what you're going to be using this for, especially if it's for the Web, you not want to use a full res file. So you're going to have to take it down to the certain spec that is required by where you are going to be posting this. As an example, my wife sells on eBay. Now, eBay has certain specs just to give you an idea. There image size, there are minimum size will be 500 pixels. On the short side, and alongside, it'll be 9 thousand pixels. That's actually quite a bit. And a maximum file size that it could be as 12 megabytes. And that is way too much, especially for online. So you wanna take it down. And as you can see here by the little squares that says width and height, I'm going to put the shorter side, which is the width up to 600 pixels. And of course I had chosen pixels. You could choose millimeters, centimeters, inches, so 600 pixels on the short side, and it comes out to 849 pixels on the height. And that's because we crop in free form. So the width is going to always be 600 because that's where I'm going to keep it sat as a vertical. When it's horizontal, it's going to be different. And, and the height is going to fall into place where abrogated does. Okay, so we had that set now. And we're going to say this and we're going to click on the bottom left little arrow. So now we have this saved as a lower res file all set to go for eBay. Let's go to our next image. So here we have a close-up because usually we start with a full length and then will come in a little bit closer so people can see. So we're going to edit this. This one is actually crop pretty close correctly in the camera already, but I'm going to take it in just a little more. Alright, so that looks pretty good. So we're going to hit done. Okay, so now we're gonna go into resizing this. And again, we're going to use the app image size at. So we're going to go and find out image. Okay, and here it is. And then we're going to choose this. As you can see, the width which is in blue, which we typed in the beginning, remains the same. And of course, the height may change to wherever it is to maintain that aspect ratio. Ok, so this is kind of neat the way it is. And we have it set to 600 and it comes out to 906 and the height 600 and a width. So let's go to, on that top right hand side we have a little icon. And that's gonna take us to some editing choices that we can do. And I'm gonna go to Effect. And here you can choose several and most of these are kind of useless. I do like one that they have. In fact, not unlike this one quite a bit more than any other apps. It's called spot. And that gives us a nice spotlight effect. That's kinda neat. So we can click on it, we can enlarge the circle and we can move it around to where we want. So we'll put it there. So this is something for spotlighting your images. That's kind of neat. So we're gonna say that just like it is. We'll click OK and then done. Okay, so now we say that one. Now one thing I do want to mention with eBay, they have certain specs that they want you to go by. They do request a white background or a gray background. Now currently my wife is doing all kinds of backgrounds. She likes dark sometimes the black background on a goal item is really nice, or silver on the silver item, or a rose-colored or all different kinds of background colors that she wants to use. And currently there's no problem with using that. However, if they ever do want to enforce the spec guide that they have, they could say that your photo doesn't meet the requirements. So I just want you to be aware of that ahead of time. 25. Post Process Heart Necklace part 2: Let's go back into another one. All right, so we'll do this one. And if you notice this was taken in a portrait mode because it tells you on the top-left. So we're going to edit. And of course this is the built-in app on the iPhone 11 pro max. And you have some really neat adjustment you can make with this. Let me just run through here real quick. If I type on the little icon on the bottom, it's going to bring up some adjustments that we can make. So it goes from auto and exposure. Now you can adjust your exposure setting. You can make it a little brighter if you want to dark your, if you need to. But as I said earlier though, that cameras up today give you some really nice accurate and exposures and color balance. And you have Brilliance where you can make adjustments. I think I'm going to maybe add a little bit of brilliance to this. Highlights is kind of interesting. It's almost like saturation can make your item a little bit more gold looking. And next you have shadows. You can reduce your shadows more if you want. Or you can make them a little bit stronger if you want. I'm just going to keep that the way it is. Contrast is usually fine, but you can mess with that only if you want to. Brightness very similar to your exposure, where you can brighten up the item or dark and it's lightly or keep it as it is. Black point. Kinda like a Contrast setting and makes your blacks blacker. I'll take it from kind of a low contrast look to deeper blacks. Well, keep that as it is. Saturation is where you can saturate your colors a little bit more or less. Now we're making it less, turning that into a silver or black and white. And if we put it on the positive side, you can see where you can really oversaturated saw money, keep that there because it's nice the way it is. And a vibrant here just adds more vibrant or almost like a saturation look more goal if you wanted to or less. We'll keep that as it is. Want is your color balance. If I keep it as it is, this is how it is taken. If I slider over towards the minus side, you can see it's gonna make it cooler. Sometimes I'm like making it a little bit cooler. It just brings up the whites more. And where if you make it warmer and it's going to give it more of a yellow tint kind of. And a tin I hardly ever mess with sharpness. I don't usually mess with either. Unless you're focus is a little bit off, you could make it a little bit sharper if you want. Definition is kind of interesting. It's almost like a saturation, but give it more, kind of like adding a little bit of sharpness definition to it. Noise reduction. I don't use that too often unless you photograph your item in a low-life situation and your image has a lot of noise, this can help reduce that noise. So that's what that score. And last is the vignette. And occasionally I like to use the vignette feature on here. As an example, you can make it high key. Usually I'll use the lower key, which darkens the sides in a corner slightly. But in this case we have a white background. I'll just leave it go as is. So we have that taken care of now. Those are just some of the facts that you can use if you want to make a few changes to your image. But for the most part, I don't usually touch those. But again, I'm gonna go into the cropping tool because this one needs to be cropped just a little more on both sides. Alright, so that looks pretty good there. And then we'll hit Done. And that is our full length for that. But we're not done with this because it's something that I want to show you goin back into the editing. If you look on the top left, it'll give us our f-stop F 16, which is our a small lens opening or aperture, which yields a greater depth of field, meaning that there's more of the area going to be in focus because this was taken at a slight angle. Focusing here was on the heart area. And if I touch the F 16 setting here is going to give me the low scale on the bottom. Watch what happens as I slide this from f 16 to about 5.5 at five, you can see we get a little blurb in the background. F1 0.4 is considered a large lens opening. Therefore, we get very shallow depth of field, so we're able to knock the background out of focus a little bit. But in this case, because I'm showing the whole necklace with append that. I'm going to take it back to f 16 so we have everything in focus as best as possible. So we're going to save this one just as it is right now. 26. Post Process Heart Necklace part 3: And as you remember, the third thing that I wanted to do in my image editing software was to clean up through a little bit of retouching, you can call it. So for that, I use an app called Snap seat. Now, all these apps, snap seed and of course they weren't, that's included in your camera. Also have cropping features. But they don't offer this. So we're gonna go into tools and we're gonna go into healing because healing is very similar to the Healing Brush in Photoshop. Right now we have the Healing Brush selected, but we need to go a little bit larger. So I'm just going to stretch out using my fingers. And then we can use the little rectangular box and the left side of the screen. And we're gonna go to the heart area. And then here you can see we have several thus spots on here that we can get rid of. And just using our fingers, we can just blend those little spots in. Very simple to get rid of. So there it is. So we have that done. And we're going to say that just as it is. And it's going to ask us if we wanted to allow to make a modification. Okay. So now with this particular image, we got rid of those spots and we're going to choose this. And then you can see again the width is going to be the same because this will be a vertical. So we're going to keep it at 600 is the width. And as it turns out, our height automatically goes to 850. Now we're gonna go back into the filters click effect. And then we're going to hit on spot again. And this is where we can make our spotlight adjustment. So make it a little larger. Okay, so that looks pretty good right there. I like that. Let's save that one just as it is done. And then we'll save this. So this one here is finished and it's now saved. Let's go into another. Okay, here's another one that was taken in portrait mode. And when you're using portrait mode, you can't get too close because otherwise it'll give you a warning so you have to back away a little bit. That's the reason that this one here is pretty far back. So first thing again, we're gonna go into Edit. And this particular thing that I want to show you after I do the cropping is very important. So let's start off with our cropping here. So we have to crop quiet a bit on this particular one. Alright, so let's leave it right about there. So this is our cropping which is now done. Let's go back to edit. And remember this was taken in portrait mode. So if you look on the top left, you can see our aperture. It says F 16. I'm going to press that. And again on the bottom we have our sliding scale and we're currently at F 16, which means we have maximum depth of field, so we have maximum area in focus. And something like this is a great example where you can not do background out of focus, which has got to give more attention to the bracelet here. Now watch what happens now if I take this from F 16. Right now we're at, at five. At 5.6 looks pretty good actually, because if we go to all the way open to around 1.4, we get quite a bit of blur, even the back of our bracelet here's a little bit out of focus and not maybe a little bit too much. It's all a matter of taste really, but I like right around 5.65. So right now we have this sense of 5.6. And you can see we have a little bit of background blur, which is what I like. And so far this is looking good. So I want to add one more effectiveness and I want to go into the last setting, which is vignette. And I want to vignette the corners here darker. So watch what happens as we go from this. We're going to slide this over so we get dark and corners and sides, which is kinda nice because now we have our tension going more to that bracelet. So you can see the difference that makes in your final image. So we're gonna go ahead and save that one. So now you can see how relatively easy it is doing. You're cropping, you're resizing, and we have to do any cleanup. And also I do want to mention when you're shooting in portrait mode, let's just go back to that because this is important to point out. You remember, as we were taken these photos, I showed you the effect that you're getting with the different settings shooting in portrait mode. Now you can also make these changes after the image is taken, like we did just now. So if you take an image and you're not happy with your, you're setting your aperture here. You can make your changes just as we did here. 27. Face Jug Photoshoot Intro: These are called face jugs and they're really interesting. We had these Honor Hodge for years under a pay down much attention to him. But I was looking for something to photograph some kind of a work of art in case someone up there makes their own artwork other than jewelry. So you have an idea how to write these and how to set a mop and, and so on. So I was looking at teas and I felt, wow, these are really interesting. And I thought it'd be kind of neat to learn how to make these, but I don't have any spare time as it is, but maybe you do or you know, somebody who does something to look at because each one will be unique. H1 is a work of art. And I think there are really cool. They look great. Display wherever on your Hodge or your place of business. But we're gonna photograph these three. I chose three. This is, let's see, mall, hairy and it's a Shirley. So I'm going to photograph at least one or two of these using different setups that you can take a look and see which one is going to work out best for you. So let's go set that up. 28. Building & Expanding Our Setup: All right, so let's look at several ways you can photograph this. We're going to start using just one line. And again we have our dazzlingly D2D LED panel that shot through a translucent umbrella, which is going to soften the effect a little bit, make it really nice and soft. And that's at just one light. And now we're going to add a reflector. Here we have, it's more of a mylar reflector that we have mounted onto an easel back. I'm going to bring us in to get just a little bit of brightness in the shadow side, right about there. And there's that look with one light, one reflector. And what if we want to solve in that light? Because sometimes if you photograph in really shiny objects, this one here is fairly shiny, so we do get some glare out of this. And we can just saw off in that glare a little bit. And let's do that by bringing in a translucent reflector, homeostatic set dish right in front of a translucent umbrella. And it's going to have soft NOW live up even more. So there we have that look, one light translucent umbrella. And then we also put a translucent reflector in front of that to soften it up even more with a reflector added on the shadow side. Now let's say we wanna add a little bit more highlight, two coming in from the back. So we're gonna add a kicker light. And this is a same unit as the other one, also a dash MNE. The mayor, by the way, I have it set to 75%. And the kicker light is set at 25%. So it's very, very weak compared to the main light because they're adjustable. Ok, so now you can see that we've added that kicker light, which gave a little bit of highlight to the sculpture there. And you can see just adds a little bit more shape to it. And you can look at these images and see which one you prefer. You might like it a little bit softer, or you might like it a little bit more contrast there. 29. Expanding Our Lighting Setup & Background Even More: Now something else that you can do, and I do this quite a bit because we have our kicker light is not diffused. Watch what happens if we hold our translucent diffuser right over? Or jug here, you can see it gets a really nice soft effect. It really turns down those bright spots, those highlights. So you might like this and of course you can adjust this to different angles that you can get it exactly how you like it. So using the same light pattern that we just looked at here would just don't eat background change. I added a scenic. It's about 22 by 28 inch background that we picked up at the craft store. And this is more like a cloud past stele type background. Now sometimes some of the places that you sell out may recommend a white background, which just fine. But I like to mix it up a little bit instead of having everything or with a white background. Sometimes a black background does justice in bakes, certain items look really good, especially certain pieces of jewelry. And sometimes a pastel color background might add a little bit of variety tweeter object also. Here we have a cloud type pattern. Now we're going to be photographing our face jugs on. So here are several different lighting situations that you can use. Choose the best one that is going to suit you the best. 30. Getting The Most From Your Photo Shooting Table: As you can see here, we're using our flash point shooting table. And this is a great way of getting virtually shadow free images more or less. And this white background actually also acts as a nice reflector. So we do get some reflective quality on those shadow side for right now I have it set up to shoot with just one light are my usual LED light shot through a translucent umbrella, which is our data's Ni detuned light. So now we're going to be adding and LED light, and this is our near cn 126. And the nice thing about this is, this sounds plenty of power actually. But we're going to put it again right behind our face here and coming in from the back. And we can adjust this background light to our case, make an adjust a little bit brighter, or we can strengthen it to give more of an impact look. And we're using the same lighting system. And if we wanted to, we can bring in and reflector just the brighten up that shadow side just a little bit. And it actually looks really good using just that one light with our reflector and of course our backlight coming in and we can soften those specular highlights on his face or her face. If we bring in are translucent reflector and you can see how nice and soft AI looks now. And that's a nice pattern. Just that one light has remained live with our bakelite. And of course we have our diffuser in front of our main light with a reflector added. That's a nice look. You may have noticed I do mix lights occasionally. Sometimes I use fluorescent lights as a main light and I'll add in an LED lights sometimes as a kicker. And that's sort of cash like a little bit of a bluer tone to it. Now something else that I made you occasionally would be to add a filter in front of this LED light. And in this case here I took out the diffuser and I put in a yellow filter, which is also kind of a frosted diffuser. But I'm saying gave our background a yellow tint to it. Okay, so here you can see now we have our background light with a yellow filter on which is going to give it an interesting book. And we can also add a kicker light onto it. Although it's not necessarily because the results we're getting with using just that one main light in addition to on Reflector and the background light is quite nice. So let's see what we got when we're holding our diffuser panel again, right in front of our main light. It just softens the specular highlights. We can soften light coming in from the back a little bit here to become down just a little bit. We can soften everything right about there. So as you can see the many different lighting techniques that we've used now we can get some really nice results if we had to use just one light mixed in with possibly a reflector. And in this case, if we're using this table, we have a nice backlight that we can add to it. We can add a kick allied. And of course, if you want to diffuse your specular highlights on your face, you can use your translucent reflector, so there's so many different things you can do. So I do recommend that once you find a style that you like, stick with that fine tune it so you're able to get results over and over again that are repeatable, especially if you're photographing a lot of objects in a role, it's gonna save you a lot of time. And yet you're still able to get really nice quality images. 31. Using a Photo Light Box: Another great way that you can photograph these face jugs is by using a light box like this one here should pay by pollutes. This I believe is their medium size. They have a smaller and a larger version. This is about 1516 inches. And it works great. It's actually really simple. So for something like these face jobs, I think it's a really easy way of photographing it. So as we look inside, but here you can see we have our face jug in here. And normally when I photograph this, I'm not full power, but because I'm doing a video here, so I get a matching light, I'm going to take it down a little bit so it's not all washed out, and that's it. So let's go and take a few photographs. And before we do, I want to explain one thing here. If you look inside here you can see there's a Velcro strip that runs all the way across on the bottom, both left side and right side. And that's causing a little more. And that's run in a collage the cheek here. Because these things law, especially in this particular one, is so reflective and so shiny, it just picks up all the reflections. So this is an easy fix. I just took a couple of pieces of translucent vellum or you can probably even use white paper. And I'm going to take this on the bottom. So as you look here, you can see those little black marks across the G. And as we take this on here, we're going to just make sure we hide the bottom part of that Velcro. Let's get the other side will do the same thing. We're just going to take this. Okay, so as you can see, those lines are gone. However, we still have a little bit of some kind of a reflection coming in. So that's an easy fix. Many times I'll take a small reflector. These are some of the ones that I made using the aluminum foil. And this is just a single sheet on cardboard. And if I place this, if I place than about there, it's pretty much gone. Same thing over here. So you can see by adding those low reflector panels or small reflector on each side that got rid of that reflection because this is a little tricky. This by tracheal one especially has a very, very high gloss to it. And it's going to act like a mirror is kinda pick up all kinds of reflections where if we use the other one, this one here doesn't seem to reflect as much as that blue one did. So it's a little bit easier to work with. But if you ever have that situation, don't be afraid to add things in there, or sometimes you may want to take things away. Now if you're shooting something that you want to shoot the top from the top down. This ten also, of course has a hole. Show you on top here. And then of course you're gonna have to remove that though diffuser cloth or even just cut a hole around it. And then you can just shoot straight down. And that's especially nice for things like that. Elaine down, like jewelry, certain things like that. So this is an easy way for you to get really good quality images when you photographing, especially something like this, a small to medium size object or craft. And you want it to look good. You can use a light hand like this one for great results. So let's go take some photos and then we'll have a look at them. 32. Gold Bracelet Photoshoot Using 1 Light: We're going to be photograph in a beautiful gold bracelet using just one light. And in this particular case, we are going to be using a fluorescent light that we're gonna be shooting through a translucent umbrella, which is gonna give us a nice soft light source. So let's go ahead and do our setup while bringing up bracelet N on a holder. And I already have my iPhone setup. Let's bring in our background. And for the background holder, we're going to be using an eight by ten easel back. And then we're gonna set this 12 by 12 background on here that we have right behind a bracelet. And we're going to bring in our reflector. So you could see as we move the reflector around that we can get different effects. And we're going to just open up this shadow side a little bit and give us a little bit more high lives in the shadow side. Now sometimes I'll bring in a small piece of a reflector that I cut out from a sheet of mylar. And sometimes I'll place this watch. Good. You can see the results. As I bring this thing in, you could add a little bit more highlighted a bottom part of the bracelet there. So let's go ahead and just leave it there. And I had the Bluetooth turn on my iPhone so I can shoot remotely just using this, this button here, because I'm going to have my hands busy doing something else. As an example, we're going to show you the difference that you can get a new goal telling here. If you bring in that diffuser. And this is a translucent diffuser and watch what happens as we bring this over the bracelet. So right here is without and that diffuser added big difference isn't that beautiful? 33. Gold Bracelet Photoshoot - 1 Light Setup Shooting In Portrait Mode: So we're gonna be shooting using the iPhone's camera, which is fantastic. And I'm going to shoot a portrait mode. And if look on top here. Now the neat thing about using a portrait mode is that you can set your depth control, which means that you can adjust it and it's gonna give the appearance as a shooting through a really fast lens that's wide open or close to light open. Now watch what happens right now. I have it set. You can see it says F 16, which is actually a small lens opening. And B is that you have a small lens opening. It's going to give you more depth of field, which means that more of your area is going to be in focus. But sometimes you'll want to isolate the object. You don't want everything in focus because it's too distracting. So let's go ahead and change that. And as I change the wheel and look right now it says F4. So here we get a nice background blur and we can even do a little bit more. Let's take it up to about here. We're at 2.8 and of course, we're also on auto white balance, which is fantastic. So let's take a photo and you can see how the background is beautifully out-of-focus. However, the end is that we're looking at is not a final image because we're gonna do some cropping. But let's go ahead and using a lighting setup that we have, which is one light coming in from our right side. It's about 45 degrees up a little higher. And we're shooting a fluorescent light shot through a translucent umbrella. And I have it set to use the telephoto lens on this, which is the two times lens. So let's go ahead and take a photo. The neat thing about this is even though you are shooting in auto mode, if you make your focus point or your exposure point, and if you look to the right, we have that little, it's like a little sun shape icon. And if we lower this, we can make the exposure of dark. If we bring it up, we can brighten it. So even though it's auto, we can adjust it. So this makes it really simple to use. So let's keep it about here. So let's go ahead and take a photo, another one. Okay, lets go ahead and I'm gonna make our background even more blurry. We're going to be all the way open at f 1.4. Here we get a maximum background blur. This may be a little bit too much of a list is try it. I'm going to bring exposure down. And remember, I do have that Mylar sheet down here. And now you can see without it. And as we bring an end, we'd get a nice little highlight. And we're gonna keep it there. So we're going to use that Philip Sagan, no photo. So now we took a couple of photos using just not one light with a reflector in there. Now watch what happens. This is going to be a big deal. We're going to bring in right from the top into the side. We have our diffuser. So we're going to hunger style holders just for the sake of simplicity. And now you can see the beautiful gold tones we're getting. Let's take a photo. And notice that if we move it around and we could find to in certain sections two, we're gonna change the lens opening back. I'm gonna go to, that might be a little bit too much. Let's go back to about 2.8. So right now we're at F 2.8. We have a decent background blur here. Let's bring in our diffuser again. You can adjust it so we get the looked out we like, and I'm just hand-holding natural right now so I can use your other hand to take the photo. Beautiful. Alright, so now before we've got a bracelet using just a one light with a couple of light modifiers. But what happens if we add a nother light? 34. Gold Bracelet Photoshoot - 2 Light Setup Shooting In Portrait Mode: Now let's see what happens if we add another light source and this'll be the cn 126 then near LED and we haven't about maybe a foot and a half away from the bracelet or coming in from the back a little bit up on top so it shoots over the reflector. And then also the nice thing about this light sources, we can adjust it. We can add as much light as we need. And the beauty of shooting with light like this is that you can see what you're getting is a little bit more difficult with Flash. But here we can adjust it just as we need to. So that looks pretty good. So let's go ahead and take a few images. So now we're looking at the bracelet with our back lay the near cn 126. And we're using our depth control, which we have set to F2, which is gonna give us some pretty nice background blur. So let's go ahead and take a photo. Okay, now let's go ahead and add our diffuser right over top and watch what happens. Isn't that just beautiful? But that the future makes a big difference. And also because we've added the bakelite that just gets a little bit more shape. It just adds a little bit more dimension to over photographing here because you can see a lion coming in from the back and you can see the additional highlights. So right now the light is turned off. Let's turn it back on. We had it right about there and watch what happens if we turn up really high. It's a little bit too much. It's kinda overkill, but it adds a nice dimension, but you can see the difference. And with a diffuser added, it just brings in that missing ingredient that makes it so much more beautiful. 35. Gold Bracelet Photoshoot A Change of Background & Direction: So let's make a little change in the background. I'm going to keep the lighting exactly the same, but we're going to bring a different background over. And then also to break it up, we're gonna change the bracelet. We're gonna change it to the other side. Okay. So we're using the same lighting, the same bakelite, and the reflector is the same. Alright, so now we have it set to F 3.240 depth control. Let's go ahead and take a photo and watch what happens when we bring in our diffuser. What a difference that diffuser makes. 36. Gold Bracelet Photoshoot - More Changes to Add Even More Variety: If you're going to be photographing and item of considerable value, well then it may be worth it to take several different images of that item because that could increase your perceived value. If you show a beautiful variety of images, it can help you make more money for the item that you're selling. So let's go ahead and set up a couple of different backgrounds. So we're gonna photograph are bracelet this time using a fluorescent light that we're shooting through a translucent umbrella. We're going to start that way with just one light. So let's fill up our set. So let's put down our background, which is 8.5 by 11 inch background scrapbook and paper that we get at Michaels or store like that. And this actually several years all it's got some holes in it. So sometimes if the whole show up, I might have to do some retouching to get rid of that. But let's put that down. And let's put a bracelet where we want it, which would be right about here. And we're gonna be shooting this sideways here. Most items that were photographing with shooting at about a 45 degree angle, like in this case here. Sometimes if we're photographing gold and silver will shoot from the top. And then we'll add that diffuser over there so we get that beautiful gold or silver telephone, whatever it is that we're photographing. So let's go ahead and try this. And because we're shooting at an angle, I'm going to photograph this pretty much coming straight in here so we can see the front of the bracelet. So just in case we need a sweep back here, I'm going to take one of our ring lights this as many uses. Not only is it a good rain light, but it also acts. It has a sweep. So we can put it back here. And it's going to raise up the background and back just a little bit so we don't get that cutoff. So now we can photograph this from the front hair and we shouldn't have any runoff on the background here and it's going to be a nice sweep. So let's go ahead and add our reflector, which is going to be the mylar silver reflector. And you can see that as we move this around, how it changes the effect that we get from that. So for now, let's keep it right about there. So let's go ahead and take a photo that way. 37. Gold Bracelet Photoshoot - The Difference a Second Light Can Make: So let's go ahead and add in a second light. And if we turn this on, you can see the effect that this gets. Now we have to remember that our light is coming in from the back side. And if our reflector is too close, it's kinda block that second light. So we wanna make sure it's back far enough to get the effect that we want. So now we're using our mainline, the fluorescent shot through a translucent umbrella. And we have our second line, which is the near cn 126, I believe it is. And I have a diffuser over the light here, the LED light. Now, even though I'm mixing a fluorescent light and an LED light, it works in those cases, so you'll want to be careful if you have any problems. You may want to stick with the same light source, but in this case, it works. So let's go ahead and take a foreign oil that way. So let's go ahead and do something really meeting n, And we're going to bring in our diffuser. And this'll be the money shot because we're going to bring it in place here. So both lights now are shining through my diffuser, softening up that light and giving us a beautiful gold tone on not bracelet. So let's go ahead and take a couple of photos that way. And another way that we can go is we have an acrylic sheet. This is the black one. We also have a white one. Bought a twelv by 12 inch. And let's put the bracelet down right about here again. And we're going to be shooting in from the front. Even though this background is rigid, We're going to prop it up just a little bit. So we get a little bit of a sweep. So put it right about here, bring in our reflector next. And again, you can see the effect that a reflector as we can move it around to get the effect that we're looking for and keep it there. So right now knows one look. And let's bring in a second light one more time. Right about there. They're not looks nice too. And again, we're going to add our magical diffuser. We're gonna put it right over the top. So both lights now are going to be diffused. Given that gold bracelet, a beautiful goal tone. There it is. So now you've seen several different ways that you can add their frontal lobes till your bracelet. And you could do the same thing for no matter what you're photographing, whether its rings. With rings it CZ you get all different size. And that blesses the same thing, all different angles. So this will give you some idea of some of the things you can do. And this is just the beginning. Um, uh, you can do more and more if you want to. You can experiment on your own to get that looked at. You're looking for. 38. Gold Bracelet Photoshoot - Overhead Diffused Lighting: Now we'll move our light source behind the table and we're going to raise it up about three feet from the table. And we're still using a one light source, which is a fluorescent light that was shooting through a translucent umbrella. Now you can also get a similar factor for you're going to be using an LED light and you shoot at through a translucent umbrella also. And if you're going to be using an app like camera plus two, you can all show, adjust your color balance to get exactly the way that you want it on this next setup. Notice that I have an older piece of a phone board down here because we're going to put a felt background, black background here. And it's got some sparklers in here. And this is about 8.5 by 11. And the reason I have an old foam board here is because many times if I set up or bracelet here, let's see, we can set this up here. And in this particular case, it should stand. Yep, so here works good standing on its own. However, most bracelets town do that. So in a case like that, here's what I do. I'll get a nail and we'll just poke it through. Therefore, it's going to be poked through the old foam board. And now this is a little bit of assured nail auto probably on this bracelet, use a longer one, but you get the idea and we'll just set the bracelet on here and I'll photograph at that way. Now because we have a nail there. We're going to have to do some postproduction processing and take that nail out. And then we're going to bring in our aluminum foil reflect her that we made, put her off to inside here little bit. I'm also going to bring in an eight by ten easel back. And I'm going to use the easel back just to support our diffuser because I'm by myself here. So instead of holding it or setting up our arm extension, I'm going to just set it on the easel back and now we have, it's also resting on our reflector here. So let's see if that works. Not too good. Okay, there we go. So I can adjust the diffuser, bring it little bit forward more. And now we're working in a tight space here. So I'm going to have to hand hold the phone and I'm gonna bring to phone up here. And I may have to lift it up a little bit higher and non-linear shoot basically straight down or a little bit of an angle at the bracelet. And then you can see how beautiful the image gets with that diffuser added. And just one light source on this. 39. Gold Basket Flower Pin Photoshoot: So I have been photographing a gold beautiful, it looks like flowers, a flower pen with pearls. And I started off photographing this in a traditional way. And first image I took, well, I put it on a black background here, which is art easel back, which has a velvet material over it. So I pinned it through. And then you can see that it's hanging onto that easel back. And our lighting consists of the main light coming in from the right side shot through our translucent umbrella. And then I also brought in a reflector to the left side. And I also brought in a small reflector underneath just to bring in a little bit more light than you can see the highlights actually in a pearls. And in addition, I also added a translucent reflector in front of the umbrella to soften the light even more, which is gonna enhance our gold tone in this basket here. So here you can see it or resolve photographed against a black background. And if you look at it looks like some of these flowers are translucent. So which means that if you hold them up to a light, you can see a little bit of light coming through. So I thought, let's photograph this against a light background and see if we can get some light coming in from behind. So next thing I wanted to put this against a white background and the lighting is the same. The main lines coming in from the right side shot through a translucent umbrella. And we also have our translucent reflect or in front of the umbrella, softening the light up even more. And I wanted to put a little bit more light onto the background. So I moved the reflector and very, very close. And then you can see here we're getting a little bit more light coming in from the back. And this is one way using our white background. And in addition to the reflector that we have on our left side, I also added a smaller reflector coming in a little bit from the front just to brighten up the front area and to add a little bit more catch lights. So then here you can see the results. And next I wanted to see if we can enhance that light coming in from the back a little bit more, just so we get no's, flowers brighten up a little bit more. So I decided to bring in our Fly's point shooting table, which as you remember, has our plexiglass in the front and were able to bring in light underneath or behind the plexiglass, which is gonna give us a little bit of back light to the pin. And then we can see some of those beautiful colors shining through. So by placing it on the table here, you can see how it looks when writing this the same way, our main lights coming in from the right side shot through a translucent umbrella. And right in front of that translucent umbrella. Again, we have our translucent reflector, so the lighting is the same. And we also added our reflector coming in from the left hand side. And then here we have our final image that I crop just a little bit and I increase the exposure just a little bit more to get a little bit more light onto those flowers. 40. Several Lighting Techniques Used to Photograph a Bracelet: Okay, so here we're going to be photographing or a bracelet and we're gonna go through several different lighting methods that you can use. So right now we have one LED light are designated light coming in from the side. And so you can see by the shadow where maybe 24 inches away, 45 agrees that a camera. And again, this is just one light. Watch. What happens if I put a diffuser or 30-inch diffuser in front of that light. Cag is kinda softens everything up, including the shadow. So that's kinda nice. So let's add a background line here and here I'm also using the daphne LED light and a habit down to about 50% power were the main light is about 75% power. So let's turn out on. Okay, so now you can see the difference when we add that light coming in from underneath a table and from the back. So there's one thing still missing, and we want to open up the shadows a little bit on our left side. So let's bring in a reflector and watch what happens here. So here's without. And as we bring it in, you can really see a highlight there now in the goal, and that's a nice touch. K. So we have the reflector or backlight, and we have our main light at about 45 degrees. And now I'm going to bring in the diffuser again and look out beautiful, that is, That's a nice soft light. Let's take a photo. So here you can see we ended up with a beautiful photograph of the bracelet. Soft lead, lead and just soften up the shadows. Now something else that you can do, we're gonna do right now is we're gonna take away our diffuser. Now we're going to bring in an umbrella. And this umbrella is translucent also. So we get a very similar effect, just like we did when we held our diffuser. And this is about a 30 inch umbrella. So here again, we're shooting through our translucent umbrella and we have our backlight GIS as before. And I'm going to add the reflector right now so you can see what it's gonna do. So by adding a reflector, we got just a little bit more light into the shadow area. And let's take a photo. Okay, so here it is on a bracelet holder. Again, we have our translucent umbrella with a reflector and we had a backlight coming in from the back and the bottom. 41. Camera & Post Process Apps (Intro & Snapseed): Next we're going to have a look at the apps that I use in our product photography. Now in many of the phones off today of course have outstanding cameras and some also have outstanding editing features in there too. However, somebody apps offer more than what the cameras due. So I like to use that to my advantage. So that's what we're going to look at now. So let's take a look. Let's take a look at an app that's one of my favorites and it's been a favorite among other photographers as well for many years with your, if you're going to be doing phone photography and that is snap seed. So once we go into Snap seed, I already have an image up here. And if we go to current, this is going to be the image that you import it. So unless you make any changes to your image, this is going to be how it currently looks. So we have current. And if you look on the filters on the bottom, certainly with his small products, you want to record dam as accurately as possible. So you may not need any of these filters, but just for fun, you could use actually pop. I'm going to click on pop. And you can see pop just gives it a little bit more saturation. It just makes the contrast a little bit increase in the colors pop out a little bit more. So if we go back to current, it's going to take us back to what we imported. And some of these for fun on the end to, I should probably show you Are, they do have some nice black and whites in here to structure fine art silhouette. So snaps C does offer some pretty interesting filters for maybe other applications. But let's go back to current. And again, here's where we started from. Now if we go back to the beginning, I recommend if you click on that little icon on the top right, It's going to give us a choice of tutorials, help, and feedback in settings. Now if you go into settings, you can set these up as you want. And I have mine save to a snob seat album. I'm not going to have them doing any resizing on my image and my format and quality is JPEG. That's what I shoot and that's what we upload to eBay. But you can set these two How you want. So let's go back again. So when you go to open its kinda ask you if you want to save any of the changes and when you hit open, all your changes will be unsaved. So just so you're aware of that. So we're going to open, and this is where you can actually choose all your images from. So when you click on a certain one, and that's what you're going to get. So let's go back again and we'll click on that little icon on the top right. And then here, the first one, it says tutorials. They have some really good tutorials on here that can help you with your product photography. As an example, one that I recommend that you watch would be mastering the brush tool. So this is going to tell you all the neat things you can do with that brush. And as quite a bit in here, that's going to teach you a lot about snap seed because it really does so much, it's really good to know. So let's go back and I'm going to find an image that we can use using the brush tool. So let's go ahead and open it. And for those we're gonna go way back. So here's an image that I took. It may be a little bit overexposed because if we enlarged us, yeah, we can see all the little specks of dust on this black prop here that we use. Now, we can do certain things to fix that. If we go into, we can try using some of the filters like as an example here. This is the portrait filter and this gets rid of some of those little specks. So that's gonna save you a lot of time. So let's go back to current. And this is how it was when we first opened this image up. I'm going to hit the accent. I'm gonna go back to Tools and let's hit the brush and wants some of the neat things that you can do with a brush. And if you watch that low tutorial, it's going to explain a whole lot more. But as an example, let's say we wanna get rid of those spots. There are several different ways we can do it. One of the ways would be Dodge and Burn. Let's use that, not Dodge and Burn is something that was popular in the old days of photography, which was not really that long ago. Where dodge means if you're making an enlargement of a print and you're dodging and you have a little tool that's maybe like a circle or oval shape as the or larger is projecting that image onto the photographic paper. And you putting that tool in front of certain areas, you moving around and it's blocking some light from hitting that. So it's called dodging. It's the opposite burn where Bern you would use a tool that has a little hole in it. So if there's a certain section on your image that you're enlarging. And you wanna make it a little bit darker. You can now move that cardboard around which has little Holand, and that's going to Dark Net Up. So we're going to use burn for this. So as you look here, it says Dodge and Burn. So we're at Dodge and Burn and we're at ten. Now, I'm going to bring this up old bit. And then now we're going to use our fingers as the brush. And here you can see we're making that area darker where all it does spots are. And that's helping that out a little bit. And if you click on the little I icon on the bottom here, you can see it's going to bring up the little red area that we are already burned in. And let's go a little bit on the bottom. Of course, I'm not going to be as careful as they normally would, but even if you make a mistake here, you can correct. I'll show you that in just a second. If we click on the I again, of course that little red area goes away. Okay, now you can see a little bit where we overlapped on the gold jewelry here. So I'm silane, Dodge and Burn, but we're going to take us back to where it says eraser. So I'm going to again use my finger and I'm going to erase that red area. And then if you make a mistake, if you raise too much, of course they need just call back again. And you can just brush in the area that you want to burn. And if we click on the i again, it's gonna get rid of that red film. Now we can see now what we have. So I'm going to reduce this. So that's a lot better than it was when we started with. So the brush tool can be very useful and it also does other things for you as well. You can make you expose your correction using a brush tool. You can increase saturation temperature. So I am going to say that, so I'm going to click on the check mark here. Okay, so next we're gonna look out probably my favorite tool in snap seat and that's healing. So we'll click on that. And the first thing we're gonna do is we're going to pinch this so we're going to increase the size of the image. And then you can see there's a rectangular box on the left bottom. And by moving this around and we can get to the point. You can see a few little desk. And of course you can see a more when it's magnified, but this is just to show you that you can't get rid of these. So just using our finger as a brush, we just paint these out a little bit and this is very quick Actually. Let's move it over. Yet there's one more over here, and that's it. We could fine tune it more if you want to, but you get an idea of the healing brush here. And again, that's one of my favorite tools in this great program called Snap seed. 42. Camera & Post Process Apps - Camera +2: When there's times that I need features that my phone's camera doesn't have. I'll use an app like camera plus two. So if we go into Camera Plus two, there's a couple things that I really like by using Camera Plus two. And let's just go into some of the settings here. And if you look here now we can select, I just happened to choose square because I had a camera setup as vertical. And if I shoot score, it's going to work out better than going into 16 by nine. And the other feature I really like in Camera Plus two is that I'm able to shoot manual. I can set my exposure manually. Now if you're new to photography, I really urge you to learn the basics of it at least so you know what the terms are. And once you start understanding what your camera settings can do, it's gonna make you photography a lot more fun, and it's going to help you improve your photography tremendously. So let's go back to shooting manually. And as you can see here, we had manually selected. On the bottom we have a scale. Now generally in photography, the lower the ISO, the higher the image quality as a rule, all things being equal. And right now you can see that our ISO and this particular app, it goes down to ISO 25, but we can get good image quality at a 100, no problem. So let's just take it up to a 100. And I do have a camera on the tripod, so I could easily get by with shooting ISO 25 in case I need a, a really long exposure or slow shutter speed to avoid camera shake. And that's something that you want to watch for also camera shake. But if you have enough light on your product, you shouldn't have to worry about that. So looking at our exposure here, you can see that we're over-exposed at a 100 ISO. And we have our shutter speed is set to 1 125th of a second, which is two months. So we're gonna take it down. So right now we haven't set to 1512 seconds, so that looks pretty good. And if we're going to be using a consistent light source, we can make changes all the time and our exposure doesn't have to change. It's going to be a lot more consistent. And the same thing goes with your adjustment and your white balance. Now we're photographing this and it pollutes lightbox. And the Lightbox is using LED lights as its main source of illumination. We are set to right now to auto white balance, which works out really nice on a camera. We can use a gray card and we can set our own, but we're not going to get into all that. You can set it for clarity, natural day flash. And our LED light box is adjusted for daylight. So it's pretty close to the daylight setting here. Now one thing you can see if you go all the way to the end here, you can see a plus and we click on that and we can even fine tune our white balance here. If you want to make it a little bit warmer, you can slide the wheel. And if you want to make it a little bit cooler, you can slide the whale towards the other way. So that is really helpful when you want to shoot manually. And also occasion when a tweak your white balance. And Camera Plus two also has a very nice macro lens on here that you can use for extreme close up like many times, well, photograph the name of the designer on the piece of jewelry that my wife is selling. And for that you have to get really close. So we get as close as we can using a macro lens or macro setting on your camera here. And the other thing would be that camera plus two also allows you to shoot in portrait mode. And portrait mode. I use that quite a bit in my iPhone because it offers it. And the neat thing about shooting in portrait mode is that it gives the appearance of u using a fast lens. So you can adjust your lands to its widest opening, which is going to give you a very shallow depth of field. Sometimes you want that to not the background on a focus. To give you a good example, I took this sheep out into our dining room table and I set it up so we have kind of a distracting background in front of a window. And if he after shoot things like this, you can use window life certainly. But here you can see it's very distracting with the lines of the windows. It just takes your attention away from your product. So by shooting in portrait mode, you go to lab, you click a lab setting, and then you go to portrait, and then you can see you get a sliding scale here. And I told you how your aperture is going to affect the image quality. So if we slide it all the way over to you can see it says F 22, which even though it's a higher number, is a very, very small lens opening. And you can see how everything now is relatively in focus. The sheep is in focus. The windows pretty much in-focus, causing a distraction. And then if we move our slider to the left, See how the apertures changing. Right now I'm set to F 6.2, which is an aperture. And you can see now how our background is slowly going out of focus and watch us, we continue more and more. So right now we're set to f 1.4, which many lenses have that aperture setting. And look how the background now is out of focus. Now you can set your aperture when you're taking a photo or you can do it afterwards. So either way, it works out, you just have to make sure that you're focusing area exactly where you wanted. Otherwise, certain parts of your object may go out of focus. So this is good the way it is. We haven't said that f 1.4. And I'm going to hit the check mark here. And then now we can further finalize it by cropping it. So I'm going to hit the crop. And I remember I liked the crop it in free form because anything that I want out of the image I can just crop out. Let's go ahead and crop this a little bit. Okay, so that looks pretty good there. And if we tap the image, you could see that we get a grid that can help you with your composition if you like. And that looks pretty good. So we're going to crop it like that. And then we're going to hit done. And this is what we have in our final image right now. But I want to do one more thing. I want to give it a slight vignette, so let's do that. And then you can see here we have two adjustments. One is we can make it bright, which I don't like too much, and the other is dark. And then here we can adjust the degree of the vignette to size other vignette. And this is our final image that we end up with here. So Camera Plus two has some nice features that you may not have currently in your phone. 43. Camera & Post Process Apps - Image Size App: If you're going to be doing all your photography and image editing on your phone. A good app to consider to resize your images is called image size. Now there are other ways that you can resize your images, but this is a good app that's easy to use for that. Certain selling platforms had different photo specs. As an example, eBay, there are minimum in pixels will be 500. The maximum is 9 thousand. Amazon. I believe there minimum will be at 1000 pixels and either width or height. And I believe at C has one of 2 thousand pixels. And the reason that they need a certain minimum size would be when a customer is looking at a product and you want to zoom in this way, they're able to get a nice clear view of what they're looking at. There's no sense in overdoing this, but you have to at least abide by their minimum specs. If we open up image size, you can see that I already have an image in here. And if you look on the top left-hand block, this image size is actually 3,085 pixels by 2226 pixels. So this would be a horizontal print and we're going to set it up for eBay, which has a minimum on the short side of 500. So I'm going to click on the height and the white section. And of course now the number one is highlighted. So we're going to type in 600 because I'm going to set it up for 600 pixels on the height, which would be the short side. And on the width, all we have to do is just touched a white and it's going to select a width automatically. Because an important part of using this app is a for looking at the center, you have a blue chain that's highlighted. You wanna make sure that that chain is highlighted because then it's going to maintain its aspect ratio. So you're not going to be cutting off just the sides in any one direction. So by doing that, you're going to be re-sizing the whole image. So there it is. We haven't image now re-size to 832 pixels wide by 600 pixels high because this is what we typed in. Let's just say we wanna make this 900. Okay? And then watch what happens. And if we just touched their screen, it's going to set the width automatically and it's going to maintain its aspect ratio. So now we have this image already resized. So let's look at another feature that this app has. So if we go back and choose a photo, let's just pick this one. This one has already been cropped, so let's choose it on the bottom. Now if we click on the top right-hand second as a little icon, if we click on that there, you can see that on the bottom we have certain selections that we can choose from. And this one has one that you might be able to use. It's called blur and focus. It's kinda similar to shooting in a portrait mode, but not quite as good. But I just want to run through this just in case you need something to get a blurred background. So if we tap on blur and focus, you can see we get a circle. So if we weaken outstretched out circle, we can make it larger and we can reduce it. So let's enlarge it to right about there. The only thing that I don't like about this is that you're sort of stuck to using the circle. You can also use what they call band. And that's more of a horizontal type selection, but I don't like that either. So we're gonna go back to the circle. And you can see we haven't said here. And then we had that little adjustments scale on the bottom. And if we move it all the way to the right and we're going to get maximum blur as you can see. And if we move it all the way to the left and we're going to get 0 background blur. So somewhere in between would be something that we can live with right about there looks pretty good. So now you can see we have a little bit of background blur. I think this app still needs a little bit of work. They should be able to have certain shapes that you can use more. As an example, an oval here in vertical format would be a lot better than a circle. But it is what it is as they say. So this is what we have right now and we're going to hit OK. For this, save that. Now there's something that's kinda useful about. I do like in this app, if we go to effect, they do have a nice filter they call spot, which gives like a spotlight effect. And again here, you can just pinch. You can make the circle as large as he gets right about there. And this works out well when you want to emphasize a certain part of your image. 44. Camera & Post Process Apps - Photo Transfer App: For the most part, when I'm working on images taken with my iPhone, I transfer them over onto my desktop and for transferring your images, a good app that I found is called Photo transfer app. So if we click on that, it's going to ask us what we want to do because we cannot only send our photos out to another computer, but we can also receive on. So in this case, let's send and then it's gonna ask us where so we can send these all over. And I'm having a mindset over Wi-Fi to Windows. And if we click on that now we have this app now is run in my phone. And then when we go to our desktop, well open up that app. And then we're going to select our phone. And this app is going to bring up the folders that you have in your phone. And then you can go to the folder where you have your images at that you want to transfer over, and you would select that. And you can also select to where you want to transfer your images to. And this app works really great. It's never let me down. And I insist that all the time to transfer my images from the phone to a portable hard drive. 45. Organize, View and Image Editing on your Desktop: Previously I showed you how I use photo transfer app to transfer my images onto a portable hard drive. If I'm going to store them or from slow walking on them, I'll transform right to my desktop. And the reason is that this way I can view the images much larger and I can find tune things just a little bit better. But if I wouldn't have Adobe Photoshop, I will be okay with using the apps that we just talked about earlier. When I transferred the images, I put them into a folder. And this is what we're looking at here, one of the folders. And you can see that some of these images here, I worked on a ready, on the phone. But I want to show you and want to share with you how we're going to start right from scratch. But I want to use an image that's coming straight from the iPhone and that would be this one here. And this is how it is. And as it came right from the iPhone, the first thing I do is view these images in a program called AC, DC. It's a program that I use since the early days of digital photography. And then I got away from it for a little while. I tried using Lightroom for a little bit, but I went back to AC, DC because I liked this so much better. But you can check this out for yourself and see if you like it. But to me it's so much faster and have gotten so used to using this. Now, the thing about AC, DC is the newer version does so much. In fact, you can get most of your retouching doubt actually using this program. So right now, I'm just using this program as a viewer who I could view all my images. I could take him a full screen. I can come in even closer of, I wanna do some retouching, getting weird, some third spots or little marks in the background. So as we go back to this image here, you can see right now we're at managing. And if we go to Edit, here's row, we can do a lot with this program. If you look on the left-hand side here, you can see all the things that we can do with this, not on user's program too much for retouching. I've just gotten used to using Adobe Photoshop through the years. But I could easily do my retouching for the jewelry photography that we do using this program. There's a repair tool. And if we click on this, you can see that we get a choice of heel or cologne. Usually, I'll use the clone tool for doing this type of thing. And this is very similar to Adobe Photoshop. Let me just give you an example here. Let's just take it up a little bit larger. And of course we can move this around. And here you can see a little speck on the background. It's no big deal, but you can clean a snob. And here you can see the clone tool. So I, using our arrows left and right, we can reduce the size or we can enlarge it. So let's take it down right about here. And if we right-click on a spot that we want to clone from, and then we go to that little speck precedent. There it is, all gone. You could do that really, really fast. And here we have another really small speck and we're going to click on this section. We're going to clone from right-click and then we're going to go right over that spot. And now this has gone as well. So that's one of the tools in this great program. Well, let's go back and would try a few more. And it's going to ask us, and if we want to save the images and I usually save as, I'll just give it a similar name. Let's just add a 01 to it so I know it's not the original, but it's been edited. Okay, so we're gonna go back just to go through here, some of the things you can do that are useful for our type of photography is you can do vignette. Of course, you can crop, you can rotate, you can resize and this program too. And you can make adjustments in your exposure and your levels. And you can even Dodge and Burn and here, and that's kinda useful. You could check your color balance here, your white balance, and under detail you can also sharp in, get rid of noise if you want to. So there's just going to vignette. And then here we have a choice of the different shapes of vignette. We have round, rectangular. So either one works pretty good. I think I like round here. We can control the degree of vignette. Right here. You can see we can take it up quite a bit or just a little bit. I think I'll like it right about there. And if you look on the bottom, you can click done. And also you can save this. And if you want to, I know it's a lot of steps to go through. So we're going to click Save on this. So this is what we currently have. And of course, this program also allows you to use layers, which is really interesting because I use layers all the time in Photoshop. So this is a CDC and it's a program that I wanted to share with you because it's a really important program for image editing and viewing. 46. A Few Tips & Tricks When Using Adobe Photoshop: Let's start over and we're going to go right into the image that was taken straight from the iPhone. And we can go right into Adobe Photoshop. We have shortcuts, Control all an x. It's going to open up an old version of Photoshop that I use. I have a couple of versions. And I do recommend though, if you're going to be doing a lot of Adobe Photoshop work, that you can sign up with. Adobe Creative Cloud. It's a monthly fee that you pay, but then you have access to the newest version of Adobe Photoshop, and I believe it includes Lightroom. But if you're gonna be doing a lot of retouching and enhancements, this might be something to consider or you can certainly get other versions of Adobe Photoshop. I know people use an Adobe Photoshop Elements. You can use that. And you can also get a free version of Adobe Photoshop seven. I know that this is old technology, but for this type of photography, it's way more than I need. So it's fast and it works great. And that's the reason I'm still using this. And I know that Adobe Photoshop has kind of a steep learning curve. But if you're going to be doing a lot of image enhancements in retouching. And, and I really recommend learning as program just one step at a time. But anyway, and as we look over here, this is the tool that I use quite a bit to get rid of what we just talked about. Little imperfections on the background. Maybe Claire does spots and so on. This is called the cloning Stamp Tool and the shortcut is F, so I just click on S and it comes up. And here also using the bracketing keys, we control the size of the brush. And here I'd just take from here, pane it right about dare, let's go back to this larger one here, so you get an idea. So that's how that works anyway. Now here I also use this, the crop and a resize at the same time. So the cropping tool shortcut would be C. And I already have presets on here for eBay. So as we click on that, you can notice that our width here is 12 inches and a resolution is going to be a 125. And that's going to crop the image well within the specs for eBay. So just to give you an idea to reason that I'm keeping the height open here is that I want to crop in free form. I don't want to crop to any certain aspect ratio because every image may be different. Some might be square or closest square or extreme rectangular. But by doing that, it's going to give me the width that I'm looking for, 12 inches and any height that I want it so that you can see I can make it square. Very, very horizontal. Could either make it vertical. So list, there's crop this a little bit, although it's crowd pretty good actually in the camera. But we can crop it maybe just a little bit. So now we have the image cropped and resized at the same time. So if we go into image, image size, and here we can see our pixel dimensions are with is 1500 pixels and our height, which will be the short side, 956. So that's well within the specs for eBay. So we're okay with that. 47. A Few Advanced Techniques When Using Adobe Photoshop: Something else that I wanted to share with you. If you're going to be photographing something of significant value. And you want to spend a little bit more time in making that item look really great. You could do something like this. On this, I'm going to start by making a layer. So we're just going to drag this down. And now you can see we have two layers. One is the Background copy and the original background layer. And on here I'm going to make what's called a Layer Mask. Now this is something that you want to learn when you're using Adobe Photoshop. And it's really not all that complicated. I do want to mention that if you are brand new to Adobe Photoshop, all this is going to look really strange to you, but don't worry one step at a time and you can do it. Now we have a layer here and a Layer Mask. What a Layer Mask allows me to do. It's like placing a piece of acetate over the image. And I can make all changes. And if I make a mistake, I can just go back and correct it. I could paint out a mistake. So let me show you. So for something like this, let's go back. And if you remember, this has been cropped the ready, any of its size here at 1500 pixels, 956 pixels on the short side. Okay, so now we know that we're going to use our lasso tool. And nobody keep it at 25 pixels here. And because this'll be the feather. So without getting too complicated, the feathering is going to depend on the file size. So for this type of file size, let's try 25. So what I'm gonna do here, I'm going to select pretty close to the edges here. Yo have to be exact, but we're going to select the neck loops here. Okay, so now we have all the inside area selected. Control Shift I is going to inverse the selection. So now that brings of selection to the outside, and I'm going to select the inside here also. So we're going to hit shift, and I'm going to select some of the background area here as well. So now we had the background area selected here instead of the necklace. So what I like to do with something like this as we go into Filter Blur. And I'm gonna choose Gausian blur. Okay, so here we have a problem. You can see that we're not getting the image on here. And you know why that is? That's because we have the Layer Mask selected. We have to select the image here. Okay, so now you can see that we have the image selected. Let's go back to Filter Blur over to Gausian blur. And now you can see that we're applying a blur and you can check the radius were actually at 3.1, which is kind of a, a slight amount of blur. You could change that if you want to, you, but we're going to leave a go at 3.1. And now you can see it's slightly blur. And if we want to apply that filter again and add a little more blur, control, F is going to apply that filter once more. Let's do it again. Now we had that filter applied three times. Okay, and let's deselect everything Control D. Take it up full. Now you can see we have a nice blur on our background. But I'm gonna go into the layer mask here because notice that some of this section on the outside of the bracelet here also got a little blurry when we apply the filter. So what we can do is go to the brush tool, make sure that the black is a foreground color here entered is so we're okay with that. And then using a brush tool, we can just push that away. And also in a brush tool we can change the opacity. Let's just bring it up to a 100%. Ok, so now what we're doing is we're painting back in what it was from underneath the Layer Mask. And isn't this amazing? I still get a kick out of this. Now this is, of course, if you'll wanna do something a little fancy, it's gonna take a little bit more time. But if you haven't item that's worth it, then it may be worthwhile to give it a little bit of extra look to it, give it a little bit more perceived value. So we're taking this all the way around. So you can see now the thing is with this because of the layer mask, if we make a mistake, watch, I'm going to just paint this to where it was when we started. Now you can see we made a mistake and we got rid of the blur here by hitting the letter x. Notice that it'll change the foreground color to white. And we can use the Brush tool again and we can paint it. So you can't really mess anything up here because you can go back and forth. If you make a mistake, you can just paint it back to where it was. Let's go back to black as being a foreground color with the letter X and continue. And if you make a mistake, you can just correct the last thing that you did control Z. Actually, this regards and the last step. Alright, so that looks pretty good. So this is what we have right now. Now you can use this as it is, but I think I want to do one more thing to it. I'm going to flatten all the layers here. I just have a shortcut. I made what's called an action. So you can record and action once and you can assign a certain keystroke to it. And then when you hit a keystroke, it's going to perform that action. So just in case I'm gonna do another layer, add a Layer Mask. And of course we're going to click on our image here. So sometimes I'll do this also. So we're going to do the same thing as before. We're going to just select our necklace here again. Control shift. Eye's going to inverse it and we're going to hit shift. And we're also going to select the inside of our background here again. Okay, so now we have our background area selected here, and I want to dark in this control, u is going to bring up a hue and saturation. And this is you can also use levels by you can slide and a lightness over to the left, as you can see, it's going to dark into quite a bit to the right and is going to lighten it. Here's where we started from. And I'm going to slide or over just a little bit to make it a little darker. Because by doing that, notice that our tension now goes more to our necklace. So there it is. So this'll be our final image which has cropped and already resized. So let's go ahead and say this image just as it is. And we're gonna save as. So this is what we started with, and this is our image right now, of course, we could fine tune things a little bit more if you want to. But this gives you an idea of some of the possibilities that you can do with using Adobe Photoshop and also AC, DC. 48. A Look at Another Amazing Photo Editor: One more thing I wanted to show a before I go, we're gonna go back to AC, DC. And I uses Program occasionally if I want to just give it a little punch of something. So, so look here, external editors, I'm gonna go into a program called smart photo editor. This is pretty amazing. So if we go into effects gallery and we can see all the possibilities that we can make with this image. Some of these may be interested, you can give it some neat borders vignettes. Of course it all depends on where you are going to be selling at. Some platformers may not want you to do any effects on these, but if you can, this is worthwhile for check into. Here's an example by a strong vignette and this is designed by Tony. He does a lot on here as you can probably see. And being a strong vignette, you can just pull a circle out further. And then now we get a slight vignette. So if we click on the editor, this is what we have. So you can see this is a vignette. This was how it was when we started. No vignette added. So this is another interesting program that I love using. Sometimes they just allows just a little bit of enhancement. Or you could take it as far as you want. You can give it borders and certain mood, Artistic Effects, oils, eggs, so on detail. Go into style. Let's look at graphic. All these neat things here that you can do. And they also have some really nice borders that you can use. Also, this is called smart photo editor. Another great program that you can use to enhance or change your images dramatically. 49. Final Thoughts & Advice: And I thank you again. And if you completed the whole course, then I'm sure you saw the importance that good lighting mix and you creating good photographs not only in small products and jewelry, but you can use your knowledge now what you learn for better, say portraits, flowers, landscapes, any type of photography really, because once you learn to see, modify and control light, you really had it down. You really have the knowledge that most people may not have. And even though the technology may get older after awhile and people get newer gear and they know what their gear does. But they may not have the same type of knowledge that you have in learning to see light and how they can use it and modify it to their advantage. So take advantage of your knowledge which you'll learn, go out and have fun in, photograph whatever you like to photograph in addition to your small products and jewelry. Thank you very much. 50. Outtakes & Bloopers: Now we're a little bit limited in space here. So don't let that happen to you? You could you could work around I'm going to bring the phone up as high as it goes. In fact, I might bring it up little. Nope. Now what are my other favorite light modifiers? One of my other favorite might, might. And if we diffuse it, we're gonna get a nice soft. Highlights pattern. And that's always nice and that's quite nice also. Unless this try and to give you an idea. This has little grooves that it just slips into. Very, very simple to attach. Just snaps right in. Usually it's a lot easier than this. What's going on here? Cut, cut, cut. 51. Bonus - Resource to Product Links: I've had several requests for me to list the products that I'm currently using. And that's what I'm doing here. Even though I may be affiliated with some of these products, their products that I currently use or have used because some of the items or no longer available. So I put a substitute in there, the product that I'm using. And this can help you avoid frustration with your gear. Because I think that's one of the key factors of successful photographers. They know what gear they need and they know what gear they have to use and they get it. And once they do, they know that working with something they can count on to help give them the type of photography that they're noted for. So there is no substitute for quality. Thank you very much.