Product Photography: Create Levitation Photos

1. Intro: Look at yourself taking the same photos of the same products for the same clients. Now getting new, exciting work opportunities, what you need is to elevate your styling skills. Stand out as a product photographer with the floating styling technique. Make people want to stop scrolling. There is the feed and actually engage with your photos. Express yourself, experiment, and create unique product photos. Who are you anyway? I'm you, but we may desire to create something new. How am I felt greater? My name is Stan C, and you are on a standard cinema. Check this. So my channel, this is my Skillshare course. I am a Product Photographer, a YouTuber, and a content creator. And I worked with jewelry, with skincare, and with health and wellness brands. Welcome to my three-part series course on product photography styling. In this episode, I'll show you how to create floating product photos. Floating is an amazing styling technique. It has many creative applications and it's super versatile. By the end of this course, you'll be able to create your own unique floating photos. And having such photos in your portfolio makes it super easy for potential clients to choose you for their next campaign shoes. In the other two episodes of this course, I'll be teaching tumor styling techniques, basking in the sun and artistic still-life. I'll link all the information in the description to this course. But now, let's take some photos with an impact. 2. Course Project: The project of this course is to create your own floating photo. How unexpected Write. Submit your photo to the project gallery and get feedback from me. I'll be looking for creative application of the technique I'm going to show you and try to put your own twist and it makes it really unique. You will use this photo in your portfolio and start attracting clients that you want to work with, where maybe you will use it for your own business. Here's a step-by-step guide on how to tackle this project. Step one, hype yourself up and get into the creative flow step to brainstorm ideas for your photo and create a mood board. Step three, source products, props, and backgrounds. Step four, set up the scene and compose the shot. Step five, set up the lights. Step six, take photos and select the best ones. Step seven, editors in Photoshop. Step eight, because a mediocre photo to the project gallery and get feedback from me. Now, let's start learning already. 3. Preparing for the shoot: Let's prepare for the shoot. I will create three different photos with three products. And I will walk you through the whole process and share my workflow in Photoshop. The first one is this Rose Lemonade, then hand cream called cocoa cooler. And finally, I have ice cream flavor. Amazing. I already have some ideas of what I wanted to create. I made a mood board. I went on Pinterest and Instagram and Behance for inspiration. And then I sketched my ideas on paper. This is a great tip. If you want to create something original, don't just try to recreate someone's idea. Try to put your own spin on it and make it truly your own. So this is what I will need for the shoot. Some products, some probes, backgrounds, that light and a good mood. How cheesy was that? Where to get products by them obviously, or get them from a client, boil them from a friend, or maybe exchange them for some content. Make sure when you're creating folders for your portfolio, you are creating the work you want to be hired for. If you want to work with skincare brands, take some photos of skincare products for backgrounds and using simple paper sheets from a local craft store. Whenever I need a new color, I go there and get it via, Of course, not very doable. You can't really make a product swatch on them or you can spill anything on them. If you want a more durable solution rule for vinyl Deb tropes. But I sometimes use a sheet of transparent acrylic if I want to do a swatch or something like that. Now let's talk about props. The easiest and the best solution is to use props that make sense. I know Rose Lemonade here. That's why I'm going to use some roses. And according to the ingredients of this lemonade, I could also be using lemon, pear, orange, and ginger. Then I have this Coco cooler hand cream. I'm going to use coconut for that. And I have tiramisu ice cream. That's why there is some coffee beans and chocolate on a table as well. Another thing to consider is the size. Perhaps you don't really want the probe to be bigger than a product because this is the hero of the shot and improper is just something that will compliment it. There are so many good options when it comes to the light. You can always use natural light that's coming from a window, but I recommend you to use it with a reflector to balance the light on the dark side of your products and soften the shadows a little bit. It will create a more elevated look. Next, there is a very inexpensive light box that you can buy. It comes with a bulb. It's really easy to use. It's not very strong, and it's really good for creating some soft shadows. Another very inexpensive option is just to use some home lights and bulbs. I have Phillip slides. I can control their color and intensity through the app, and I love to use them with my product photography. And finally, there is a slightly more expensive but still affordable option of a continuous slide like codex as L6 TWO, I love this slide. It's very easy to use. I can control this intensity and they create very beautiful harsh shadows with the slide. But if I put a diffuser in front of it or add a Okta Box or soft box on it, it will make softer shadows. In the next lessons of this course, I'll walk you through my process of taking photos and editing them in Photoshop. So let's start shooting. 4. Creating the Rose Lemonade Photo: I will start with the Rose Lemonade photo. My ideas to shoot it floating among these pink roses. I'm going for a monochromatic look. Pink background, pink bottle and pink roses. I'm going to shoot all of these elements separately and then combine them in Photoshop. First, I'm just placing the bottle on this pink background. This helps to make the liquid even more pink. Next, I'm going to set up my lights. I'm just playing with my Philips Hue lights to see how they light up the liquid. I encourage you to use the lights that you have at home as well. Don't be afraid to bring them, even though they're not professional photography lights. Nobody's going to know. The main light. I'm using the codex slide. I'm placing it right in front of the product, making sure to light up the label and keep it readable. So the setup is beautiful. It's good enough, totally works for a product like that, but I'm feeling a little bit extra today, so I'm gonna give you a tip on how to light IT. Products made out of glass or something transparent in a way that's going to elevate it, going to take you to the next level, to the stratosphere, okay, for that. So I'm actually going to use this. This is my transparent acrylic trade for photography. I created in myself. If you want instructions there on my YouTube channel, this was a super budget friendly DIY. Everybody can tackle that type of stuff. So now let me show you how to use it. I'm placing my small lights under the tray. Alternatively, you can use a sheet of acrylic or glass, maybe a refrigerator shelf even. You need to elevate this and light up the product from underneath to create this beautiful ring on the sides. Of course, if you're going for a different angle, you can just keep the product standing up and lighted from the back. Here's the photo to always make sure to shoot in RAW format. Keep your ISO on 100 to minimize the noise on a photo aperture is five. I don't want it to be too open, otherwise, the label is not going to be fully in focus. And the shutter speed really depends on the intensity of the light. Now let's take care of the roses. I'm only going to shoot the flowers, so I cut them first. You may be wondering why I have chopsticks, but I found that's the best way for me to be covered rose flower and rotate it in front of the camera to capture it from different angles. I'm taking a lot of photos, I'm going to choose the best ones later. I keep the same camera settings and the GoTalk slide is in the same position. I'm also taking some photos of rosebuds and petals just in case it's important to have a variety. Here are the final photos I chose from this shoot. I have my fault over lemonade, and I have many photos of roses and petals. Now, let's take it to the Photoshop. 5. Editing the Rose Lemonade Photo: Now let's edit our first photo of the Rose Lemonade in Photoshop. This is the photo I'm creating in this class. And I wanted to do a disclaimer that instead of focusing on different Photoshop tools and how to use them and other basic stuff. I'm going to focus on my workflow and I aesthetic part of editing photos. There are so many tutorials on the Internet explaining this basic things, but there is no tutorials talking about aesthetic part, composition, etc. This is the timestamp for you. If you want to come back to certain part of the video, it will be easy to navigate. So let me start from opening up the selected photos in Photoshop. All of them are in the raw format, which is important. Now they're all in this Camera Raw view, and I'm preparing them for retouching by adjusting the temperature, exposure, colors, et cetera. I want to match the color of the lemonade to the real product. So it's important to have next to me while I'm editing, when I'm happy with the result, I copy these settings, paste them to the other photos, and open all of them. Now they're all open in Photoshop. Before we begin, let's make sure we have the same workspace. Go to Window Workspace Photography then gives us three essential panels, toolbar, adjustments, and layers. The first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to cut out all of the objects from the photos. I'm going to use Quick Selection Tool to cut out my objects. I will just draw over an object and Photoshop is going to create a selection. I will right-click on the selection and choose Layer via cut that creates a new layer with this object on it. If I remove the background, It's only this cutout object. And it can even use more automated solution on a different photo here I'm going to press the button, Select Subject. Photoshop is going to analyze the picture and select the subject. I will need to refine the selection and right-click on it and choose Layer via cut to cut it out. I'm just going to repeat this process for all of the other roses and rosebuds. And then I will start working on the bottle. When it comes to the Rose Lemonade bought or some parts of it are Blu-ray. They are not in focus. And when cutting out the bottle, I need to maintain this soft edge. And the best way to do that is to use a mask and work with a soft black brush. After I'm done cutting the objects out, I can now reattach the boards are some parts and perfect. And I want this bottle to look as perfect as possible. At the same time, I don't want to make it look on the reel. I just need to remove some dirty bits and make the color of the lemonade more even. And they definitely need to smooth out this bottom. For retouching, I'm going to use three different tools. The first one is the Spot Healing Brush, and I'm going to use it to remove some small spots. Then a stamp tool and I can draw over and imperfect area with IT to cover. And finally, I want to use Patch Tool and I'm going to work on the whole bottle trying to make it as perfect as they can while keeping it real. When it comes to the bottom of this bottle, I really want to make it smooth. So first, I'm going to use the Quick Selection tool to select this button. And I will apply a filter. So I'm gonna go to Filter Noise median. And with this toggle, I can make the area really, really smooth. The only problem is it has no noise. So while that area is selected, I'm going to apply a different filter and I'm going to go to Noise, Add Noise. And I just want to match the amount of noise on the bottom to the rest of the bottle. When looking from a far at this button, It's not very even and they think that what makes it more real? After some final touches on the bottle, it's time to make the composition. The first thing I do is I resize this picture to four by 54 months. This is the best format for Instagram. And then I'm going to transfer all of my roses petal and a rose bud to this picture. The best way for me to create a composition is to play with all of the elements. I'm going to put them in different positions. I'm going to resize them. I'm going to rotate them. But it's important not to rotate them too much because we want to maintain the shadow on the same side for every single flower and on the bottle. So flipping an object or rotating it too much would make it very obvious that this does not really belong there. And we really want to avoid that. I really want to make it look like they're roses are floating on different distances from the bottle. The roses that are floating closer are going to be bigger and more blurry. I'm gonna go to Filter Blur, Gaussian Blur to choose how much I want to blur them. And the roses that are flying farther away are going to be smaller and also quite blurry. The small rose on the right, it's going to fly next to the label, since the label is in for Q. So I'm going to keep that rose in for cues as well. The green rose bud is quite big and I'm going to make it blurry as well to appear like it's flying somewhere in front. Now I want this picture to appear more bright, so I'm going to Brightness and Contrast settings and I'm going to change it up a little bit. And then I'm going to create a background. So we'll just create a new layer. And I pick up the color from the label of the Rose Lemonade and then filling it in. And this is how I created this Rose Lemonade floating photo. Okay, the first picture is officially done. I've already happy how it turned out. Let me know what you think about it as well. Now, let's move on to the second picture. 6. Creating the Hand Cream Photo: I'm going to create the second photo now with this hand cream, the photo is going to be a bit more complicated to make, but the result is so worth it. I'll need a coconut, some sand, and a neutral background to do this. I'm going for the beach vibe. The yellow packaging and coconut. Just make sense to be on a beach. I'm going to take photos of all the elements separately and then I'll combine them in Photoshop. The first photo will be over coconut laying in sand. Here. I'm just trying to imagine the final composition. I decided to add small stones to create a more natural look of the sand. I'm using products as my main light again, this time, I really need to create harsh shadows to imitate the sunlight. And here is the final photo I took. The format is rho is always ISO is set to 100 to minimize the noise, aperture is 4.5. Keeping it to open would make the coconut Blu-ray. And I don't want that. Shutter speed depends on the intensity of the light here. It's just one 160th of a second. Next, I'm going to take a photo of the other coconut. I'm sticking it on a chopstick that I secured with some tape inside of a glass. I'm also adding a gold reflector to soften the shadow and imitate the sun even more. Here you can see that the final photo, this settings are absolutely the same. And finally, I'm taking a photo of the cream. I'm doing it very simply. It's laying flat on the background. I'm using Goldilocks as the main light. Shooting. This product is a little bit tricky because of all the text on the packaging. If I place it on an angle like this, some letters who alluded to up more and it becomes hard to read. We must avoid that. Every letter and the logo must be very clear. And then I'm also placing two Philips slides on two sides of the product. I chose this position strategically. I need two sides of a product to be in shadow and two sides glowing. You will see why I did that in the Photoshop. Walk through. And here is the final photo. I have a photo of the cream and voters have coconuts. Now let's get to editing. 7. Editing the Hand Cream Photo: Let's start with our second photo now. This is the photo that I'm creating in this tutorial. I'm going to walk you through my workflow. I'm going to focus on the aesthetic choices they make and not so much on different tools I use or techniques I apply. If you want a more detailed Photoshop tutorial, please let me know and I may create it in the future. For now, let's dive deep into this. First, I'm going to open up the photos of coconuts that I took earlier. They are in row format and that's why they open in this Camera Raw for you. This is the place where I prepare my photos for editing. I'm just going to change some settings to make these photos brighter, more colorful and warmer. Then I'm just going to copy the settings from the first photo, paste it to the second one, and open them up together in Photoshop. The first thing I want to do is to remove the background. So I'm going to pick up the Magic Eraser Tool, click on the background to remove it and the stool isn't perfect. So I still need to work on some areas and I'm going to work on the edges or the coconut and the sand a little bit later on as well. But for now I'm just going to attach this coconut. It wasn't very fresh when I opened it. So for now I'm just trying to make it a little bit more perfect with a stamp tool, with the spot healing brush, and with a patch tool. I still want to keep it real though. I don't want to make a cartoon like coconut. Next I'm going to work on this second coconut photo. I'm just going to use Quick Selection tool to select it and cut it out onto a new layer. Then I'm retouching it as well. I need to remove that chopstick, obviously. And again, I need to make it a little bit more perfect than it is while keeping it real. When I'm done retouching this coconut, I'm going to move it to the first picture, resize it so that it looks like the same coconut and I'm going to place it a little bit above. Now we need to work on the cream again using the Quick Selection Tool. I'm going to cut it out, refine the edges a little bit, and change the color. I'm trying to match the color to the real product. So it's very handy to have this screen next to me and look at it when I'm editing. One problem with this cream though, is that the letters on this packaging are not very visible. I want to make them brighter, so I'm going to create an adjustment layer with brightness and contrast. I'm going to make this picture brighter and then work with a mask using a white brush, I'm going to reveal this brightness. And then when I'm happy with the result, I'll move it to the first picture and start playing with its position. If you remember, during the photo shoot, I made sure to sides of the screen are glowing and two sides are in the shadow. So you can see the side with the shadow is right under the coconut. And two sides that are glowing. They're not obstructed by anything. Then I found a photo of this beach on a free stock footage website, I think is going to work really well. I think the color matching is very good, as well as the angle from which this photo is taken. I'm going to resize it and bluer it to make it look more natural. Then I'm going to work with the sand a little bit, removing some parts, drawing on some parts with a stamp. And when I'm happy with the result, I'm going to move to the next phase. I need to add some greenery to make this picture a little bit more colorful and give it more this tropical vibe. So I found this photo on a free stock footage website as well. And using the tool called Color Range from the Select menu on in Photoshop, I'm going to select white and I'm going to cut it so that all I'm left is these branches. I'm going to divide them using the Lasso tool and move them to the picture and then blur them as well. I make sure to blur them a little bit less than our background so they appear closer to the product than the ocean. I'm going to repeat this for the second branch. I just really wanted it to be together. And finally, I found this music splash on the same website. And now I'm just trying to remove this blue color. I needed to go in with the same tools. So I go to Select Color Range, and then I click on the blue color to remove it. And I do this a couple of times for this picture because these blues are different. And once I'm left with this wide splash, I'm going to transfer it to my photo and places behind the cream, but in front of the coconuts, I want it to appear like coconut milk. Like this. Coconut has been just opened. And you can see the splashes of milk. It's not going to be so dramatic at the end. For now, I just need to figure out the basic placement and size. And then I need to work on the color. So I'm just going in with some adjustments, layers like brightness and contrast, hue and saturation as well as curves. And when I'm quite happy with the result, I'm going to work the position size and the look of the splash even more. I'm going to create a mask so that I can mask some of the splashes. There are this really big parts that I do not want to see. I'm very interested in this small little drops flying everywhere. And I'm going to draw them even like in front of the cream to make it look more natural. And when I look at the picture now, I see the coconuts are dark in comparison to this splash. I'm going to make this coconut flesh a little bit more pride using just the brightness and contrast filter and applying the mask to it. Now it's time for some final touches. I'm going to work on the edges of these coconuts. I'm going to make them a little bit more smooth, a little bit more realistic. I want to adjust the color of this hand cream a little bit. And that is it. That is it guys. Alright, the second picture is done as well. I'm happy about it. It was a little bit more challenging, a little bit more created. It took me more time, but I use more techniques and tools. Hopefully, you learn something new. And now let's move on to the third and final picture of the course. 8. Creating the Gelato Photo: Let's start working on the final photo. I'm going to shoot this gelato and a cream background similar to its scholar, with some coffee beans and chocolate floating around it. I decided to place it at least a bit on an angle, so I'm just propping it with a tape roll, securing it with a little bit of sticky tape. And I placed a small acrylic sheet to protect my paper background from the condensation. Next, I'm setting up my goddess as my main light. I make sure it's quite bright and intense. Then I'm using my Phillips lights to light up the product from the back. It creates the most beautiful glow. And I think it's such an easy way to elevate the look of your photo and make it more professional. This is how the scene looks like right now. There is still a big shadow on the right side and I want to reduce it by adding another light. It shouldn't be strong. So I'm using my light box with the bulb for this task. And now I'm just taking the photos. Here you can see the final picture i2, the format is wrong. That's super-important. Iso is kept to a minimum to 100. Aperture is five. I want more of the product to be sharp, not blurry, and the shutter speed is one-one hundredth of a second. The next stage is to shoot many pieces of chocolate. They will be floating around and I need a good variety of sizes. So I'm just breaking it down and I'm using my chopsticks to hold each piece in front of the camera. I'm taking many photos from different angles. It's important to have a big variety to choose from when editing the final photo. Here are some photos I chose from this shoot. The camera settings are completely the same. The final stage of this shoot is to take photos of coffee beans. Here I'm demonstrating another method of securing small objects. I created this contraption with some sticky tape and a paper pin, and it helps to hold a coffee bean in place. And I can rotate the beam to shoot it from different angles. Again, I'm creating quite a lot of photos to choose from later. I've taken all the photos that I need. I have a picture of gelato, I have plenty of photos of chocolate and coffee beans. Now let's take it to the Photoshop. 9. Editing grom gelato: Alright, it's time to edit our third and final picture. So let's start. Here's the photo I'm working on in this Photoshop walk-through. Isn't the other two Photoshop tutorials. I'm not focusing so much on different tools and techniques that I apply, but on my workflow and my creative decisions. As usual and working with files in the raw format, they open up in this Camera Raw view and then preparing the photo of this Gilat. So for editing, just adjusting the temperature, exposure contrast and some other settings. Then I'm cutting it out from the background using the pen tool. Honestly, this is my favorite tools to use. I can not use Quick Selection Tool here because the background color is so similar to the gelato. If I had another color of the background, lets say blue, it would show on the packaging and make the photo more cold. So after cutting it out, I'm slightly or retouching the packaging. And then I'm starting to work with the coffee beans. I open all of them up and proceed to cut them out using the Quick Selection Tool. Let me skip to the good part. Here. I have all of the beans cut out and transfer it to the photo. It's time to place them. There are so many ways of arranging them. I could totally do something to the Rose Lemonade photo that they've done before. And I could place them all around the gelato flying at different distances, make them different sizes. But instead, I'm trying to arrange them in a cluster and make them much bigger than in real life. This does two things. You can see that these are coffee beans, even when you open Instagram profile, the photos are very small when you just open the profile. So having a big leg that makes it very visible. Also, it creates this mouth-watering feeling like I'm emphasizing the coffee forward flavor of this gelato. It hints on the amount of coffee flavor you gonna get. I put all except for the one coffee beans on the right side of the packaging because I'm going to add chocolate pieces on the left. So now I'm opening up all of my chocolate photos and I'm going to make some basic edits to match the color of this chocolate to the gelato and coffee beans as much as I can. Then I will select all of these photos and open them up to cut them out individually using the Quick Selection Tool. Now let me skip to the good part again where all of this chocolate pieces are transferred to the photo and now it's time to play with them. I'm not following any rules here, obviously just trying to create a cohesive and balanced look. I'm playing with the sizes and position of this chocolate pieces. And I specifically chose these chunky ones. I think they look more interesting than this Polish little pieces of chocolate that you would normally get. I also don't want to have the same amount of chocolate as the coffee beans because they think it would really overcrowd this picture. The next phase will be to bluer elements to create more dimension in the photo. Now it looks quite unnatural because the top of this gelato is not all in-focus. It's a little bit Blu-ray, so it's important to glue everything that's behind the front, right. So I'm going to Filter Blur, Gaussian Blur, and then blurring individual elements. And those coffee beans that stay in front of the packaging will be in-focus. Those that are on this side of the packaging. Now we're going to be a little bit blurry and those that are behind are going to be smaller and more blurry. And the same for the chocolate. Finally, I'm creating the background. I'm just picking up the color on the gelato itself and I'm creating a new layer and filling it in with this color. And this is the final photo. Alright, It seems the final feature of the course is complete. Now, I'm very happy how it turned out. Let me know what you think about it as well. 10. You have made it!: What a journey we have made. You learned how to make products float on your photos. And I created my first ever Skillshare course. Little did you know, but live tested me while I was creating the course. You'll have no idea how many obstacles say, overcame to get this course out to you. I was documented every single step, every single obstacle and every single sound way overcame something on my stories on Instagram. You're welcome to go and watch it in my highlights if you want to see the full emotional damage that they've got. Now it's time for you to create your projects. I cannot wait to see your photos in the project gallery. I'm so excited to connect with you and to see what you created if you like the score, don't forget to leave a review. It will make this course more visible for other creators. And if you want to see more content on product photography, check out my YouTube channel, Stanza Della. I shared a few videos where I took photos of the same products with, with different concepts. So check it out. Also, if you want to connect with me on Instagram, you can find me at Stanford up Nova, and slide into my DMs, startup and recession, letting me know that you found me on Skillshare. I would love to connect with you over there as well. I post reviews and stories every single day. And that's it guys. See you in the episode to peace.