Have been experimenting...

[monkey7]

... with photoshop and a camera. Currently my main concern is the background becoming grey in the back of the photo, like this:

Auto colour correction already applied, btw. I have selected the background and manually changed brightness and contrast. Which do you think is best?

+10 +10:

+0 +50:

+30 +10:

+100 +0. Background is completely gone, but so is part of the shadows.

Any ideas what I could do to improve the pics?

 

[TonyG]

First one.

 

[monkey7]

I take that's the +10 +10?

Have been looking a bit more, brightness really seems to mess up the shadows. Have inserted another one (no. 2 now) with +0 +50

 

[zak4994]

+30 +10

Seems to have a pure white background while retaining shadows.

 

[Allargando]

+30 +10 for me as well

 

[monkey7]

Thanks for the comments so far

PeterStoba asked me for a pic of the setup, so here it is. Taken in a minute without tripod so with flash, and the flash of the a350 isn't exactly the best.

It's basically my bed, a horizontal sheet of bleached paper (50*70cm) and another one such sheet sticked to the wall. Camera lighting was set to +2.

EDIT: and yes the wallpaper near the end of the bed is dirty, I've slept there for ... err... a lot of years.

 

[DeMoB]

Can you use those sheet(s) to make a shallow-ish curve where it goes up the wall, and shoot the subject a lot closer back to it. Like this:

This way when the background is over-exposed, there'll not be the distance for the light fall-off to make it look gray but the white over-exposed-ness will mean you won't be able tell that the paper is actually going up the wall (and so will look good without tweaking).

Dan

PS. I'd also suggest shooting at somewhere around F8 to F16 rather than all the way at F22, as diffraction starts to degrade picture quality with such a narrow aperture.

 

[monkey7]

Wow thanks for the tips

My F was mainly that high because I had been shooting macro's before and hadn't put it back to 9, which is my normal. Might start using 16 as normal for macro

Sadly my parents are away with the camera today, so won't be able to do any experimenting. Which is a pita, because I was planning on doing that -and writing a small review- all day

 

[Bungral]

+30 +10 for me.