Product setup

[rogan200]

Hi all,

Got a question to help out a customer... not my line of work so thought id ask here!

Company shoot all their own retail products (Automotive parts) in house for display on their website. They like the products cleanly lit against a pure white background to make sure the details are clear to their shoppers. At the moment they have two studio constant light source (daylight balanced) and shoot the items against a table painted white and a white wall. Issue is they find there is always too much work in photoshop making the background true white and not blotchy. They also sell metal products so can have issues with nasty reflections.

They want to keep things simple since they're not photographers and i wandered if either one of these collapsible product photo tents or a still life table would be a useful upgrade to their current setup? They're not scared of spending money if it makes life easy in the long run but of course if they can keep their current light sources that is preferable.

Any advice much appreciated. Most items are up to a foot or so square but occasionally they need to shoot bigger things like exhaust manifolds, backboxes etc. so might a seamless background mounted on the wall be better for that stuff?

Thanks!

 

[Garry Edwards]

Basically, a light tent will create flat lighting and virtually kill reflections, but is strictly amateur night and they need to be thinking in terms of a product shooting table, proper lighting and large softboxes, all is explained in this tutorial on the Lencarta lighting blog.

As for the white background, white backgrounds tend to interfere with lighting control, the best way forward is to pay someone else to cut the backgrounds out for them