Simple way to lighten background consistently

ethoemmes

Hello,

I am a complete novice on photoshop. I have read a number of different guides to lightening the backgrounds on photos. I keep hitting stumbling blocks though and was wondering if someone could help point me in what I hope is the simple way.

I have taken around 25 shots of tea in small chinese tea cups. The backgrounds are all slightly different and too light. I would like to lighten these backgrounds to just off white.

You can see some example of the pictures on this Google Picasa gallery although these have already been edited (badly) but unfortunately I cannot get my hands on the originals until later tonight.

http://picasaweb.google.com/101991428840846771997/TeaLiquorEdit?feat=directlink

Can any help me?

Thanks

Eddy

zoomer

Set your exposure and white balance manually and you will get consistency.
Use a tripod to maintain same distance from subject with camera.
Flash has to maintain same distance from subject.

If trying to fix these maybe click on the background with the white eye dropper and use your histogram to adjust the exposures equally to where you want them.

Somebody I am sure will reply with a more involved better way to do it, but this would be my simple way to try it.

ziggy53

You might try Andy's tutorial:

http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=46354&postcount=1

BinaryFx

I agree with zoomer, it is best to get this right in capture, rather than in post (as much as you can). Setting consistent camera position, lighting, metering/exposure and white balance will help a great deal (white balance is easy to fix if you shot raw, although adjusting JPEG colour is not impossible).

The suggestion from ziggy to use the tutorial from Andy is a good suggestion, however I think that you will also need to make some slightly more advanced edits based off this simple tutorial.


Regards,

Stephen Marsh

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx/
http://prepression.blogspot.com/