Taking Photographs

[Blackswanwood]

I didn't want to hijack/distract from the thread asking for advice on buying a camera so thought I'd ask my question separately ...

I find that taking "holiday" type pictures works fine on my iPhone but taking pictures of the boxes I make is a lot harder to get right. The colour often looks different. My method is stick it on the corner of the bench (preferably on a sunny day as I have cold LED lights), point, perhaps zoom a bit/move the bench light around and shoot.

Are there some simple rules/tips that should be adopted by photography numpties like me to increase the odds of a better outcome.

 

[Amplidyne]

You really have opened a can of worms with this one.
First rule is not to mix light sources. Natural light colour changes thorough the day, or even by the colour of the room, so you want to use artificial light arranged to look natural, or wholly natural light, and set the white balance of the camera for that source.
Get a couple of reflectors, any piece of white board will do, to reflect light into darker areas.
Shoot in RAW, and process to give the result you want as well. If you don't have a RAW converter try RAW Therapee. It's free / open source.
What result are you trying to achieve though? "Natural setting" "seamless white background" "seamless other colour" or "isolated on white"?

Whatever you won't get satisfactory results without taking time on the setup.

 

[MintSauce]

You don’t mention which model of iPhone you have so not sure if you can shoot in RAW. My suggestion doesn’t rely on RAW.

1. Purchase a grey card / white balance card. They can be card, plastic or fabric.

2. Use the card to set/fix the white balance on your iPhone. The card should be in the same light source as the object you wish to photograph.

3. Take the photo. Set the white balance again if the light source changes.

The above should get you closer to an accurate colour rendition but do be aware that different screens/monitors may show a different rendition due to their different calibrations.

Good job you only mentioned photography of boxes. If you were also taking photos of your sharpening technique the thread would go thermonuclear (possibly).

 

[Amplidyne]

Ah I missed the fact that he's shooting on an iPhone. I thought that was at other times. My mistake.
Also, I wasn't saying that the OP absolutely needs to shoot in RAW, just that in a lot of cases, it's less damaging to make any changes necessary.
If you can't use RAW, just use what you can. Preferably uncompressed images.

 

[Sideways]

Just a few ideas:

A plain background that doesn't distract. Some white paper on a roll is ideal. Wide enough that it can be placed some distance behind the box, so it will be out of focus and look smooth, but will fill the frame behind your boxes. By concentrating more or less light on your box and not on the background, you can make the background look any shade of grey.

You can do still life photographs with all sorts of light, but a main light and a fill in light is a classic, simple combination. The main light does most of the work. The fill light lightens up shadowed areas so you can still see detail in them. It is very common to put the main light above and to the side of the object shining down like we expect sunlight to fall. The fill "usually" comes from the other side (say 90 degrees around) and is less strong.

Another way to achieve this is ambient light for the main and one artificial source for the fill, but you need to match the colour of the fill to the ambient at that time. So this adds complications.

Small bright sources of light throw hard shadows and reflections. Diffuse light sources are much softer and have a different feel. This is an aesthetic choice. Look at the Wera Tool Rebel adverts. These are high contrast images taken with small bright light sources.
I imagine soft light will work better for your boxes. Shine bright light through a biggish sheet of paper or something white and translucent to soften it.
Bring a light closer and it becomes effectively bigger and softer.
Move it further away and it becomes effectively smaller and harsher, but of course dimmer.

Lastly. Take a few hours over this. Watch some youtube about tabletop or still life photography and don't get hooked on the gear. Just experiment with a couple of battery or desk lamps as main and fill. Try pointing them from different positions like they do in the videos and look at the effect they achieve.

Take a ton of digital snaps and see how they look.

They call it painting with light for a reason.

 

[Chris152]

The above should get you closer to an accurate colour rendition but do be aware that different screens/monitors may show a different rendition due to their different calibrations.

This is the biggest problem, I think - creating the sought-after digital file means little unless the screens it's to be viewed on are correctly calibrated, and 99% of the ones showing your box photos won't be, which can lead to a lot of variation.

 

[sploo]

I didn't want to hijack/distract from the thread asking for advice on buying a camera so thought I'd ask my question separately ...

I find that taking "holiday" type pictures works fine on my iPhone but taking pictures of the boxes I make is a lot harder to get right. The colour often looks different. My method is stick it on the corner of the bench (preferably on a sunny day as I have cold LED lights), point, perhaps zoom a bit/move the bench light around and shoot.

Are there some simple rules/tips that should be adopted by photography numpties like me to increase the odds of a better outcome.

When you say "colour often looks different" do you mean that the colour of the boxes don't look correct (vs real life), the colour of the boxes appears to vary from shot to shot, or both?

As others have mentioned, poor quality (especially cheap white LED) lights often have gaps in the spectrum of light they produce (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index), and that can make it almost impossible to get good colour in an image. However, if you're shooting in daylight then that shouldn't be the issue.

When you take a photo with a digital camera the camera's "brain" will attempt to guess that is white in the image, and will shift the colours in order to try to produce something it thinks will be realistic. However, even small changes to the composition or lighting can change the guess, and result in a series of images that appear to have slightly different colours. As Sideways has mentioned; a plain background (either white or neutral grey) can help; especially as many photo editing programs have a white balance tools; whereby you can click on the background to indicate what should be considered neutral white/grey. As long as the lighting hasn't changed too much between shots (e.g. bright sunlight + shadows changing to overcast) then you should be able to get a series of photos reasonably consistent.

If you can shoot in RAW then it's telling the camera to write out a (theoretically) completely unmodified set of readings direct from the sensor. The automatic white balance that's applied to JPEG files can (if it gets it really wrong) do enough damage to the colours in the file that it's hard to correct. The RAW data will contain no white balance adjustment - it's literally what the sensor saw, so is preferable to work from if you can.

 

[sploo]

Here's an (extreme) example - taken in absolutely terrible (low energy lightbulb) light. It's exactly the same subject, just with the camera moved slightly between the two images. Both the (automatic) exposure and white balance are very different.

Because I included a bit of white card at the top, I can tell my editor (in this case, an ancient version of Photoshop) to white balance on the card. Both images are now pretty neutral, but the exposure is still different:

Finally some tweaking of the exposure has got the subject reasonably close in both images:

It's still not great (poor phone camera, poor quality light, everything in the camera on automatic), but much better than the shots straight out of the camera. If your phone has a "pro" mode you might be able to fix the exposure and white balance settings when taking a series of shots. At least that way they'll all be consistent (as long as the lighting doesn't change).

 

[paulrbarnard]

this is a subject that can be very problematic. As was mentioned in the thread you have to ask yourself how important it is as the people viewing the image will not be using colour controlled devices.

I have both grey scale and colour targets which are used as well as a colour spectrometer for calibration. I use custom profiles for my camera, display and printer. I am often horrified how images look on other people’s screens.

 

[Ozi]

In a previous job I had to take a lot of close-up photos of test samples trying to show things like cracks in black plastic or wear patterns on plated surfaces. We purchased a cheep pop up light box which came with various colored paper back grounds and adjustable light level. It really improved the quality of photos for reporting. Not sure if it would suit your purpose or not.

 

[Ozi]

not the exact one we had but very similar

 

[Blackswanwood]

Thank you to everyone who has chipped in here. There are some really useful pointers and I’ll find some time later in the week to try them out. I’ll probably be back with questions!

 

[Chris152]

One further thing to try, which appeals to my sense of 'economy of means', is:

Put the box somewhere outside, or inside but surrounded by natural daylight softened by clouds (not direct sun);
Take the pics as you would normally, with your iPhone;
Open the edit function on the phone, sharpen the image a little (always looks better on the net) and slide around the colour balance, saturation and contrast until you get, on your phone screen, what looks most like the figure in the box;
Post to the internet.

As said above, you can't determine how the image will appear on other people's screens, so no point worrying too much about that - make it look right on yours and that's as good as you can do.