If you have ever made a genuine attempt at photographing people or things on a pure white background, you know it is not as easy as it looks! Designers like stock photos on white because they can easily place the person or thing almost anywhere on a page. Without the constraints of a frame or background, one can even wrap text around the image or make it look as if the photo is perfectly integrated with the layout.

I decided to try and get some stock images on white backgrounds at my recent modeling shoot as well as some demo shots for my makeup artist, Jackie Ellis. (Jackie is available for wedding makeup and other projects.)

The simple answer for getting pure white backgrounds is twofold- 1). Throw some light directly onto the background 2). Use manual exposure to overexpose just the background. With practice, you will be achieving pure white backgrounds with no post-production.

Original photo, as shot

Here you can see a big difference between pure white and not-so-pure white. If a designer used the second image you would see the edges on the paper and things would get messy.

the setup

Here is the side view of the studio setup- you can see the small softbox on the background light will not quite throw enough light on the whole sheet of white seamless paper. We only brought three lights to the studio and wanted to use two for the model. Whoops!

Lights we will use to light our model: a 30x40 and 24x32 softbox.

The big softbox creates a nice catch light in her eyes and will help create some more background light by spilling onto the paper.

Since the background was not quite pure white, we’ll apply some Photoshop magic to make it happen. First I’ll go to image size>canvas size> and extend the canvas by a couple hundred pixels. Choose a color of white so you have something to compare your white to.

Extending the canvas size

Below, you can see how pure white compares to the white backdrop in the original shot.

There is room for improvement in the overall brightness of the image as well, so the easiest way to kill more than one bird here is with a levels adjustment layer.

I bring the slider on the highlight side in to really crank up the brightest areas. Then simply select the layer mask and use a black, soft edged brush to darken our model to a normal level. For all the areas I want dark like the original, I will mask with a black brush set to 100% opacity. This brings her skin etc, back to normal. Then I carefully adjust my brush size with the “[" and "]” keys to refine the edges. Go back to a white brush to brighten the edges. Adjust the opacity of the brush to 50% or so to refine the difficult spots. I used a 30% opaque white brush to brighten her eyes up a bit-an added bonus while we are at it.

You may lose some of your model’s hair in the process, as you can see in the finished image. Losing a few stray strands may be a benefit in some cases. In some cases, it may look like artifacting. If you want a good quality stock image, it is important to get as close as possible to pure white right out of the camera. Your histogram inside the camera should help you decide if you are getting close.

On some monitors, it is hard to tell just by “eyeballing” if all your whites are truly white. A grey spot can sneak up on you later. The easiest way to tell for sure is to select the background layer and run your cursor over the image with the “info” panel open. The values for R,G,and B should be “255″ if your’e getting a pure white background. If not, use the dodge tool or your layer mask to touch it up.

Next time I will definitely be using two background lights with bigger diffusers to avoid some of the post production hassle. But I have to write about something in the blog right?

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