chasingmoments

Isolations (Part 2): Basics of Isolation

'How do you isolate objects off their background" is probably one of the most frequently asked post-processing questions in photography. Certaintly a lot of people have asked me that. Everybody wants to know how to achieve perfect isolations and to extract objects from their backgrounds. In this two sequel tutorial I will deal with tricks of isolation - from basics (Part I), to more advanced, such as hair, fur and complex objects, isolations (Part II).

We know that there is high demand for images "over white" : many designers want their images over white because white is what they publish on and it offers designers many versatile opportunities to be creative. Stock photographers want their images over white - they sell better as designers would much rather prefer a concept/product image over white than over gray, blue, pink, or yellow. And yet, matters of correct lighting and exposure aside, many stock photogrpahers who use home-made light tents, home-made lights or both still frequently do need to clean their images up to make surse their background is purely white. People who sell their work on ebay prefer the clean, uncluttered, professional look of "over white" isolations. And yet I've heard many times from e-bay sellers that they purchased equipment to shoot their products "over white" but could never really achieve perfectly white background and instead ended up with shots "over gray"

Strictly speaking, depending on your subject matter and your needs, some of what you may need to do can be done by pure color manipulation and the use of an eraser tool. The pen tools is necessary only in certain, more complex, cases. Let me walk you through a couple of representative examples. Starting from a basic, simple one. 

Read the rest of this tutorial here

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