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Old 2015-05-11, 6:42pm
Doug Baldwin Doug Baldwin is offline
Pixel Dude
 
Join Date: Apr 26, 2013
Posts: 49
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From your comment that the photos needed significant lightening in Lightroom, it sounds as if the photos were quite underexposed, leading me to think they were shot using some type of automatic exposure setting on your camera. These settings would include Full Program, Auto Exposure, Aperture Priority, and Shutter Priority. All these exposure methods rely on the camera making decisions on what's right for the subject. Unfortunately, cameras are not vey smart when it comes to that. Most camera's built-in light meters are designed to set an auto exposure to equal an 18% gray card. When a photo containing a predominance of white is photographed on auto exposure, the camera wants to underexpose the image to darken it down to 18% gray. Then we have to manually lighten it in the computer. Instead, let's use manual exposure, pick an arbitrary exposure of 1/30 at f8 with an ISO 100 setting. If the photo is too light, change only the shutter speed to a lower speed or fraction to let more light into the camera to lighten the photo. If the photo is too dark, raise the shutter speed to let less light into the camera. Keep making adjustments with the shutter speed settings until you get a photo in the camera that looks good. At a certain point if a photo is too underexposed, Photoshop or Lightroom is unable to correctly lighten the photo without significant degradation. Better to get a good exposure in the camera and make very small change in LR or PS.

It also appears the aperture (f-stop) setting used in your photos is to the lower end of the scale, namely f4, f5.6 or maybe f8. These yield shallower depth-of-field (DOF), meaning which parts of the image are in focus. The focus on the marble is towards the front. The shallow DOF results in the back of the marble going softly out of focus. If you want more of the marble to be in focus, move the focus slighty back from the front of the marble and increase the DOF by using a higher aperture number, such as f11, f16, or f22. Using a higher aperture or f-number results in less light coming in the camera because the aperture is getting much smaller. To offset the lower amounts of light from using higher apertures, manually change the shutter speed to a lower number to let more light into the camera.

Also, try shooting some pieces on a middle gray background. You'll get less "light wrap" reflecting around the edge of the object. That's the glow that results in shooting an object on a white background. You'll start to see the edges of the horizontal bead in the second photo show up more clearly by using a surface darker than white. Going all the way to putting the item on a black surface though won't work in most cases. There won't be any light wrap or reflection back into the piece and you'll lose much of the lower edges of items where they blend in with the black background. The only time black works is when the piece is significantly away from the background. I use this a lot with hanging pieces and edge light the piece to provide drama, bright edges and good edge separation from the background.
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