Books

I like to read. Tonight, I decided to take a photo of a book. Over Christmas break I spent as much time reading as I did taking photos. 

Taking this photo was a bit challenging. I really should have looked up the best way to light a reflective surface like a book jacket, but I wanted to figure it out myself. 

The book jacket is very reflective. Very very reflective. I couldn't use a small light source because I would get hard, ugly shadows for one, and there would be small, intense highlights. So a big light source it is. Which makes big specular highlights. As in the entire book. This has the same effect as putting a layer of white over the book in Ps and turning the opacity to 50%. It washes out all the colors and destroyed the contrast. 

I had to figure out how to get rid of that silly highlight. What I found worked the best was to have a bare 560 shooting across the book and up at a big reflector. The reflector bounced light back at the book at an angle that wouldn't be seen in the camera. In other words, it still lit the book, but only by the texture of the book reflecting light and not by the actual reflector. If that made any sense. It's the same principle as tilting your phone in the sun so that you don't get a reflection of the sky. The angle of incidence and reflection does not intersect with the lens position. 

Despite getting the specular highlight out of the way as much as possible, it was still there to some degree.  Which mean some work in Lr.

First thing I did was actually to raise the highlights and whites. Seems the wrong thing to do, but it ensured adequate contrast on that part of the tonal range. 

Quick note, the goal here is to make the book jacket look like it does in Ps when it was first designed, not as it does in real life. We all know that things look better on the screen then they do in physical form, and the point of this is to make the book look appealing to buy. 

Continuing with Lr adjustments, I added a gradient adjustment to each side of the image to brighten up the white background just a bit and make the book stand out more. 

I then went a painted over the black parts on the cover to make sure they were really black and not a shade of grey. 

Lastly, I adjusted the colors on the book (red) to be more orange, as this is the real cover of the book. In the original photo it looked more red than it should be. 

The camera setting were f4, 1/200, and ISO200. The 560 was set to 1/64+ .3. 

Aperture was at f4 so that I would get a little bit more sharpness than at a lower aperture, shutter was that high to kill ambient light, and the ISO was there so that I could use a lower power setting on the 560. The stopped down aperture,  about one stop down from 2.2, killed one stop of light from the 560, so I had to raise the ISO one stop to compensate. Remember, shutter doesn't nothing to light from a strobe unless it's over the sync speed. 

Now that's you're done reading this, go read a book. 

See you tomorrow.