Lights and a Phone Case

I'm not sure if this is a picture of my phone case, or a Photoshop creation of light trails. One sort of turned into the other and I just enjoyed playing around with this one.

It started as just a straight up photo of my phone case. I was trying to replicate an ad photo, as usual, and thought I was getting pretty close. I liked the nice specular highlights on the phone case as well as the beautifully soft background.

The set up for the photo looked like this. I used two medium sized diffusers, a ring light and a soft box. I put a gobo on the bottom of the soft box to keep light from spilling on to the back drop. I wanted the background to be darker than the case. In addition to the gobo, you can see I raised the case up to distance it from the background.

I had the soft box and the ring light both set to 1/128 power, as they were so close to the case. I shot straight down. Camera settings were f3.5, 1/200 and ISO100. I used a little higher aperture to get some depth of field, and the high shutter speed to get rid of ambient.

In Lr, I made everything a bit brighter (really need to start doing that in camera...) and did a bit of split toning. I made the image cooler (as in temperature) by toning the shadows blue and the highlights got tinted yellow greenish. Very slight though. Then I had the idea of making some light trails...

One thing led to another, and soon I came up with this.

This may look really complicated, but it's really simple. The four tools used for this are the brush (to set the colors), the pen tool (to set the path of the lights), layer masks (to create the illusion of the trails weaving through the case), and the layer styles function. To create path of the trail, you use the pen tool. Right clicking and selecting "stroke path" will make the color trail based on what you have your brush set to. Then, using layer styles, you can add the glow, shadows, gradient and pattern overlays. Finally, you add a layer mask and paint out the parts you don't want. Pretty simple. For the lettering, I just made a layer and painted with the brush with colors I wanted. Layer styles too care of the rest.

I think as a whole, it's a pretty over done photo that would never be used for commercial purposes. But I really enjoyed playing around in Photoshop, so why let all my hard work go to waste and not post it! Light trails are really fun to do. They're simple and easy but have a really cool effects.

That's all. See you tomorrow.