So this lady that owns a antique furniture store wants me to take pictures for her new website. She wants it to be purely white background images. I have mentioned that a studio would be better but the items are quite bulky so it would be better to do it there. Any idea how I should do this? I'm thinking I need some kind of white sheet that I can hang with a couple lights in front but I have no clue as to where I can get hold of such sheets.
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How to make the background white
- Thread starter Raevinn
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Jabberwocky
Expert Member
Put a sheet/curtain with a single colour that is not in the item behind it, photoshop`s magic wand will do the rest.
If the furniture is wood textured, use blue. Unless its varnished... in which case the whole item would look blue.
On second thought... Just put an example in front of a painted wall, take a picture and post here.
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Ryanbighead
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I would say use green if you go the photoshop route...
"green screen"
"green screen"
get a thick white sheet, and put it against wall and forward, so that it doesnt make a actual 'crease' where it turns, so it will sortof be curving instead of straight down then straight on floor, then get 2 brightish white lights, floresent probably best. place one on your left and one on your right, pointing towards the item. to eliminate most shadows. Then take your picture. should come out fairly okay for not much expense.
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Fudzy
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If you have Photoshop look up tuts on how to deep etch a photo. The same logic can be applied to GiMP if you don't have PS.
http://chaendryn.hubpages.com/hub/Photoshop-Tutorials
http://chaendryn.hubpages.com/hub/Photoshop-Tutorials
Just keep this in mind... If you get your setup right you can take the photo, and upload it. If you go with some setup where you then need to go edit each photo to try get rid of the background in photoshop or paint.net, it will make it a huge job which can be eliminated with a few small basic steps upfront. photoshop route is great for less then 10 photos. but having to edit each item a furniture shop want to put online... make your life easier, just use a few lights and a white sheet, will work like a charm. Afterall, if you go for photoshoot you stand in front of white sheet not green then the dude edit 300 photos to change green to white...
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Fudzy
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Are you doing the website as well? If not, I'd check with the designer to ensure they are wanting white backgrounds, not transparent backgrounds.
scud
Expert Member
For transparent backgrounds , you would of course do the shoot in front of a clean window !
Jabberwocky
Expert Member
lol!
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Fudzy
Guest
LOL! Or just ask for the invisible sheeting at Builders Express, that should result in some confused looks
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Fudzy
Guest
I'd imagine its to try replicate the chroma keying technique used in film. Doesn't work as well IMO. Using the Select Wizard or selecting a colour range will always find green in the main image.
AstroTurf
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I do plenty pics in a light box and if you have reflective materials that go white it makes getting the back-round out a bit harder.
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Fudzy
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What process do you use to remove the background?
AstroTurf
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Just use the wand in corel.
I bought a 7m long swath of heavy white material - might be tablecloth linen - from the local fabric shop and it's served me well. For something like this you needn't use strobes, hot lights will work as well and you'll be able to quickly see specular highlights and what shadows are being cast and adjust accordingly. The better the set up the less time you'll be forced to work in post.
It is theoretically impossible to correctly perform chroma keying, especially with semi-translucent foreground objects, with only a single background colour. James Blinn (of the Blinn-Newell Utah teapot fame) published a paper to show that the problem is under-determined in general, but that you can get around the problem by capturing the shot twice with different background colours.
It seems that Hollywood is blissfully ignorant of the flaws of single-colour chroma keying --- you can often see these artifacts in the actor's hair if you pay close attention.
One day I will try Blinn's method with a screen / TV as the backdrop ...
edit: I see that McGuire and Matusik published a paper on a real-time system based on Blinn's method at SIGGRAPH 2006. You need a special camera, but you get perfectly chroma-keyed video in real time.
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Demo of background removal
Ok, so I put my money where my mouth is, and I implemented Blinn's two-background method of chroma keying.
Here are the input photos:
Note the background colour (just some coloured cardboard). Compare background with second input image:
The method requires that you grab a shot of each background without the foreground objects (not really interesting, so I will not post those shots). After applying Blinn's method, I blended the foreground object with a new background image using the alpha channel determined as part of the chroma-keying. Here is the result:
This was completely automated. All I had to do is capture the four photos -- two shots of only the backgrounds, and two shots with the foreground objects (one with each background) -- and run them through the algorithm. Here are some 100% crops:
and
Note how well the fur is blended with the new background in the first crop. In the second crop we can see some speckles appearing --- I suspect that you may have to HDR your images first if you want clean shadows.
As you can see, the method works rather well with translucent objects, but glass is still a problem. The problem with glass is that you cannot recompute the refraction, in other words, the background that is visible through the glass is not distorted at all, but merely alpha-blended, so you have to be really careful, or you end up with some bizarre-looking photos. (Look closely at the stem of the glass in the third image above).
I'd be happy to send the code (C++ using OpenCV) to anyone who is interested.
Ok, so I put my money where my mouth is, and I implemented Blinn's two-background method of chroma keying.
Here are the input photos:
Note the background colour (just some coloured cardboard). Compare background with second input image:
The method requires that you grab a shot of each background without the foreground objects (not really interesting, so I will not post those shots). After applying Blinn's method, I blended the foreground object with a new background image using the alpha channel determined as part of the chroma-keying. Here is the result:
This was completely automated. All I had to do is capture the four photos -- two shots of only the backgrounds, and two shots with the foreground objects (one with each background) -- and run them through the algorithm. Here are some 100% crops:
and
Note how well the fur is blended with the new background in the first crop. In the second crop we can see some speckles appearing --- I suspect that you may have to HDR your images first if you want clean shadows.
As you can see, the method works rather well with translucent objects, but glass is still a problem. The problem with glass is that you cannot recompute the refraction, in other words, the background that is visible through the glass is not distorted at all, but merely alpha-blended, so you have to be really careful, or you end up with some bizarre-looking photos. (Look closely at the stem of the glass in the third image above).
I'd be happy to send the code (C++ using OpenCV) to anyone who is interested.
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