Simple Isolation over White

You may have seen Images Isolated over white and wondered how it is done?
Firstly it is Important to get as much of the isolation done in the camera, achive this by shooting against a white backdrop, in this example it was a Kingsize flat Sheet from ASDA, need a longer one then sew two together, the lights used were a set of 4 purchased from ebay for under £200

The background should be metered two stops more than the subject, this is the setup used in this tutorial, Canon 400D, Background f11, Subject f8, 1/250sec and ISO 100, I only had one background light but two would have been better for a more even flood


Take a range of Images of the same subject I took about 10-15 of this one, after taking and selecting our Image we open it in Photoshop, it is good practice to create a copy to work on first and use this file, lets get started, open the Image in Photoshop and check for focus (sharpness) and general composition, we are happy with this image it looks ok so we can make a start


There are a number of different ways to Isolate over white this one is quite quick, easy and effective worth adding to your workflow,from the Menu we choose Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Levels


You will automatically get the Levels dialog box appear, under the Histogram there are three sliders, just slide the left (Black) slider to the right to expose the areas you need to clean, as you can see the background in our sample was not as white as we first thought


Now you just select the Dodge Tool from the tools, and a setting of Highlights and 10%, we want to remove some large areas first so we choose a large brush (300) for the first pass


From the Menu, Window > Layers (F7) Select the layer called Background, then using the Dodge tool remove all the larger areas of discoloured white, work as close to the image as you can, zoom in if you are unsure


Once you have done as much as you can, working at 100%, View > Actual Pixels, reduce your brush size in comfortable steps size 30 down to 10, now you can work the detail, you can even change to 5% or use a finer brush, take as many passes as you need reducing the brush or Exposure, but only practice will prove your best workflow, if you mess up you can always start again


As you can see we finished with a size 10 brush, when you are happy with the Image, from the Window > Layers, select the "Adjustment Layer" right mouse click and delete this layer, now you are left with the background image, nice and clean, save as new image jpg quality 12 and you are finished


And here is our finished image all clean and ready to use, I hope you will find this article helps, and the most important thing is photography should be enjoyable, so keep snapping