Posts Tagged ‘White background’

A plain white or black background can be very useful for both photography and video. It gives a very clean look, without any distractions to take the viewer's attention away from the subject.

A plain white background also works well where the intent is for the image or video to blend in with a web page or printed page that is also white. (The same for black, though white is a much more common background).

A plain background is often used for catalog style product photography. And it can also work well for portraits, still lifes, and studio-style nature photos. In this article we'll look at a few different ways you can create a clean white or black background for your images or videos (the technique is the same for both).

Photographing a white subject on a white background can be quite tricky, particularly if you are looking for a pure white background. In this article I'll look at a number of ways of achieving a pure white background while keeping the white subject exposed nicely.

Clean white backgrounds can work well for some images, particularly product photography. There are two different ways that a white background is normally achieved:

• Aiming a light at the background so the bright light bounces back off the background.
• Using a semi-transparent background, and placing a light behind the background to shoot through it.

However, there can be a bit of a problem if you only have one light to work with. If you use your light to blow out the background to pure white, then how are you going to light your subject? And vice versa if you use the light to light your subject.

Thankfully Photoshop (or most other image editing programs) can come to the rescue.