White Background Feather

[Featherfolio]

A hospital wants three five foot prints each with a composition of many individual photos of feathers on white backgrounds. Black backgrounds are easy. White tends to blow out the fine downy parts of the feathers. Any help?

Some possible avenues toward a solution:

1. Lighting. I have tried a bunch of things but everything gets blown out.
2. Photoshop. I cannot get the downy parts to layer without including background color.
3. An off white or light grey background. These colors will have to be exactly the same for each photo since they will be composited.

 

[AlanLichty]

Not a photo task I have tried before but a couple of random thoughts:

Do you have the feathers already selected? I would try laying them all out on various backgrounds and play with lighting angles to see if that can make the feathers stand out. Expose to make certain the brightest area in the image will be no more than 1/2 stop overexposed. Recovering shadows is easy in Lightroom but nothing will help blown out bright areas.

Have you considered using a light table to shoot the feathers on? Same exposure rules as above. transmitted background light might give you a bit more dimensionality to help the lighter colored feathers.

 

[JimFox]

First off, welcome to FocalWorld Featherfolio!

Now this is an interesting project you have before you.

I agree, that this will not be easy. As great as the Selection tools are, with that soft white down of the feather it's going to be super hard.

Alan has a great suggestion to try.

I will suggest going the green screen route.

1. Set up the feathers on the green background.

2. Light the scene and photograph it making sure not to blow out the whites in the feather.

3. In photoshop open up your Green Screen Photo

4. Add a new Layer to your Green Screen Photo and fill it with White.

5. In the Layers Tool box (lower right usually) Double click on the on the Green Screen Layer to turn it into a Layer as opposed to being the Background.

6. Drag the Green Screen Layer on top of the White Layer.

7. Go to Select -> Color Range and click on the Green in the Green Screen Layer.

8. Now adjust the Fuzziness Slider to make sure all of the Green is selected, it will select that tone of green anywhere, even in between the feathers.

This next step will take a time or two to experiment with.

9. Go to Select -> Modify -> Feather and adjust the feathering to 1 pixel, maybe 2 pixels. Or maybe just even skip this Feathering step.

10. Go back to the Layer Tool Box and make sure the Green Screen layer is the active Layer

11. Press the Alt key and click on the Make Layer Mask Icon at the bottom of the tool box. (Rectangle with oval in it)

12. Your White Layer will now replace the green screen color.

13. If there is still any bits of green showing through, go to the Saturation tool, and decrease the Green Color until the green disappears.

I think this could work for you.

 

[JimFox]

BTW, please post some of your attempts, or future attempts at this here, it would be great to see how this comes out, I know I am sure curious about it.

 

[Ben Egbert]

Just following along here, you have some great advice and I too want to see the results.

By the way, a hearty welcome to the forum, and looking foreword to your posts.

 

[Jameel Hyder]

Welcome to Focalworld !!

interesting project for sure. The green screen idea is good one to try. Do post your results.

 

[Jameel Hyder]

A tip to use the green background effectively is to light the background independently so its evenly lit and keep the subject a distance from it so there is no shadow of subject. Then light the subject itself and use spot meter to meter the subject. Now its is simple to select the color and delete it giving you just the subject. Now use whatever background you like to composite. This is often doing with videos.