Help on Clothing photography

[DavidAngeloPhotography]

Hey all, I could sure use some help in regards to shooting white clothing on a mannequin. A brief intro, I am the product photographer for Tennis Company. I am using my Canon rebel Xti, 17-55mm lens. Anyway, I am having trouble with white clothing getting washed out with a yellow tint. I then used a red filter and then I get a red tint to it. Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated. I shoot in our attic of the business. I attached a pic so you can see what I am dealing with in terms of space and my lighting set up. Thanks again.

[Benji]

The yellow tint is most likely caused by the tungsten lights bouncing off the yellow wood above the clothing and contaminating the image. I would either paint the ceiling with white paint or staple a white bed sheet across the joists.

Shoot in Raw and shoot an 18% grey card first and all your white balance problems vanish.

Benji

[ttosifa]

Another possibility is that you are blowing out the blue channel. As I recall, this will give a very light blue tint that, when color "corrected" would give a yellow tint elsewhere. Depends on how you and/or your camera are dealing with it if in fact that is the problem.

I find that it is easy to blow the blue channel when photographing white things. My cats, for instance, are black and white, and I have to be careful with their white spots.

You can check to see if your blue channel has been blown in PS in several ways. One is to bring up a levels adjustment layer and Option-click (for a Mac, don't know the Windows equivalent) the highlight slider. If you see blue, you've blown the channel. My D700 can also be set to show blue blinkies on the screen when I have blown the blue.

Clothing shots, particularly white clothing, is going to require care in setting up the lights AND the clothing. Properly exposed white is going to be white -- it won't show form and you will be right at the edge of overexposing a channel. You need shadows to show form on white clothes. You can see this in your shot above -- all the wrinkles are identified by shadows. But you have to decide how soft and how deep you want the shadows, and light appropriately.

In your white shirt shot above, it appears to me that you have actually blown the red channel in the collar, yet the shirt overall is unpleasingly (to me) underexposed. Just changing the exposure on your camera will unlikely be satisfying, as you will further blow out the collar -- losing detail and color accuracy (when you get color accuracy in the white). You'll have to adjust the lighting so that you can get more light on the white part of the shirt and reduce the light on the collar, assuming the same exposure you are using now. You'll have to work with the angles of your light, change the size of your light, bring in gobos, whatever it takes.

Product photography, in my opinion, is hard work. But when it's good, it's good.

By the way, black properly exposed is black. Again, no form. But form is revealed on black by reflecting the lightsource so that the reflections produce overexposed black (i.e., gray). That's why you never light a black car -- you light that which surrounds it.

[LeeR]

Years ago a well known photographer was taking pictures of a chambered nautilus shell when he noticed that the shell had an unexplained red tint. After searching for the source of the hue for some time he realized it was the T-shirt he was wearing. He then tried wearing different colors of shirt to see their effect on the shell and decided he like the red best.

That's the long way around to tell you I agree with Benji.

[ttosifa]

By the way, I just looked at your set up shot. If you plan to do these sorts of shots regularly, consider getting a couple of the 7'x3.5' Photoflex light panels with diffusion (shoot through) fabric or something similar. I don't remember the cost. But they will make your lights MUCH bigger and it will be MUCH easier to shoot light-colored clothing. If this is just a one-off, consider getting a white bedsheet and hanging it from something. Make sure it's white, not cream white, and be careful about your color correction like Benji says.

Your lights are WAY to small for something like this.

[LoveDSLR]

That's why I use a color meter, calibrated my monitors and profiling my cameras.

[OsmosisStudios]

Its actually not a yellow tint: it's magenta/green. Your white balance is out of wack.

[ttosifa]

Originally Posted by OsmosisStudios

Its actually not a yellow tint: it's magenta/green. Your white balance is out of wack.

Yeah, good observation. It's consistent with adjusting levels for the exposure in the picture above -- the green channel is the first to get blown in the white parts of the shirt. This is a bit perplexing to me. My statement about blue usually being first to blow might be depend on the fact that I use strobes, not continuous tungsten lighting. Maybe with tungsten one has to be more careful about the green channel. Dunno...

[OsmosisStudios]

Originally Posted by ttosifa

Yeah, good observation. It's consistent with adjusting levels for the exposure in the picture above -- the green channel is the first to get blown in the white parts of the shirt. This is a bit perplexing to me. My statement about blue usually being first to blow might be depend on the fact that I use strobes, not continuous tungsten lighting. Maybe with tungsten one has to be more careful about the green channel. Dunno...

Tungsten, IIRC, shows up bright green. That could be it.