Hi, I think this is my first post in this forum. I build furniture (for fun), and I tend to use highly figured woods: quilted or tiger maple, for example. The photos show examples.
I've been trying various lighting scenarios (hard lights, soft lights, various directions) to get the best effect, to ideally show off the wood figure. (Woodworkers sometimes call say the figure "pops," much as photographs can "pop.") Results vary.
Does anyone with experience want to recommend a setup or two? Thanks.
I shoot Nikon, couple bodies, bunch of lenses, SB900, SB600, R1C1 kit, couple cheap umbrellas and stands, reflector. I also have a good camera tripod, and the lighting certainly needn't be from flash.
Guitar woods are often highly figured also. I typically use a medium softbox with a grid for key, a strip light for fill, and a honeycomb gridded reflector overhead for accent.
I adjust the angle of the accent light to produce the best chatoyance (shimmer).
I'd ditch the umbrellas in favor of soft/strip boxes because the umbrellas splash light around.
You can see my work with guitars and other musical instruments at www.guitarphotography.com
cwebster wrote:
Guitar woods are often highly figured also. I typically use a medium softbox with a grid for key, a strip light for fill, and a honeycomb gridded reflector overhead for accent.
I adjust the angle of the accent light to produce the best chatoyance (shimmer).
I'd ditch the umbrellas in favor of soft/strip boxes because the umbrellas splash light around.
You can see my work with guitars and other musical instruments at www.guitarphotography.com
<Chas>
Thank you, Chas! Terrific answer. To make sure I understand the strategy, the key and fill lights do the usual key and fill things (provide lighting, depth, shadows) and the accent light emphasizes the chatoyance in the wood? Is that more or less the idea?
I don't own any grids (yet), but I'll at least kludge up something directional to start with.
Indeed the accent light enhances the chatoyance. I usually use a boom mounted strobe for this to not limit my angle of approach.
I use grids only to keep the light from splashing around in my small studio. It's hard to get a good key/fill ratio if the room walls reflect so much light that it becomes additional fill.
You can use black wrap (Roscoe Cinefoil) to make snoots and flags to help control the light. A roll goes a very long way.
There is also room for improvement / enhancement post capture. Looking at the first image in CS5 using Levels I found it considerably underexposed and a bit overfilled per the histogram. I have no way of knowing what the piece looks like in person but I did this edit to illustrate how it can be altered to enhance tonal range, contrast and sharpness.
I tweeked the tonal range with Levels adjustments, then using adjustment layer selectively applied the soft light filter to the top to increase contrast. I applied unsharp masking sharpening overall using 500, .2, 0, faded back 70% then on a separate layer oversharpened selectively in the area indicated by the red outline. It would be more effective on a full size image. This smaller JPG pixelated when I applied it.
The AA filter over the sensor tends to mush up micro specular highlights, what give things like fur, feather and grain in wood it's shimmer and for fur/feathers the illusion of 3D texture. The way unsharp masking works is by increasing contrast between the tonal boundaries, which tricks the eye into thinking the boundaries are sharper. It's an optical illusion, but the net effect is similar to the appearance of the micro-specularity by eye. It's something that needs to be applied selectively, by before / after comparison until it looks right by sharpening on a separate layer then adjusting the opacity slider from 0% to 100%. Somewhere in the middle usually looks better that the original unsharpened version.
Thanks, Cgardner. Sorry about the late reply. That was very helpful. I guess a lot when I set the exposure comp for pics like this, and my pp skills are, well, self taught....
A couple of notes on post processing. You can always make improvements from what you get out of the camera or raw processor, and Levels are an okay way of going about it, but you will have a lot more tonal options using Curves. In addition, the Levels adjustments shown here are great as far as they go, but they also show up one of the pitfalls of doing a master Levels move, in that it increases the saturation quite a bit. Since it's impossible for anyone looking at these jpegs on a computer to know what the real wood looks like, this is something that should be at least worth noting. The way around the saturation increase use a Levels or preferably Curves Adjustment Layer, and set the blending mode of the layer to Luminosity. Just doing a Luminosity move will often leave the image looking somewhat desaturated, but a second Adj. Layer set to Normal or a Hue/Sat Adj Layer can let you fine tune the look of the wood further.
Charles makes very fine photographs of wood guitars. He knows what he's talking about in terms of lighting wood. Pay attention to his advice. I see from his website that both he and I have photographed a Klein guitar. His is actually the only other shot of a Klein I've seen recently.
Levels is the most basic tool for tonal adjustment which I've used since starting with V1 of Photoshop in the early 90s. It has 5 controls. It can move the input values in the shadows and highlights, move the middle tones indepent of the those end points and also allow the output values in the shadows and highlights to be altered.
Before commenting in a photo I will copy it and open it in Levels as an evaluation tool to see whether or not the image has a full range of tone, and if any of the channels are clipping in highlights or shadows resulting in a loss of detail / texture. If you have Photoshop open the shot I edited in Levels you'll see a gap on the right indicating the lack of any bright highlights. Holding down the alt/opt key and then clicking on the ^ highlight slider will cause the image to black out, except for any channels which are clipping.
In yours there weren't any clipping areas in part because the tone of everything was darker. But in terms of how the brain perceives 3D shape and texture in 2D photos having specularity (clipping highlights) on objects you want perceived as hard or smooth are important clues and the reason CW recommended collimated (parrallel ray) accent lighting to create what I refered to a micro-specularity.
An easier to understand analogy would be black and white cats sitting on pile of coal. To render the fur texture in both cats you'd want lighting which creates sharply defined specular reflections on the hair shafts, what creates the sparkle in the fur seen by eye.
Continuing to depress the alt/opt key move the ^ highlight slider to the left. Photoshop will lighten the highlights and you will see clipping start to occur represented in colors corresponding to the channels. If you were evaluating a test image with a white /gray/black reference like a QPCard or content you know is neutral white you'd see the white patch of the target / white content of photo clip in all channels at the same time IF your WB was neutral. If blue or red were to clip first on the white target it would indicate the color balance in the shot wasn't neutral. So combined with a reference target the right slider is a simple way to check highlight exposure and WB when evaluating an image.
Highlights are exposed "nominally" when specular highlights clip and appear in colors/ white in the opt/alt + click display but solid white objects don't. Something also to be mindful of is that there are changes during post-processing which affect highlights. If a 16-bit RAW file is adjusted in ProPhoto editing space at the point where speculars clip but solid white content / target doesn't by the time you make a 600 x 800 sharpened 8-bit JPG that the solid whites are clipping and in one or more channels.
By way of analogy with cabinet making the capture stage in the camera should be like cutting the board with knowledge that wood will be lost with all the subsequent processing steps of milling, mitering and sanding. With experince running photo through the RAW > JPG and RAW > Printing workflows on your equipment you'll learn how much allowance for "shrinkage" you will need to allow for when exposing images in the camera and editing. For example my RAWs look a bit underexposed in absolute terms out of camera and so do my "Master" 16 bit ProPhoto edits, but when I convert to small JPG and sharpen to the size you posted and apply the "Levels Test" I don't find any undesired clipping in highlights or shadows.
Getting back to Levels, you can do the same evaulation for full range / clipping by holding alt+opt and moving the shadow slider. If you see clipping before you move the slider it indicates a loss of detail at capture an in the studio setting insufficient fill lighting. If you need to move the slider to the right a good bit before anything is forced to clip it would indicated the image was overfilled and the full DR of the sensor wasn't utilized at capture. Again it's more of a preliminary diagnostic tool than one I use for the actual correction of the image.
If you adjust images with the highlight and shadow sliders you'll notice that the middle slider in Levels also moves automatically. That's Photoshop trying to adjust the middle tone values of the image relative to the shorter "normalized" Black-to-White range you adjusted inward. In terms of net effect moving the middle slider in Levels has an effect similar to pulling the middle of 45° line in Curves up or down to shift the linearly of the tones. That's how you change the apparent saturation (tonal value) of the image — shifting the tone of the perceptually significant detail in the mid tones.
If you try using Levels as a diagnostic tool as I do on final reduced JPGs at the end of your workflow you'll have a clearer idea of "how to cut the wood" at the beginning steps of capture / RAW/ 16-bit editing. I don't image, because I have years of experience doing it, but occasionally before every starting to edit a RAW file I will take the SOOC file and run it through my entire RAW, 16-bit ProPhoto, 8-Bit sRGB JPG workflow and give it the "Levels Test" to see how close the end points are to clipping and losing detail, or conversely if they need tweeking to optimize them because they are too dark. Moving the middle slider when evaluating darkens and lightens the middle tones which radically changes the overall appearance of the image. Looking at the SOOC JPG conversion as is, lighter, then darker gives me an good idea where I need to take it when adjusting the RAW and editing in PS.
In terms of adjustment workflow if the final image I make "global" corrections to tweek exposure, WB and contrast in ACR (Adobe Camera RAW) and also via the Camera Profiles tab may make selective color shifts without affecting the neutrals.
When I open the file in CS5 it will be a bit darker in the highlights and lighter in the shadows than I want the final JPG, but that's the "allowance for shrinkage". Then based on my evaluation in Levels with lighter / darker midtones I use Adjustment Layers to SELECTIVELY lighten, darken and add contrast to specific image areas much like dodging and burning a print under an enlarger. I explain how I use them in this tutorial: http://photo.nova.org/AdjustmentLayers/
I also have a tutorial on lighting furniture http://photo.nova.org/PhotographingFurniture/ with SOOC and after editing photos which illustrate how they can be used to enhance what the camera captures. The furniture tutorial resulted from a furniture maker with only two lights e-mailing me for suggestions on how to light the chairs he made on a white background. Given his limited equipment the bare bulb / small white room approach was the most practical. I just grabbed a nearby table for the example but it illustrates how using screen to lighten and multiply to darken and add saturation work, and how adding a collimated "rim" light from behind (the hair light I normally use for portraits) enhances the illusion of 3D in a 2D photo. Not a road map you want to follow litererally for lighting your more elegant pieces but the general direction you need to travel to get optimal results.
