Enhancing Highlights and Shadows in Post

Although we always strive to get as much right in the camera as possible, product photography is one area where it usually pays to do a little tweaking in Photoshop after the fact (called “post-processing” or just “post” by people who can only use one word at a time). When I shoot a product, what I’m looking to do in Photoshop (besides removing any specks, dust, or other little junk on the background or the product itself) is to enhance the highlights (the brightest areas of the product) and the shadows (the darker areas). Basically, I make the highlights brighter and more obvious, and the shadow areas a bit darker and richer. Once you see the difference this makes, you’ll want to be doing some “post” yourself. I did a little video for you (you can find it on the book’s companion website at www.kelbytraining.com/books/digphotogv3) to show you exactly how the Photoshop post-processing was done for most of the product shots used here in the book. I think you’ll be surprised at both how easy it is, and what an impact it has on the finished image.

What File Format to Save Your Photos In Even though we shoot in RAW format, once you open and edit your photos in a program like Photoshop, at some point, you’re going to have a duplicate of the same image (for uploading to a lab, or archiving, etc.), and that’s when you have to decide which file format to save your images in. I choose JPEG mode with a quality setting of 10 (out of a possible 12) for all my final images (I think a setting of 10 gives an ideal balance between maintaining great quality and still compressing the file size quite a bit).