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Editorial watch photography of Jack Mason Brand life style watches, available at Nordstorm now.
www.jackmasonbrand.com

Please contact us for pricing on high quality watch photography.

Made two stop motion animations.

The first one (star wars flip-bar cufflinks) is actually my first try, thus the transition of a full loop is not as well planed as the second attempt featuring a pair of USB cufflinks.  Both made using 17 frames edited and created in Photoshop.

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Step 1:  Find some images to print out on a letter sized paper

Step 2: Prepare the setup, stick the new printout on a black board, put your products on a piece of reflective black plexi glass.

Step 3: Shoot with controlled lighting and edit in photoshop to clear out imperfections

You are done!

I was assigned the task of a mockup to put some gems into a skull cufflink for a customer to review, the task is simple.  extract the gem from a previous product using Pen Tool, make a new layer and match it into the eye socket of the new one.  For different colors, simply use Hue/Satiation (CMD+U) option to instantly change gem’s hue.

Here is the image of the original products I worked on:

And finished job:

As a product photographer, you are often faced with the challenge of limited workspace, most often times, limited prop choices.  I was given a (really tiny!) piece of wood and to be expected to produce a 30″ print of a pair of our new style cufflinks fully blown up for the upcoming trade show.

The key is to find the right angle that utilizes most of the useable wood texture, combined with photoshop’s new powerful Content Aware Fill function, the final result came out better than expected.

What it looks like

Final result

Photography is a key factor in online retailing business.  Choosing a bad photographer could literally ruin your reputation and drive customers away from you.

Taken for example, a recent photo retouching request I was assigned to for some high value designer cufflinks.  The photography is so so,  the path cutout was okay, and it was just dull and seems unedited.   Somehow the designer decided to just use these un-edited images for all their online presentations.  It took me a good amount of time to at least correct them as best I can, so we can use them for our online product page.

You be the judge, were the original images good enough for publishing, or my edited versions (diagonally placed) better?

I’ve been asked to setup a shot for the engraveable items that we carry.  So we got money clip, tie bar and cufflinks all in production and ready to shoot, but we don’t have any sample yet for the engraveable charm, I have to setup the shot with a temporary charm and replaced the surface with an existing cufflink surface shot.

This is the setup

This is the image I’ve used to replace charm surface

This is the final outcome.

Photographed a new banner for our new products (antora.it), and I was just toying with the composition and text placement.  Have to use the mirror tool to create the top part of the plexi glass because the original shot was a horizontal rectangular composition and our designer wanted square.  I’ve also included the raw image for a before and after comparison.

Products available for purchase here

Often times we came upon the problem of photographing a subject that is backlit by either the sun or light came from the window behind.  You want to use natural lighting, but without fill flash, the subject looks dark and underexposed.

This problem can be partially corrected if you are shooing in raw and able to do raw-adjustments for “fill light” before edit.  But often times or not, if you are stuck with a backlit jpg image,  you can quickly adjust the exposure to perfection in Photoshop CS5.

The “Shadow/Highlights” tool will be your best bet to start.  Also in this tutorial, I will combine the dramatic lighting technique from my last tutorial to enhance the overall look of the finished image.

Here is a scene where subjects were  lit from behind. Notice how dark the subjects were compared to the background.:

Original Image

1. Create a new duplicate layer of the background, and name it “Shadow/Highlight” layer for simple identification, with a blending mode of “Screen.” (The screen blending mode will generally lighten up the overall brightness of the image)

2. With Shadow/Highlight layer selected, go to menu “Image” –> “Adjustments” –> “Shadow/Hightlights”, a dialog like below will open up, click on “Show More Options” to display all the adjustment properties, tweak all the settings until you get a desired effect for your image (ie. the subject is lit up nicely):

Now we have the subject lit up, however the overall image looks pretty flat and low contrast.

3. Optionally, within this step, you can add a layer mask, and mask out the top portion of the image using a soft brush.

Masking the top portion

The top portion is masked, but the image still looks flat.

Now we have completed the shadow highlight adjustment, and the image still looks too flat.  It’s time to add some dramatic lighting to the image to boost its visual appeal.

4. Make a new layer name it lighting, add dramatic lighting effects.

5. (Optional) Make another new layer, dodge the top portion of the image some more

6. (Optional) Make a new “Hue/Saturation” Adjustment Layer, and desaturate the image just a bit.

Finished Image

There you go, the whole process takes less than few min to do, and will instantly boost your image’s visual appearance.

To quickly add a dramatic lighting effect to an image, you can use Render->Lighting Effects tool under Filter

Original Image:

Open your original file.

1. First, duplicate your background layer into a new layer by dragging your background layer to “create a new layer” icon under layers tab.

2. Go to “Filter” Menu –> “Render” –> “Lighting Effects…” You’ll find a dialog similar to this one.  Select the round “Soft Omni” lighting style in “Style”, then adjust your properties to create an effect looks similar to the preview below.  Once finished, click “OK”

3. With default “Normal” layer rendering method, you’ll get some really darkened images, thus, we need to change the layer rendering effects from “Normal” to “Soft Light” to blend our new lighting effect into image nicely, then, adjust duplicated layer’s opacity to your liking.  You can see in the dialog below, after I created the first background copy layer and tweaked opacity, I then duplicated the first copy layer, this way, so I can fine tune the image further by adjusting opacity (This third layer is optional.)

4.The final image will look like below.  Notice the much more dramatized lighting effect compare to the original photograph’s flat apparence.

Edited Image:

In Photoshop CS5, the HDR Toning command lets you apply the full range of HDR contrast and exposure settings to individual images, to achieve a look close to real HDR merged images.

Before:

After:

HDR Toning Dialog:

I just got a copy of the Adobe Master Collection CS5 and am experimenting with a lot of new features.  Photoshop CS5 sees a significant boost in terms of ease of use (time saving) for photographers a like.

Two particular functions that would interest photographers the most is probably the “Content aware fill” as well as the totally cool “puppet warp” tool, first seen in the motion video editing program After Effects.

Together, content aware fill and puppet warp is your most powerful weapon for image objects manipulation.

Here is an example I just created using both tools.

First, you use content aware fill to remove the flowers for the background.

Then, you extract the flowers into a separate layer use the new selection tool called “quick selection tool”

Once you have the flower extracted, you can then go to Edit->Puppet Warp to apply all the movement effects to the flower.

To create animated gif, you then make multiple layers of the flower selection, and apply puppet warp to each layer to form a motion effect.

Finally, compile the layers into animated gif and “save for web & devices”

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Boxer Muhammad Ali training for a fight against Joe Frazier (1971).  Photographer:John Shearer

I tried to add a bit spice and color into the original photograph.