Reasonable expectation?

[angryrabbit]

Hi all. We've built a lightbox for shooting "products", (e.g. bottles of alcohol, bags of chips, scissors, etc.).

It was my hope that the images the camera produced would be good enough such that they could be trimmed in Photoshop.

Our results have been less than satisfactory.

So I'm backing up and asking: is it a reasonable expectation that one could take a photo such that it could be sent through Photo's Trim function (image > trim) and come out with almost nothing but the product?

I've manually cut about 1,400 images already, and, as I'm sure you can imagine, am quite tired of it.

Thanks, much!

 

[chrisburke]

when i take pics of "products" and want the background (i.e. the white from the box) i just use the "Magic Eraser" and the white background is almost all gone in 1 click

 

[angryrabbit]

when i take pics of "products" and want the background (i.e. the white from the box) i just use the "Magic Eraser" and the white background is almost all gone in 1 click

What is the "magic eraser"? Are you referring to the magic wand?

Any action that needs to be done in Photoshop should be batchable. In other words, the action performed for one image must assume identical arguments for any number of images.

My goal is to take the 500+ photos, create one set of action and let Photoshop do its thing across all 500 photos.

Any variance in what an image needs to achieve a completely white background means the batch will fail to produce the desired results. Granted, the wand is more forgiving than Photoshop's Trim command, but it can also eat into an image; also undesirable.

 

[chrisburke]

oh your wanting to make it an action... my method likely wont work then.. and the magic eraser is when you hold down on the eraser button, then you get 3 other options, one of those is the magic eraser... is erases selected colors

 

[angryrabbit]

oh your wanting to make it an action... my method likely wont work then.. and the magic eraser is when you hold down on the eraser button, then you get 3 other options, one of those is the magic eraser... is erases selected colors

Interesting. I've never used that before. Pretty cool though. Thanks for the tip.

Anyone else have any experience with getting pure white backgrounds?