First DIY lightbox pictures...

mrpink · Feb 28, 2010

Had some spare time yesterday so I decided to make myself a lightbox. A quick trip to wal-mart and $3.32 later I had everything I needed (they had white flat bed sheets on sale for $2) White poster board was $0.38 each, I bought 3. Took about 20mins to make, here are the results.....

I didn't notice the brown reflection in the left side of the bottle until after I uploaded it, I removed it using GIMP but my flickr account is maxed out so I need to wait until tomorrow to replace it.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

My 18 month old daughters cookie monster doll.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Again, raided my daughters toy chest for subjects.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

All of these were taken using natural light, I have a bay window setup in my kitchen so I just set the box in there and opened all of the blinds. To me, the backgrounds look a little grey, and I am assuming this is from lack of lighting on the backdrop. I am looking to get some off camera strobes in the near future. Hopefully this will solve the greyness issue.

Let me know what you think.

p!nK

SushiWarrior · Feb 28, 2010

I think you mean light-tent, not a softbox. Looks okay, pretty underexposed and I would lighten up the corners in GIMP/photoshop.

JimmyO · Feb 28, 2010

Light looks good but your about 2 stops underexposed....

mrpink · Feb 28, 2010

SushiWarrior said:
I think you mean light-tent, not a softbox. Looks okay, pretty underexposed and I would lighten up the corners in GIMP/photoshop.

No, I meant lightbox.

I see what you are saying about the underexposed, but the shot I have that are brighter seem to be very blown out. I will try round two today and let you guys see what I come up with.

thanks for the comments.

p!nK

Derrel · Feb 28, 2010

It looks like you are getting pretty even, diffused lighting from it! Awesome!

I think some of the fall-off in the corners might be attributable to your camera's lens, which is quite normally really, and can be removed in post processing software. It's amazing what can be done with a little DIY spirit and some materials from a store!

SushiWarrior · Feb 28, 2010

Oh also most of them could really use a tighter crop, with studio shots RoT is not really necessary. All it is is empty space. It only really works for the blocks.

pbelarge · Feb 28, 2010

Derrel said:
It's amazing what can be done with a little DIY spirit and some materials from a store!

I could not agree more.
Nice job and great spirit. With a little more practice (and a lot less money) you will have great results.

mrpink · Feb 28, 2010

OK, here is a brighter shot of Cookie....

Better? Worse?

At first, this seemed to be blown out, now looking at it next to the others it doesn't seem as bad as I thought. I lost some definition his eyes (being that they are on top of his head and against the white background)

This DIY stuff can get addicting.

p!nK

SushiWarrior · Feb 28, 2010

Maybe I would take the underexposed subject and just lighten all of the white manually. With the lighter shot it gets very "soft" around the edges as the light blows out the edges of the subject.

mrpink · Feb 28, 2010

SushiWarrior said:
Maybe I would take the underexposed subject and just lighten all of the white manually. With the lighter shot it gets very "soft" around the edges as the light blows out the edges of the subject.

Yes, that is why I was thinking there was not enough light on the background. From what I have read- a light source focused primarily on the white background with bring it up to proper exposure.

I will play around with it in PP, see what I can come up with.

p!nK

SushiWarrior · Feb 28, 2010

That's just a quick 3 minute edit. I cropped it, brightened it, messed around with levels and hue/saturation, and that's what it came out like.

Sbuxo · Feb 28, 2010

Let me get that Absolut.

NateWagner · Feb 28, 2010

sushi, I think you should look at it on a brighter monitor, because it looks like an incredibly sloppy masking job.

Btw. to the op, I think the image looks much better brightened.