improving product photos for the Web

[bobrock4]

I have 300 photos made by a manufacturer to display in a web site. In my opinion they have bad background. I would like to understand what should I do to give them a better result only using Photoshop post production.

I would also like to know if I could find some cheap service to make this post-production for all of them.

Here there are some of these photos

Thanks for your attention

Roberto

 

[bianni]

It has too much reflections (highlights)
Maybe something like this

 

[CameraClicker]

The initial photos have a yellow cast. Your "like this" photos have a green cast! The light looks like there was more than one colour temperature used. Warm at left, cool at right. They were shot with a small aperture and there is sensor dirt showing.

There are companies that provide a clipping mask service. They remove the background. The product in your sample photos still will not look good unless the lighting is fixed.

 

[bobrock4]

Thanks to you for your replies.

@bianni I ask you how you make to obtain those results

@CameraClicker, I ask to where should I try to look for such companies to obtain a good work with a right money expense.

 

[CameraClicker]

Google is your friend: Google

I do my own retouching because I like total control, so I have almost no experience with retouching services. I know they exist and recall one company I wrote software for was using retouching services for a product shoot they did. I don't know how much it cost, and that was about 10 years ago anyway.

 

[bobrock4]

I made some retouches in the past. I was unexpert but maybe it is a time consuming activity expecially for dozens of photo. What do you think about it?

 

[CameraClicker]

I don't know where you got the photos but you seem to have a bunch with the same bad lighting. I assume you have the right to edit them and use them commercially. Invoking educational Fair Use, I tried to even out the lighting and put it on a white background. This took about an hour. It still has some too blue and some too red parts. The background is white, a separate layer painted pure white. The boots are masked over the white layer.

 

[bobrock4]

Hi CameraClicker,

the photos have been furnished to me from the reseller of shoes. He made himself these photos using own solutions, I believe buying a light and using a common digital camera. My purposes are to insert them in a Web catalogue where these products are "in front", well seen from the potential buyers. Any ecommerce solution. Only a way to show them

For these reasons I'd prefer to put out the original background, getting it white (as you have just done) or substituting it with some other background.

My photoshop use is quite simple, so I'm kindly asking to you to explain to me the procedure you have made. An hour for one photo?

Thanks and Regards

 

[CameraClicker]

Yes, it took a while and several layers to get the light evened out a little. As compared to my old shoes, which only received a minute in Photoshop. Just enough time to determine white balance from another photo with a grey card sitting on the shoes, increase exposure on the white background to hide the joint between plastic and paper while making the background really white, and finally to crop to the final image and save.

This is the whole frame with card

To answer your question, if you were going to use the photos you were given, how would you get a white, or no background, I think a relatively easy way would be:
Use the Quick Selection Tool to select the background
Invert the selection
Select Refine Edge, you can tidy up the selection if needed, then check the Decontaminate Colors box in Output and click OK. The default in the drop down menu box is New Layer with Layer Mask, which will provide a new layer.
Put a new layer under your masked shoes layer and paint it white. You will have shoes on a white background. You could skip this step, turn off any other layers and save the file as a GIF, instead of JPEG, which would give you the shoes and you could put them on a web page so the background would be the web page.

 

[bobrock4]

I will go to try CameraClicker. Many thanks.