Clipping Path for Business

When photographing most items I always shoot in a way that highlights the best characteristics of the product itself which doesn't necessarily create a true white background. Correct lighting of the object will hence often result in underexposure of the backdrop so that it appears an unpleasant and uneven shade of grey. Take as an example a photograph of a white paper plate. To bring out the surface texture and detail of the plate the photographer would have to somewhat underexpose this area, but by exposing for the brilliant white background the detail on the plate would be lost and consequently appear flat and 2-D.

Obviously, these problems can generally be overcome with extensive and time-consuming photographic lighting solutions such as flagging the object. A 'flag' effectively creates a physical obstacle in between the studio light and the item, therefore shading the object so that it sees less light while subsequently increasing the intensity of the light to the backdrop. This is lovely if the client has the budget for what I call 'bespoke' product photography, but more often than not they have many hundreds of products they basically require cataloging so resources and time scales are understandably tight.

In these instances, the easiest, most affordable and normally most productive solution is in the creation of a post-production clipping path. Produced in professional image manipulation software like Adobe's wonderful Photoshop, clipping paths are hand-drawn vector paths that once utilized isolate and separate the product from the background and effectively allow the product to be dropped onto an infinite number of backgrounds. It may be compared simply to taking a pair of scissors to a printed magazine, cutting the desired object out and dropping it onto a background of your liking!