How I make MONEY with MACRO (Lighting tutorial for macro and product photography)
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- Опубликовано: 28 июл 2023
- In this week's video I show how I use macro techniques like focus stacking and flash lighting to create commercial-standard product photos that could be sold to clients for actual money. I show how I photograph this product setup, including the settings and composition and how I use Lightroom, Photoshop and Helicon Focus to create my final image.
It's amazing how many techniques from my macro photography I use in my product photography and it's my macro work that has brought in the most commercial clients for me, allowing me to earn money from the same macro skills I've shown on this channel.
And even if you don't care about doing product photography, taking photos of any new shiny gadgets you've got at home is still an amazing way of sharpening up your focus stacking techniques, or learning more about how to control your lighting. And you can then take those skills out into the world to photograph your preferred subjects.
In studio I was using two Godox AD600 Pro lights, with one Godox AD200 Pro flash, controlled by the Godox X-Pro C controller on my Canon R5.
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#tutorial #photography #productphotography
thank you for all your work making theses videos I love them.
I enjoy both your studio videos and your outdoor macro and landscape videos, and your editing videos, so please continue doing a mixture of them!
I don't shoot just one thing myself either, I enjoy shooting nature, macro, with and without flash, and sometimes still life so I'm learning from all you do!
Thanks so much Tim, that’s really helpful and really nice of you to say! Do you try these kind of product photos with macro or do you prefer natural subjects?
@@AndrewLanxonPhotography I shoot a lot of macro outside, natural subjects.
But when I shoot indoors at my desk, taking a quick look at my macro images I think it's about 50-50 natural subjects and man-made subjects and even for flowers often the background will be something man-made that will need to be cleaned up.
And often I do focus stacking on these images as well.
Ah a good mixture then. I try to shake things up a bit. Some people will only want to see outdoor subjects and others have said they love seeing the indoor projects so it’s always a bit of a gamble from my perspective! But I genuinely believe that there’s huge value in shooting a wider variety of things to learn more about the process
@@AndrewLanxonPhotography Browsing back -- one of my most fun macro subjects was to photograph the bare bulb of my Godox AD200 while it's flashing. 😀
Focus stacked as well to get front to back sharpness.
Something for you to try perhaps, the result can look really good.
That one did require a lot of spot-healing in CaptureOne though!
I like his macro outside & inside too, the helpful tips. Like yourself I like landscape & Macro
Brilliant explanation about combining the different techniques on composition, lightning, focus stacking and processing techniques. As you mentioned is starts with a good composition and the correct light setup. Thanks
Thanks so much,I really appreciate it!
Excellent and most inspirational video Andrew, thank you!
Thank you for watching, really glad you enjoyed it!
Excellent video with very informative contents. Thanks Andrew for sharing such a lovely video. You have earned a subscriber and I hope to see more and more videos about product photography here.
I love yu re videos… thank you 😋😜🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼
Even though I'm an outdoor macro photographer, I've been wanting an alternative indoor hobby and an excuse to better learn the technical side of photography that comes with using light that's not the sun. Watching product photography videos has been fun, and I finally got some equipment to go with my crude studio set up (made a "table" and place for backdrops, just got a speedlight, soft box, a few accessories to hopefully make my limited setup work at its best).
Brilliant. I have quastion, this table, black desks what You got, what that is exactly, and where I should look for it? Thanks 🙏.
Fantastic tutorial and what a truly great taste you have in single malts.
Thank you!
Great content i love it.... I'd love to see more like this
Thanks! I'll definitely keep it in mind!
Brilliant and inspiring video. Enjoyed watching. Many macro photographers, including the established ones, lamented about the challange earning out of macro photography. Utilising macro skills to product photography can be a lucrative answer, where there are more money & commercial needs.
Thanks so much, really glad you enjoyed it!
Excellent video, really enjoyed it. Thankyou
Thanks for watching!
Excellent choice of subject for you photoshoot! 🍻📸
Cheers to that! 🍻🍻
Great one, Andrew! May I ask what will be your preference for the lights, the AD200's or the flash lights such as the TT680's and why is that? The ADs are much more expensive than the TTs and the cheaper ones can be more lucrative for us beginners. What are their limitations of being cheaper? Cheers mate!
I liked this video too! While I've never really done any product photography a lot of what you're showing here is still interesting and useful for other kinds of photography. Personally I use photography as a way to get some excercise, look at small things, landscapes and nature in general.
Thanks so much for watching and your really helpful comment! I also prefer nature and landscapes in general but I sadly don't always have the time to get out so studio projects are great ways to stay creative at home for me!
If any of your viewers are limited by budget or only have say one softbox then another way to build the same shot is to take three shots - with the light stationed in different areas then use layer masks to combine the three images into the same shot. Fabulous shot - love it.
Absolutely, that's a solid way of working, though it's more time consuming in post, especially if you're also focus stacking the shot as you're having to juggle exposure and focus blends and it's easy to make mistakes. It's a great way of turning one light into many though (and I did a video on exactly that with a coffee bean a while ago). For commercial-level work though (and when I'm on professional sets) I'll use more lights to craft the image as best I can in camera.
absolutely - I watched that coffee bean one - awesome texture - my work is improving in no small part due to your videos. @@AndrewLanxonPhotography
Awesome video and tips! I need that owl shirt!!
Thanks so much! I love this shirt. I think I got it from redbubble
@@AndrewLanxonPhotography It's awesome! I'll see if I can find one! Love you videos, really helpful! Keep up the great work!
Brilliant video
Thank you, Jean!
This looks very very good
Thank you!
I like these product photography videos, and love the editing side of it also, but how do you get around that background light, cut out the product and put it above a layer with color background light? :)
Thanks! The slight golden background glow I added was done simply by creating an ellipse shape, blurring it, reducing the opacity and cutting the cans out so it appears to glow from behind. It worked well here because of the deep blacks in the background, but sometimes I would add a real background glow using an additional light.
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Did you also try zerene stacker?
Andrew. I just watched this again and the videos on B&W Fine Art Landscape and the abstract fine art photo technique. All great videos. But my question may be dumb but once I have the image the way I want it, what is the best way to save it for printing so not to lose any of the pixels and / or deteriorate the details? I have an image I would like to print as wall art but every time I save it, it loses some of the sharpness and details. Can you add this to one of your editing videos in the future? Thanks so much. Tammy
Hey Tamara, thanks for an interesting comment. Whenever I print I tend to simply export my images as full-resolution JPEG files or as full resolution TIFF files. I'll sometimes add a low amount of sharpening in the export. Either way, you shouldn't notice any real loss of sharpness in the details, unless you're exporting really small files. I've been doing a lot of printing recently as part of an upcoming launch of limited edition print sales and it's just been about making sure I'm exporting every single pixel I can without any compression. Hope that helps!
@@AndrewLanxonPhotography Well, that’s what I do so maybe it is my printer. Argh. I’m going to try a different printer and see if that makes the difference. Thanks so much for replying. You’re awesome.
verry cool video
Thanks!
Thanks Andrew. For someone with no experience with artificial light, what’s the difference between constant light and the kind you used now? If I don’t want to complicate things with a trigger or remote etc. is there an advantage to this over just buying a light and keeping it on? Thanks a lot
Hey, thanks for watching! Constant light, as the name suggests, is on constantly, which has its advantages in that you can see exactly where it's being placed and what it looks like in your image before you take the shot. However, unless you get extremely powerful LEDs they won't generate as much light as using flash, so you would have to work with either wider apertures or slow shutter speeds to get similar exposures. Using flash is more energy efficient and doesn't force me to compromise on settings in my still images. I hope that helps!
Method B and (8,4) on the settings for Helicon - I tried millions of combinations and the default ALWAYS works best for me too :) Have you tried using the healing tools in ACR? I find they are more accurate than Photoshop
Yep, i tried different settings but helicons defaults always seem to do the best job!
Really useful video Andrew, and some handy Photoshop tips. What was the device you had on the camera to control the lights?
Thanks Warren! It's the godox x pro C, it's the standard trigger you'd use to wirelessly control godox lights
@@AndrewLanxonPhotography thanks mate, much appreciated
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