Hi All, I'm new to photography, I purchased an EOS 2000D to take pictures for a website where I'm selling jewelry. I watched a couple tutorials but still not getting the images quite right. My goal is to have a clear image with a pure white background, I'm taking the images in a lightbox. If I increase the exposure beyond -3 it turns the backround grey, however at -3 the image gets bleached a little to much. I attached images at -2 and -3 exposure to show the difference. Seeing if anyone has a suggestion on how to get what I'm looking for, even if there is another lens that would help. Thanks!!!
Here are a few things you can try to get a clear image with a pure white background: Use a higher ISO. This will allow you to use a faster shutter speed, which will help to reduce blur caused by camera shake. Use a wider aperture. This will allow more light into the camera, which will help to brighten the image. Use a reflector. This will bounce light back onto the product, which will help to fill in any shadows. Use a diffuser. This will soften the light, which will help to reduce glare and reflections. Shoot in RAW. This will give you more flexibility in adjusting the white balance and exposure in post-processing.
Your camera is going to try to expose for midtones/grey a bit as you have noticed, so you will have to increase the exposure beyond the meters expectation as you already found. Daisy had some approaches to increasing the light by shooting wider or bouncing light in for example. Depending on how much flash power you have you can dial that up as well. You have done this with compensation already a bit but way have better luck controlling aperture and shutter speed. I actually think your not too far away with what you been getting, you will end up over exposing to turn the backdrop white instead of grey, carefully positioning more strobes can wash away some of the light fall off if done right as each light will create a gradient. So if you position multiple ones it will help with shadows. Just a quick example from at photo challenge recently i did where the subject was trains and i added a twist by shooting a toy. I wasn't aiming for perfect white in a light tent because that is almost impossible without washing out the object in it. But you can see I raked light in from left and right to have a clam-shell approach and just a slight bit of angle on the strobes to minimize shadows. The closer you can get the lens to the object the better you can crop that light fall off away..... that's the thing about a lens playing a roll here i can see something fast (wide) and macro preferable would help you get closer to the object. You want a light tent comparable in size to what your shooting also or you will have light fall off issues since the strobes are far away from the item, and you will struggle to get the camera close enough to the item.. The closer the light is to the object the softer it will be. If you really want to go for pure white, you will have to push the over exposure as far as you can while retaining the detail and color in the subject, then you can take a raw file into LR or photoshop and fine tune the background to almost no detail.
if you are shooting still subjects you better off using a timer to keep the iso 100 . minimum for the cleanest image and allow the shutter speed to set the exposure, this would be on a tripod of coarse to which a still of a ring / jewellery would be for the best image
You can decrease the exposure. You may need to go down to -4 or -5. This will make the background darker, but it will also make the jewelry darker. You can adjust the white balance to compensate for this. And just to say, you can always edit your photos in post-processing.
