Photoshop Product Shadow

[Francisco Raya]

Welove shadowing in product photography. Shadows are an easy way to instantly upgrade your product photography to look as polished and professional as images you would see from any e-commerce industry leader.

Below you will find information about the importance of shadowing in product photography, the different shadow options to consider, how best to apply them to different types of products, and video tutorials for how to add shadows to your product images yourself.

Ideally, you want your product images to be recognized as your product images. To reach that level of brand recognition, it is critical to be consistent with how you display your product images on your site and how you use shadows is an important part of achieving that consistency.

A perfect example of recgonizable product photography is Dollar Shave Club. They use an interesting product setup and natural shadow on all their razor product images to create a product image style that is immediately recognizable.

Revision Skincare is using reflection shadows for their product images which fit nicely with the sleek and simple design of their bottles. Again, their consistent use of a reflection shadow helps build their brand recognition.

By adding shadows to your product photography, you add a sense of space, context and realism to the image. And that extra realism can actually have a big impact on how well your product images drive sales for your business.

As we discussed in our post More Product Images Drive More Sales, there is research showing that consumers not only use images to examine products, but also to assess how trustworthy a brand is. The higher quality the images are that you provide for your customers, the more trustworthy they will perceive your brand as being, and that increases the likelihood that they will make a purchase from you.

But before you whip out your camera and fire up Photoshop, it is important to understand the different types of shadowing effects most commonly used in product photography and which effects are best for which products.

Drop shadows give the illusion that a product is being photographed from above by imitating the shadowing that occurs when direct sunlight is shining down on an object. This helps add a bit of context to your image as opposed to your product appearing to float freely on an all-white background.

Drop shadows are particularly nice for products like furniture because it gives the customers the illusion the product is sitting on a surface, just like it would be in their home. Drop shadows are also great for shoes because shoes are normally displayed in a brick-and-mortar store sitting on a non-reflective shelf.

To save you time in post-production, be sure to control your lighting to avoid reflections or light spots that might appear on your product. Those are removable in post-production, but you can save yourself some time by setting up your environment using our guide on how to photograph highly reflective products.

Once you have chosen the type of shadowing effect you want to use consistently across your store, you want to make sure you are applying your shadows following best practices based on the type of product you are applying your shadows to. But first, there is one additional consideration relating to your creative operations: how can you begin to use shadowing in your product photography without adding additional retouching time to each image?

There is one drawback to adding shadows to your product images: they do require additional time in post-production to achieve. That means additional time for your retouchers to spend editing product images. And if you are producing hundreds or thousands of product images, that can be a lot of extra overhead for your creative operations.

A potential solution to this is to outsource your image-editing to a company like Pixelz. We have retouched and added shadows to literally millions of images for some of the largest retail and e-commerce brands in the world.

Outsourcing your shadowing to Pixelz means that your team can upload tens, hundreds or thousands of images to us in an afternoon and get perfect shadows on each one by the time they come into the office the next day. This way you get all the benefits of professional shadowing without the additional overhead of your team spending hours doing it themselves.

Adding shadows to your jewelry product images can really help elevate your brand. Plus, it helps make all of your jewelry truly shine online, ultimately making your products more appealing to customers and one click closer to making a purchase.

Hey there! My name is Aaron Horwath and I am a Content Manager here at Pixelz. You'll find my insights into Pixelz' products, company culture, and industry here on the blog and over on our Facebook and LinkedIn pages. If you have an idea you'd like to pitch feel free to contact me directly so we can chat!

As Dave has said, if you are doing product work, then using the Pen tool to create clipping paths is pretty much a given. Apart from enabling perfect white backgrounds, it also lets you give the client PNG files with transparent backgrounds that the client's website builders are going to thank you for.

Of course, this was made a whole lot easier by shooting it right to begin with. This is the way to do it - good lighting, carefully cleaned up background. Too many shoot carelessly, and then say "I'll fix that later" - but then they always discover that it's a lot more work than they thought.

It's a matter of context Dagg. If I provided a client with shot where the background had been knocked out with the Magic Wand, that would be the last job I got from them. Product shots are going to be used by page designers for websites, leaflets, packaging, and huge pull-out signs. This job (I did everything except the background hills, that was taken by the client) was for a two metre high vinyl sign.

I used a 21Mp Canon 1DsMK3 for eight years waiting for a high pixel count 1D body for my commercial work, but eventually gave up and got a 5DS (which I absolutely love. With 50Mp it is that much easier to make clipping path around the bottle top, or cap, in the case of beer bottles. You have to consider the end use and client requirements, and product shots are usually going to involve clipping paths. Definitely so, with a hard edged product like this torch.

My point was about image adjustments. The classic case, to illustrate, is an underexposed head shot against a white wall - and people carefully mask out the hair to make the wall "white". I'm sure you can all picture how that goes.

Now, Trevor. It's OK to use my first name, but it should be correct. It's Dag, not Dagg. Yes, I know it's a name that easily comes out awkward in English, too much like dog (which is partly why I left it out of my screen name). I really struggled the first time I went to the US (California no less). But please don't make it even worse Don't get me wrong, I like it, and it sounds perfectly fine in Norwegian. But I suppose my parents didn't travel much back in those days.

Whoops. Sorry about the spelling Dag. BTW I was going to mention that Scandinavian countries topped the list in the recent World Happiness report We came a lowly 9th in New Zealand, and America 14th. The poor UK could only manage 19th. I think we tied equal first as the world's least corrupt country not so long ago, but incomes are not flash here. NZ people would rather go fishing than do overtime.

Yeah, the happiness thing has been properly mentioned here, not least by those connected to government, as you can imagine. But to be honest I think I'd trade the least-corruption index any day. It's going largely under the radar, but it's rapidly becoming a real...not problem, exactly, but it's there no doubt, and getting more so every day. It's just called something else, usually something with "market" or "bonus" or "compensation" in it.

I'm working in the newest version of Lightroom CC Desktop and I'm working on product photography. I have multiple product images with a shadow photographed on a pale grey mottled background. I'd like to change the background to pure white RGB 255. The white background in the photo must match the white background on the website it's intended for. I'd like to keep the shadow cast by the product in the photo to give a more natural effect.

The newest Lightroom CC has a different layout and I haven't been able to find a white eyedropper tool to do this. I've looked up many online tutorials and they all advise on using a mask and a brush which I'd like to avoid as the white eyedropper tool method seems quicker and more efficient.

I'd like to keep the shadow cast by the object so I'm not sure that this clipping method in Photoshop would be suitable. Also, I'd like to stay in Lightroom CC as that's where I'm doing all of the photo editing.

Edit

Brush tool- Select suitable brush size. Set the Feather, Flow & Density sliders to maximum.

Select Auto Mask

Set the Exposure slider to maximum.

Using the brush tool to paint the white background around the image, being careful to avoid the object and the shadow.

I'll then use the png to create a pattern in PS.

The 2 issues I'm having is that my shadow layer which has multiply blend mode on it is carrying the white background across to the PNG.

yhe next issue I have is I can't get the pattern to be transparent and just show the product on top of my chosen background layer, the pattern always seems to have a white layer. Altering the pattern layer blend mode only shows me the product with the shadow including the white behind the shadow.

does this make sense? Thanks all.

That works perfectly for me Jeff. No white fringing and a semi-transparent shadow. Did you define the lower left outline of the shadow manually? Only it looks close to spot on, and I am not sure how Photoshop could have worked that out.

I have an image of a product that was photographed on a green background that I am trying to separate from the background with the shadows kept intact but the shadows have the same green color in them as the background and look awful. The problem is the product itself also has green in it so I can't simply use color range to choose the green to get rid of and I also need the shadows to be transparent for whatever background they go against. Is there a semi straightforward way to remove a color cast from a shadow and to make the shadow transparent so it looks natural against any color background it's placed on?

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