To kick off the New Year I decided to set up a studio in my dining room. I am a natural light photographer but I really wanted to try out this shoot, so I decided to try something new using the equipment that I already had. I had never done studio work before and to say that it was a learning process is an understatement.
My backdrop stand wasn't tall enough and I ended up having to duck tape it to keep it from collapsing (insert face palm emoji here). I knew instantly that I would have to extend the backdrop in photoshop but I definitely underestimated the amount of time it would take to correct this during the editing process.
Here is a before and after:
As you can see we have some photo bombers (cute as they may be), a lot of empty space at the top and a whole lot of wrinkles.
On the final image I cropped in closer and then used the free transform tool, patch tool and clone stamp to extend the backdrop and remove the wrinkles to create the desired look.
3 things I learned
Removing the wrinkles was the most time consuming part of the editing process and while using the clone stamp and patch tool fixed the problem there was a very simple solution to the problem. Besides getting a paper backdrop or taking extra time to steam the backdrop if I would've moved the girls a couple feet forward the backdrop would've looked more smooth like I had envisioned.
Investing in quality studio equipment is WORTH IT if this type of shoot is something that I want to continue to do. I would definitely want a backdrop that was at least 8ft high and that stood up without being held up with duck tape.
Because I made some errors during the set-up and shooting process I had to spend a ton of time correcting my errors during the editing process. While this wasn't ideal I quickly learned, with the help of YouTube, how to extend a backdrop as efficiently as possible.
Here are the links for the things I purchased for this shoot specifically:
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