PHOTO SESSION

This way I started to take pictures of individual pieces. The camera was set to manual mode, ISO 100 to make each photo as sharp as possible, so I set the aperture f22 and set the time 1/125 seconds. Despite the high aperture, I did not avoid the photo being out of focus a little blurry. Therefore, I had to take pictures of individual pieces in several shots, where each photo I focused on a different place. In this way, I had a few shots of each piece of biscuit, which I then combined in a photoshop, and the result was one photo that was sharp from front  to back. This technique is called Focus Stacking.

POSTPROCESSING

All the photos I take are in a raw format. I do not accept any other option and recommend it to all photographers who have not done so for an unknown reason. RAW is basically a format that is designed for further processing and provides many options to get the most out of a photo.

On the left is raw directly from the camera without modification, on the right is raw after quick adjustments in Adobe Camera Raw.

When editing individual RAW images, I made all the necessary settings to be happy with to the first photo. Since the light and camera settings did not change during shooting, I automatically synchronized all the other images with the first photo. This way I was sure that the individual parts of the puzzle would be equally ready for further work.

Exactly the same way I did when taking pictures of the fruits, the same light, the same RAW conversion.

Once I had all the assets shot, I could do the most boring part of my work. All the photos I needed to get rid of the background. For this I use the pen tool in the photoshop. It can be done in many other ways, but the pen tool suits me best. It is a lengthy and monotonous process, but on the other hand, I have total control over what I am doing. In addition to getting rid of the background, I had to remove the wire and pin and retouch all the imperfections.

The fun part begins. Gradually I put the individual parts of the biscuit into a new document. I took everything with a black background and gave the same background to a new document.

The biscuits are already floating in the air, it's time to add fruits. To make it look more realistic, I had to paint a shadow that casts fruit on the biscuits, or vice versa. Shadows that cast pieces of biscuit on the fruits.

Basic composition is done, now I need to bring it to life. It wanted some effects. I took some extra shots of crumbs - bigger, smaller to choose from later. This photo shoot was very simple. I crumbled a biscuit on black paper and photographed it vertically from the top. Because there was a big contrast between the crumbs and the paper - the masking (removing the background) was very easy. Basicly - I used the channel with the highest contrast (I can explain this in some other blog).

I placed the first part of the crumbs in a layer behind the main composition.

I put other smaller particles in the layer in front of the main composition. In this way, I will create a depth to a photo.

I used smoke as another effect. Just like in the previous step. Part of the smoke went to the back behind the main composition.

And another part infront of the main composition. Smoke can be used real, shot on a black background, or can be drawn using brushes in a Photoshop.

Finally, I did a gentle grading, added contrast and sharpened the whole picture. The product photo prepared in this way could go straight to the portfolio and to be printed. I also submitted this photo to the World Photographic Cup 2018 – It gets me into top ten finalists in commercial category. As the best ranked advertising photo among of Slovak team words brought me a Nations Award and overall 6th place in commercial photography.