Hands on: Selling an image

Or a scanner
With some smaller objects you can save yourself the effort of worrying about lighting, backgrounds, angles and the rest by scanning them.

Books are an obvious candidate for scanning, but jewellery, coins and medals, mobiles, handhelds and other small gadgets all scan well. As long as the object to be scanned is no bigger than the scanner and no deeper than an inch, you should get good results. A scanner has surprisingly good depth of field and even detail that’s a few millimetres above the glass will be in reasonably sharp focus.

A scanner already has a plain white backdrop, though for some things, in particular light and reflective objects, you might want to place a sheet of black paper behind the object.

Computer screens
If you want to sell your notebook PC on Ebay, you’ll need at least one good photo to show exactly what bidders are getting and what kind of condition it’s in. LCD screens don’t reproduce all that well in photos, so you have two options – either show your notebook with the screen switched off, which looks dull, or paste in a screengrab. If you do this you should mention that the screen image is simulated. You could always include a smaller photo showing the actual screen to prove your machine is in working order.

If it’s not possible to take a screengrab, for example with handheld devices, try and arrange the lighting so that it doesn’t fall directly on the screen and attempt to match ambient light levels to the screen brightness so that your exposure setting will capture both the screen detail and the device. If that’s not possible make two exposures – one for the screen and one for the device – and cut and paste.

Ethical issues
Manipulating photos to improve the way they look raises some ethical and legal issues that you should be aware of. If you’re simply removing distracting background detail, or making tonal adjustments to improve image detail, that’s not a problem.

However, if you use retouching tools to, for example, remove scratches and other damage from an item, the buyer could legitimately complain that you misrepresented their condition. By restricting your photo manipulation to image enhancement and mentioning any retouching that could be misinterpreted, you can avoid such problems.

Digital manipulation
One of the simplest ways to improve a product shot is to cut out the background. Make it easy for yourself by photographing the object on the plainest background you can find. It doesn’t have to be white or flawless – as long as it’s relatively plain it will make the job of selecting it with a magic wand or colour selection tool much easier.

The key to getting the job done quickly is to select the background, rather than the object. Unless the background is very plain, set your magic wand or other selection tool to a lowish tolerance and Shift-click to select the background in clumps. While it can be satisfying, there are no prizes for getting it all in one go. If your editing application has a colour selection tool this might yield better results than a magic wand tool.

With the background removed, objects can look a bit stark on plain white. To add a natural-looking drop shadow duplicate the cut-out object layer and use a levels adjustment to make it black – drag the slider on the left side of the histogram as far to the right as necessary. Apply a Gaussian blur filter to the layer to soften the edges. The Radius amount will depend on the image size, but for a high-resolution image somewhere between 20 and 40 should work well. If your shadow layer is in front of the object you will, of course, need to drag it behind and offset it a short distance – try to position the shadow where it would fall naturally, given the lighting conditions.

Finally, reduce the layer opacity to around 30 or 40 per cent to make the shadow grey. For added realism add a small amount of noise.