Although I have taken pictures in the photographic studio at Burton College, sometimes you feel that you would like a different or even a more exotic backdrop for your photographs.
If the subject that you are shooting is opaque, then there is not too much of a problem, but what if it is a glass bottle ?
With three of my finished images; “Quality First”, “Head and Shoulders Above the Rest” and “J2O Storm”, which were shot in the studio, I wanted to add something that would make these images stand out, but without the obvious difference in what is behind the bottle and the background.
The first step was to remove the original backgrounds from these images, by selecting the background:
then inverting the selection, contracting it slightly to remove any rough edges, adding a feather edge to help blending, then copying it to a new image.
Next create a new layer and fill this with the background that you want, remembering to place this below the subject in the layer stack.
An important point here is to label the layers accurately, because as you add more layers you can easily become confused if you leave the layer titles as Layer 1, Layer 2 …….
Once you are happy with the image, it is time to deal with the empty part of the glass bottles.
What I did was to select the clear section of each of the glass bottles, then cut it out, not copying it, and pasting the sections onto separate new layers, exactly over where they were cut from, carefully labelling each layer.
Next, on each layer I lowered the opacity to around 60%, so that the background can be seen through the layer containing the clear section of the bottle:
Below is how the tops of the bottles looked afterwards, with the coloured background visible through the glass:
Finally the before (as shot in the studio) to the finished work:
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