White Backgrounds with Lightroom, ON1 Photo Raw and Photoshop

I have already shared how to create black backgrounds earlier, but, this one is going to be slightly different as we will also discuss a bit about the original exposure and which shots lend themselves well to a white background.

Do not confuse a white background with a high key image. High key images are those that are mostly light and white which is not true for just a white background image.

We will go through the process of making a white background in Lightroom, Photoshop (with and without Topaz Mask AI) as well as ON1 Photo Raw.

Yes, I have recently installed the trial version of Topaz Mask AI and so far, not very impressed as far as wildlife is concerned. Still learning more about it and experimenting…

This would also give us a reasonable comparison as to what one can do with each.

So…This is an image from my rooftop shooting today and this is what we will use in this session. Let’s start with this in Lightroom and then we will look at the same in Photoshop and finally in ON1.

First, the shot itself. As you can see from the base EXIF, this is overexposed specifically for a white background. I have avoided the wall behind the bird and it’s mostly the floor of the roof in the background. The angle of the shot is just over the bird to do this.

Similarly, when you have grey and/or overcast conditions, you can always look to overexpose a bit to create similar effects. Even low light conditions are good for this as long as the subject is close enough. In this case, the bird is just 6 meters away.

Now that we already have a dull background, let’s see how we can make this image pop a bit…

First, we apply my wildlife preset to this and tweak it a bit for a white background. Then, as with the black background, we use the adjustment brush and mask the background around the bird and then pull up all these sliders to make it white.

Do keep in mind that we can only do black or white in Lightroom, anything beyond that, you would have to look at some other application.

Okay, now, let’s remove the mask and try the same in Photoshop.
First the select subject.
Now, let’s try the Topaz Mask AI

Finally, let’s do the same in ON1 Photo Raw…We will use the local adjustments here with the perfect brush which is the equivalent of the auto-mask in Lightroom.

#Photography #Post #Topaz #Photoshop #ON1 #Lightroom