Amy Y's Photo Blog » tutorial

How To Make A DIY Lightbox

Amy Y. Yang Photography — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 04:43:53 +0000

A lightbox is essential if you are to take well lit macro photos of your products.

Now, you can certainly buy a lightbox, but making your own lightbox will yield you similar results and for a whole lot less money! Although the DIY ones are not as foldable or storeable as the commercial lightboxes.

The materials you need to make your own lightbox are foamboard, packaging tape, and a utility knife.

To make a 20 x 30 x 30 inch lightbox, you will need 5 sheets of at least 1/4″ foamboard sized 20 x 30 inches. What you do is tape it together into the shape of a box with one open side. With the utility knife you cut the 2 sides that are sticking up so you get a box with one open side.

For lights, you can get the clamp lights they sell at Home Depot and such. You will be clamping the lights onto the sides of the lightbox and turning the light towards the inside of the box.

You will be able to put whatever kind of background you like inside this box for you to photograph your products on.

For lights, make sure you get the daylight balanced bulbs. If you are somewhat technical, the specification should be between 5500 to 6500K for the temperature of the bulb.

For a more detailed tutorial with pictures, you can go here.

Adobe Photoshop Tutorial: How To Add A Copyright Watermark To Your Images

Amy Y. Yang Photography — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 00:15:33 +0000

In this Photoshop tutorial, we will learn how to add a copyright watermark to your images.

After you open the image to which you want to add the copyright watermark, you’ll want to choose the Type tool.

text tool

Now choose a location where you want your copyright statement to be and type in your statement (you can do ‘© 2008 your name’ or ‘all rights reserved’ or anything else you want to type). To get the copyright symbol, either insert symbol or if you are using a Windows keyboard on a Windows machine, you can use the keyboard shortcut of Alt+0169. Make sure you are using the numpad for the keyboard shortcut.

Once you are happy with the placement of your copyright statement, change the fill of the layer to 0%. Your text will disappear from sight at this point.

0% fill

Now, right click the layer and choose ‘Blending Options . . . .’ Check the ‘Bevel and Emboss’ option and now you should be able to see your new copyright watermark statement.

bevel and emboss

You can change the settings around in the options of the bevel and emboss for different styles of the copyright watermark.