Project52 - Week Three: Books

Yet again, this week's photo isn't what I intended at the start of the week. Initially I thought I was going to do another portrait, but seeing as I did one last week and it was a bit too sunny for what I wanted, I decided to do some product photography instead. I was kind of lazy and decided to leave it until Saturday, when I realised the idea I had wasn't going to work, so I had to come up with something quickly - which was this. I've had this idea in my head for a while - I just love the different colours in the HP children's covers and I thought it would be fun to exemplify them against a white background. Admittedly, it's not particularly original, but I like it. I shot it using my DIY photo box, but since I'd used it last it had kind of disintegrated a bit, plus I couldn't use the lamp I normally use. Having said that, I still got what I thought was a nice photo and figured I'd fix the rest in Photoshop.

The first thing I did was fix the white balance and crop it in Lightroom. I then took it into PS and did lots of playing round with the curves. I wanted the colours to be bright, but the background white, so I crushed both the whites and blacks. The only issue with this was that because my hardcovers have covers on them, they reflected and faded out, so I used the quick selection tool to do separate curves adjustments for those. There's still a few funny spots, but overall I'm happy.

Hopefully this will be the last of the (more or less) random shots - I really want to choose a theme and plan things out more than I have been, so that's my aim for next week.