Bottle Photography

One might think it might be easy to photograph a bottle, just put it under the lights and bam! But it is really one of the hardest assignments you can get. The glass bottle refracts everything – sometimes you can see the whole studio in its reflections so it always asks for a lot of retouching. Hence, it is the most important to get a good starting point. This time I opted for continuous lights because I just got two video light tubes that came in handy for this job. I’ve put them sideways to get even light on both sides of the bottle. They needed a bit of softening so I used my softbox cloth and reflectors. It was important to put them as close to the bottle as possible. Third light was a Profoto B10 modelling led light behind a bigger reflector. It took a bit longer exposure to avoid noise and keep ISO at 100. So we had a good lit bottle except for the front part with the etiquete. So I’ve used forth light – Profoto B10 in a OFC softbox on top for other 2 images to light the etiquete and bottle neck I later composited back in the original image. This could be easily done with any diffused light. Better to be handheld as you can easily see this light reflection on the bottle on the first image and I had to remove it with content aware fill tool. Watch the video to see how was everything done in Photoshop.