A Simple Photoshop Trick for Getting White Backgrounds

However, a perfect white background requires a lot of (expensive) photography studio equipment. Not to worry, there’s a simple trick in Photoshop you can do in seconds to produce near-perfect white backgrounds. Watch this short video by Cheapshooter to learn how to use Photoshop’s Curves adjustment to get whiter backgrounds in your photos.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=zVKLL3hitwI%3Frel%3D0 Does it work? Well, it’s effective enough for amateurs like me. I took an iPhone 5 photo of a product sitting on top of a plain white folder.

This is the unedited photo: You can see there’s a lot of shadow and dark areas in the background. I imported the image to Photoshop and, using the Curves adjustment panel, I dragged the curve to the left of the histogram until I was satisfied with the background. There were still a few dark spots after the adjustment, specifically at the corners of the frame.

So I used the Brush tool to manually lighten up those dark background areas. It only took a few seconds. This Photoshop trick would work much better with a DSLR camera shooting in RAW, and also by using a light box.

By shooting in RAW, we will be able to work with more color data, which essentially means lighter foreground colors won’t get affected as much. You can see from the iPhone 5 photo above that I lost a lot of light-colored details. If you don’t have access to a DSLR, you could consider using a Curves adjustment layer, mask light areas of the foreground which are in danger of being overexposed, and then proceed with the curves adjustment that way.