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[MUSIC PLAYING] There are many point and shoot cameras on the market today. A point shoot camera also known as a compact camera is designed to be easy to use. It's the type of camera that you may purchased for a vacation or for a birthday party or for an event. In this lesson, I'll teach you how to use your point shoot camera. I'll show you how to set it up, use some of the technical aspects but I'm not going to go into a ton of detail here.
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You're here to learn how to take some great photos of your business, not become a professional photographer. I'll just teach you what you need to know. If you do want some more detailed instructions and definitions for some of the terms that we're going to talk about, I've included them in the Resources below. So let's start by reviewing, where we left off. We had just taken a photo just using the simple window light technique.
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We didn't use anything else. In this section, we're going to add some special cards, and some lighting elements, and I'm also going to show you how to set up your camera. So let's jump back onto set and get started. So let's go ahead and set up our point and shoot camera here. I'm just going to lock it into place. If you have a cheaper tripod, you'll probably have to screw it into place.
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This one has a little plate and I'm going to go ahead and recenter my camera and just kind of set up all over again like I did with the cell phone initially. So you can notice again, we have a little bit distortion. So I'm going to go ahead and push it back. So it's centered and this time I'm going to Zoom in on this camera with the optical zoom. And before I really get deep into shooting, I want to review the top of this camera.
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So you can see kind of the settings that come with this camera. So let's go ahead and talk about that. We have what's called the P setting and the auto. And there's a lot of different auto settings on these types of point and shoots. And they're all going to look a little different. You might see like a running man or a flower. On here there's also an A and a T.
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So those are all different types of auto settings to help you shoot these images in a little bit easier way. In this class, we're going to use the P mode and the P mode is called program and basically what this program mode will do is it will decide all the settings for us. The F stops, the shutter speed and the ISO, which are all kind of photo math which compile the exposure of the camera. The exposure is how bright the image is.
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So we're going to have this camera decide those settings for us in the P mode. The P mode also gives us a little bit of extra wiggle room to make some adjustments if we want. If you don't have that, look for your auto mode, just go and set it to that for now. I also want to introduce you to what's called the exposure compensation dial. So you can see on the top of this dial, we have a zero with a plus 1 and a minus 1. In some cameras, this exposure compensation could be hidden.
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You saw on the back of the cell phone when I pushed it a little bit, it gave me a little bit of wiggle room to kind of add more light or subtract light, and so that's what this is. So I'm going to make those evaluations, after I take a photo and look at the back of the camera. Let's go down. Square up again. I'm not quite centered on the product. So I'm going to go ahead make that adjustment.
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Tilt it down. If I push the shutter down just a little bit, it will refocus. So I just took a photo. It looks a little bit dark. So what I want to do is, I'm going to add a little bit of light by going to the exposure compensation dial and twisting it until it looks just about right to me.
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If I push the shutter again, takes the photo and looks a little bit brighter. So this is great. One thing that I'm noticing that I don't really like is that the right hand side of the image is just a little bit too dark. And I really want this image to be even throughout. So I want to introduce you to these different types of cards. So we have these white cards. And if I add this white card in, it's going to give me some different results.
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If I just put it here, it's going to add a little bit of bounce light into the right hand side. Let's go and take a photo. And I'll show you the difference when we look at it on Lightroom too. You can see that the right hand side is now a little bit brighter but they're still a bit of a dark line kind of going through the center. One thing that we can do is we can actually open this up, give it a little bit more real estate and room and now it's really bouncing that light in to our scene completely.
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You can see that looks a lot more even and actually now it's looking a little too bright. So after I've made this adjustment, I'm going to have to make an adjustment to the exposure. So I'll go back up to the exposure compensation dial. Dial it down one, maybe two. That's looking about right. Now I'll take a photo. And now that's looking really even. And I can go ahead and continue to make adjustments with this. If I want that right hand side to look darker have a little bit more shadow, I can go ahead and open these black cards up and make it darker on the side.
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So might give your image a little bit more of a moodier look. Let's go ahead and let's try and get it out of the frame. We take a photo there. You'll be able to see that it's a lot darker on the right hand side than it was before. So this is just a basic introduction to how these cards work. We're going to get a lot more advanced with these, when we switch to the DSLR a little bit later.
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So let's go ahead and jump into Lightroom and just see the results of some of the photos that we've taken. So you can really see in detail how these cards worked and what the results are. OK. OK. So we're back in our library module now. And you can see here's the folder that we created here. You can see it's called Shopify lifestyle.
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You can see the Google Pixel 2 images that we shot earlier. And here's the last image that we shot. If I double click on it, it makes it big but let's look at the new images that we shot. So this is the first image that we shot. I remember I told you it was a little too dark and we added some exposure compensation. Here's the results after adding exposure compensation. You could tell that a brightens it up. You really want to make these adjustments in your camera, if you can as opposed to making these adjustments in Lightroom after the fact.
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Here you can tell that we added the white card on the right. And what you can see is that it's a little bit darker in the middle and that's because we're not wrapped with that whole white card yet. And then when we extend the white card you could tell that it really fills in that whole white, that white bottle there. I also want to show you the results of adding that black card and where you can see this side is a little bit dark. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to edit these images.
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I'm going to make the color adjustments and the exposure adjustments that I want to make it look really good. I think that one of the best ones of the shoot was this one, where it was more evenly lit. But we had the white card wrapping around. But it still looks a little dark overall. So what I'm going to do is, I'm going to go ahead and just brighten it up until it looks good. One thing you can tell about this is that the shadows are maybe not intense enough for us.
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So I'm going to go ahead and go down here to the shadows and bring it down. And I'm also going to give it a little bit of black. You can tell I'm just kind of wiggling stuff around here and just kind of experimenting till it looks the way that I want. If you're moving stuff around this area, that's great. You should be experimenting a little bit. Down here in the presence area, you want to be a little careful with the vibrance and saturation because it's going to literally change the color.
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So you can tell if I go up, you tell changing the color of that Shopify logo. And then you don't want to do that with your photos because it might misrepresent your product. Let's go and keep the saturation the same. You can go ahead and boost the clarity a little bit. This will up the local contrast which will make it look a little bit more poppy. And you can tell it's looking pretty good. I'm going to go back up here to the crop. To make this a square crop to kind of match the cell phone image that we did, just kind of make it look the same.
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Now let's go back into our library mode and compare our smartphone image to our point shoot image. So I'm going to go ahead and go into library. Select imported images and this is where we kind of left off here. I'm looking at these images side by side with the image on the left being the point shoot and the right hand side being the smartphone image. And they don't quite look the same.
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So I'm going to go ahead and jump back into the develop mode and just give this point shoot image just a little bit more brightness, just so we can compare apples to apples here. Let's go ahead jump back into the Library mode, but not quite yet. Maybe a little bit more brightness here on the exposure. And then I'm going to go ahead pull back on these highlights a bit.
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Give it a little bit more shadow. Now that's looking a lot closer, right? So we can tell a couple things. First-- how it's rendering the green is a bit different, not every camera renders colors exactly the same. So one thing that I want to show you is a comparison close up of these two images. If we look at the point shoot image first, you can tell that the grain looks pretty tight.
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It's not perfect. But it looks pretty good. If we jump into the cell phone image and zoom in, we can tell that this image is having a hard time kind of maintaining its structure. So you can see the before and the after here. And that's really important to notice. But you may have also noticed that the background is not a full white yet, which is usually the goal of a traditional product page. To get this done, will outsource this part of the process to a retouching company.
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There are many companies that do this, though my favorite company to recommend is pixels.com. They have a really simple user interface, we can just upload the photos and they remove the background for you for $1.45 per photo with a $25 minimum after the free trial. Doing this yourself is very challenging and in Photoshop it would require an advanced understanding of layer masks, pass and adjustment layers and more.
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Trust me. It's worth the $45. You know, now how to take and assess photos with your point and shoot camera. Join me in the next lesson, as we learn how to use a DSLR and we go through our entire shot list and shoot all the products for our product photography page.