Gadgetory

I have just got in my hand this luxury version of the oneplus 6 it's made by a company called head d'Oro who have created this carbon fiber patent II sort of design on the phone and charging several thousand pounds for it it looks amazing so I was really excited to get it in the studio and see what sort of shots I can get so this phone is very dramatic looking it's monochromatic of course and we've got this really interesting pattern of the carbon that the company has managed to get on the phone so I really wanted to kind of match that with a very dark dramatic high contrast look in the studio so what you can see is I've created a set within my studio this is really really simple to do this is just three pieces of black card one as a base and to have created this corner wall this is literally just the two of them propped up together and held in place on one side by a microphone and taped together with just a tiny little bit of masking tape on the back like this is not an expensive set service does not take a long time but the results can be really really cool so I do want this very dramatic single light look so I am just using one of my go ducks 8600 Pro studio strobes I've got a reflector dish on the front of this and I put this grid on here which as you can probably see or maybe not just restricts the spread of light when it fires out so it really focuses this beam of light down on the phone which creates a really nice shadow on the phone and stops it spilling all over the backdrop that I've created so you get this really nice dramatic look so thankfully this light has got what's called a modeling light on it which means it has a continuous beam coming out which is nowhere near as powerful as the actual flash but it does help me just have a look at where the lights going to fall so as you can probably see as I move it around on here you can see how the shadows change on there on the phone how the light spill changes on the background you get a really good idea of where this light is going to fall just means that I can set up my shot very very accurately at this point so when I take a shot I know that it's going to be looking exactly as I want it to I actually quite like the way that the shadows are coming out there and do you want some light on this background here if there's no light on it at all this is going to just be a complete black background which isn't gonna look great so we do want to have some lights falling on there so maybe about maybe about there so I'm shooting on my Canon 5d Mark 4 which I've got on my mind Fratto studio tripod this thing is really really solid so there's no movement in the camera when I'm actually trying to take my shots I shoot in Live View for this because you can get it great look of exactly how your shot is going to come out at shooting like this you can twist these handles and frame up the shot exactly as you want also makes focusing much easier because you can just zoom straight in on the camera on the back of the phone and fine-tune the focus to make sure it's exactly where you want it I can also see exactly the composition that I want to go for in this I want to make sure that the the corner of this wall is coming down right in the right thirds of the frame which is where the phone is and we get this really nice shadow coming in which is ending just before the edge of the photo so I think this is really really nice shot so we're going to start getting our settings right and start shooting the first thing I want to do is turn off my strobe and just take a shot and great there's no light in there whatsoever I want to make sure that my shutter speed is high enough if there's no ambient light affecting the shot I want to know that when I take a photo all over life it's appearing in this shot is like that I have put there that I have got complete control over so if we turn the light on and we just take a test shot now we can see that the phone has been lit and the background is lit and I know that the only light that's affecting this shot is coming from the light that I've put okay so now what I want to get is a shot of the front of the phone to actually show that it's a one plus phone and to show me these Android first thing I need to do is make sure that the display isn't going to turn off after 30 seconds because that's quite annoying if I'm going to get this into position prop it up a little bit of blue TAC or white TAC right so I'm happy with how this looks at the moment and like before I've got this shadow coming from behind the phone so I'm gonna take a shot and see what we're looking like okay so some things I hadn't considered there my shutter speed is so high that there's no ambient light really coming into the scene which is a problem for the screen because of course that is entirely an ambient light source so by using such a high shutter speed the screen may as well be off you can only just about tell that there's some information on there so my only option now kill the ambient lights in the room lower my chef speed even more which means we have to fall into darkness that's me focus that's in focus okay we'll try this again okay so that's much better by using a much slower shutter speed it's allowing the light from the actual display to appear in the shot so now when we have a look at the shot we've got we can see that the phone is nicely lit the backgrounds nicely lit and you can actually see what's on the screen which is what we were going for so that's great so I think I'm pretty much done here I think I've got all the shots that I wanted it's definitely a really really cool phone I love this texture and even if looking at the photos on the back of the camera I think they've come out really really nicely it's been all about diffusing that one light to get a really dramatic sense to the scene and just fine-tuning the exact positioning and power of that light so I'm really happy with what I've got in camera really excited to take these over to Lightroom and Photoshop and see what I can get with them now okay so now we're over in Lightroom and you can see I've already imported my images and I'm really pleased with how these are coming out we have a look at this I really love the detail that you get here around the 1 plus logo and on this carbon wave pattern going on it looks really really cool again here ona's great I love how the background has been put together I love the shadow coming here it's all very dramatic very moody and I really think it suits the tone of this phone really really well now the shot but I want to do the main edits on is this one here it's a nice straight up shot of the phone I think the background looks cool I really like the way that the light Falls around here and it hits this background over in this area but it's still quite dark over here so this is a really really great amount of different tones going on there which I think looks really really cool so I'm gonna head firstly over into the develop module within Lightroom and I'm just going to start playing around first thing I've noticed that the light is a bit too bright up on this top left corner of the phone so I'm gonna bring that down just a touch I don't want to bring it down a lot I still want some of that remaining in there and what I don't want to do is bring down the light everywhere else in the scene if you can see if I bring this highlights right down then we lose some of that light on the background you can see what happened on the background if I just bring that up and down there so I don't want to take that out completely I just want to take the edge off ever so slightly so I think there works quite well so this point I would tend to play around with these sliders a little bit and see what looks good again with the shadows if you bring it down it gets it more dramatic but then the background fades to black a little bit and that's not what I want with this shot I want plenty of background detail to be there to really create the atmosphere in this shot but it is still going to be very high contrast and it's very very monochrome there's there's no color in the phone and there is like a slight orange yellow hue just the moment that's just from my white balance settings but I'm going to change that as well so if we take the temperature of a mic balance down a touch then you'll see things start getting a bit more blue which is much more accurate to both the phone and the background which I like a lot and we could try and tune of a saturation down to but then it goes - it looks - black and white it looks like I've just applied a black and white filter whereas I do want some of the color tones to remain to give it that realism I think about there looks great now it's going to use the crop tool and I'm just going to give it a bit of a straightener so cropping in I want it nice and centered in the frame I think about here looks good nicely in the middle I'm just making sure when you when you look at this view that all the lines are nice and straight against the top and side edges of the phone so it's going to apply that and there we are already getting to a good point and that's largely because I spent the time in the studio crafting the shop making sure that the light is falling exactly where I wanted it to I wasn't just firing light anywhere and hoping to fix it in post I really wanted to make sure that the shot looks exactly as I wanted it to when I took the photo so my actual work I'm gonna have to do here in Lightroom is going to be pretty minimal I bring the clarity it can really help boost a shot like this this this sort of texture but on the phone can really be boosted but if you look if you go too high then the background starts to have these artifacts and stuff which I really don't like so instead rather than bringing it up in the whole scene I'm gonna use and bring that back down just to about pretty much zero I'm going to use an adjustment brushes this tool up here in the right by bringing that up I can then increase the clarity and just paint on the areas where I want that clarity to be so I'm using at the moment a wide brush with quite a lot a large feather around it I want to bring that down a little bit I'm gonna turn the auto mask on which will should hopefully help it not when I paint it won't go anywhere else other than the phone I can sort I can paint on over this area where I want this clarity to be and it won't go over the edges on to the background at least that's the hope I don't wanted to go too much around the camera unit as it will start to look a little fake and even now I think this effect is slightly overdone so I always going to bring that clarity down to maybe just about there 13 mark only a small amount but if you turn that on and off you can see but it does just help that effect to pop out just a little bit okay I'm not gonna use another adjustment brush and this time I'm going to set everything to 0 and I'm going to bring those highlights down just a little bit and I'm gonna paint just over this top corner because that car and I still was a little bit too bright for me I want to bring those tones to be a bit more even with the rest of the phone but without affecting the rest of the scene by painting that on as you can see it brings it down makes it blend much more naturally with the rest of the phone so already you can see if we look at the back and forth view a small few edits but it makes a big difference and it makes this phone look really dramatic but we're not done yet there are still a few more things as I want to try the backgrounds I was using they're a little bit scuffed in places or a few little bits that I wanted to take out so what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna click right-click editing and I'm going to take this over to photoshop so I can just clean things up a little bit okay so wherever in Photoshop now the first I'm gonna do is drag this background layer into a new layer that means that any changes I make to this picture at all I can always just turn them off and go back to the original shots now hopefully won't need to do that but there we go just to be safe so the first I'm going to do is I'm going to use this tool up here it's called a Spot Healing Brush tool I'm gonna make it bigger to about that size 50 pixels and I'm literally just going to paint over this blemish here and as you can see Photoshop does the rest it figures out that it shouldn't be there and it figures out what should be there instead and allows me just to literally tap these smaller as well tap over these little bits of dust little scuff marks anything else in the scene which basically shouldn't be there I can go around and basically just click on it makes everything very easy to do you can spend more time doing this yourself if you want it to be super clean which I do so I'm gonna go around and get rid of the rest of these okay that's pretty much it on the background so if you have a look at the phone there are a few areas that looks like it could be cleaned up a bit so if you look here for example there's this mark and there are a few other bits like normally I'd take this sort of thing out and the bits all over the place but with this particular product this carbon effect they tell me is unique to each phone so these aren't scuffs this is actually somehow this carbon is made it's it's layered up and then cut into you basically to create the shape of the phone so these are all and natural at the marks that you would want to have on the phone so I really don't want to remove anything which actually is there to give the phone character only thing that's not is a little bit closer up to the top if we zoom in you see a couple of little bits of dust and grit around the camera unit which I want to get rid of because I want it to look nice and neat and these little bits of grit always stand out as white marks against the black surround of the camera so it's important to take those out to give a good look okay the last thing I want to do here is and it may be difficult to see but there is a little bit of what I think is my fingerprint on this camera unit here you can just see these very faint lines and they shouldn't be there everything should be fading very much to black as is the rest of it but that's very easy to fix just by using the brush tool selecting a larger brush this size is fine and then simply taking a color picker of the actual background there because you see it's not completely black I don't want to paint in black completely black it because it may show up against the actual tone which as you can see has a little bit of blue in it just a touch so I'm going to select that and then I can literally just paint over that area very carefully not wanting to go too far into the camera or onto the sides but that gets rid of that really nicely if you look before and after you can see their fingerprint and then it's gone but because it is black it's not affecting anything else and again we can do the same with this little smear down here as I said most of the time was spent in the studio getting a shot to begin with and now with even just 20 minutes of work less than I think we've got a shot which looks pretty neat so I'm going to go ahead and save that and that's will take me back to Lightroom and ping there it goes and if we just have a look before and after at the editing that we've done we can see that it has made a big difference I really like the color tone I like the contrast on the phone really brings out this texture but doesn't overdo it the phone really looks natural it stands out for exactly what it is and I really think this shot is a good example of the sort of moody look that I want to achieve we can't have a look through some of the other shots I did have a quick edit on this one I went in a little bit of a different direction for this one in that I really wanted to emphasize the darkness so I have intentionally darkened this background a little bit more in order to make the phone stand out against it which I think looks pretty cool is that actually the one I edited yes I think that it's a lot of edited and again I've brought highlights up a touch and to help the phone stand out because it with this one if I had them too far down and you can see the phone really sort of fades to nothing it's not a good look that we want to get so by bringing those up just a bit you get a much nicer tone almost looks like it's been lit with this almost stage light spotlight which of course it has because it was just a single light which is why we just get this nice light here in the background and of course at this strong shadow I think that looks pretty cool again I actually haven't in fixed my white balance there I'm going to bring that back down to get the nice cooler tone that we wanted and then we've got and the other shots now going back to the library view so a couple the other ones I really liked I went in and did a close-up shot on the adoro branding on the side this again I think is pretty cool I've done some contrast work on here a little bit of clarity which again just helps boost that texture you can see hoping the sliders here just +23 McLaren see I brought the shadows up here because I think that actually brings the background out a little more and stops it looking like it's been shot against a black empty space I think that gives a really really nice look and it's it's pin sharp on here on the head Oro logo which is great so I'm really happy with what I've managed to get and I think just by using such a simple setup these three pieces of black card and the one light crit was really dramatic moody shot which perfectly suits this stark stylized phone like this wouldn't work for every product but definitely a winner for this really pleased with what I've been able to get its please let us know your thoughts on this shoot in the comments below make sure to LIKE and subscribe and if there's any product that you'd like to see me take a crack at photograph things that you've been having trouble with do make sure to put that in as well