How do I make the BG black

[Gregg Bell]

My dad wants this presentable to show to clients, so He wants the warehouse the way it is, but the beg black, and some lighting added onto the photo, to give it a more strobist like feel.

How do I do that, and can someone please kindly teach me? I am using Photoshop CS2.

here is the photo:-
http://i951.photobucket.com/albums/ad355/GreggBell/PPTUFFL3a.jpg

I want to learn at the end of the day.

[James T]

You go back and reshoot it with the lighting. ;)

Failing that, select what you want black, and fill it with black.

You want the warehouse how it is, but the background black.. what part of the background? Does that mean you want to lose the corrugated iron, and all the roof structures?

The bit that may cause a problem is where the overexposed areas are bleeding around the edges of the truck.

[ricktas]

lots of use of the burn tool

[Xenedis]

There's no way you'll be able to shoot that scene such that the background is black.

You're shooting a very large object in a relatively dark enclosure, right next to a large door leading outside.

While you can use light to create darkness, you need sufficient distance between your subject and the background in order to, using a combination of a fast shutter speed, narrow aperture and lighting placed close to the subject, completely darken the background.

It's just not possible in this setting.

Unfortunately using fill tools to substitute that blown-out white background with black will not look natural, as you have light reflecting off the water on the ground. You'll also experience fringing/halos due to the bleeding of light around the edge of the subject.

[Jeremy]

You can try playing around by creating an adjustment layer and use the levels to get rid of everything except the white background in this layer then combine these two layers. Here's the result of doing a "quick fiddle"

[Jeremy]

The altered pic:

Sorry - some how the pic is not appearing. I'll try again.

[Jeremy]

Here it is:

[Jeremy]

Altered picture"

[Big Pix]

layer>new adjustment layer>selective colour>OK>choose black and increase to help control flair....>OK

Layer>merge Visible

CS3 quick selection tool>select areas to change colour>refine edge>make ajustments>OK

with marching ants, hold down shift key and hit delete, the area should have changed to black

There may be a bit of edge tidy up to do........

[James T]

Not too sure what you want, but just upping the contrast can help quite a bit. Flickr seems to have killed this in re-uploading it but with the original you could tidy it up quite a bit.

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4028/4396051413_5d0e96ff86_o.jpg

That was about 5 seconds in Photoshop, heavy curve to increase contrast, then a blank layer set to overlay, and just painted in different shades of grey to 'add some light' as you say. :)

The BG is just too messy though, as said, with the massive amounts of light coming in and affecting the foreground, it's never going to look natural just dropping in a new background.

[kiwi]

Id crop the image at the left hand shock absorber

Problem solved

That'll be $5, you can paypal me :)

[N*A*M]

id put matching roller doors over the white area

[DavidB]

Go back with strobes and/or continuous lights, and shoot it at night so the background starts out as black!
Use the strobes/lights to put the light where you want it.

Another option would be to shoot it as a bracketed HDR exposure.

[WorkingClassHero]

You can select the BG and then use edit->fill to fill it with black. This was just a quick 2 minute selection, it'd be a painstaking process to do it really well.

[Papou]

Why not just do a(good) selection of what you want , say the Uclid and toolbox for example then cut n paste in a new black background layer ??..

[ving]

hit the power button on your monitor :P

[Roof]

not sure if this still going but make a path using the pen tool and right click to make a selection and you can do anything and everything......or just dup layer and paint black what you don't want.

not to hard

[Analog6]

Ok, I went a similar route to Alan, but I felt black was too dark and drew the eye. I made a copy layer, greyed out the white areas by selecting a grey colour and filling with the paintbrush. I then pot a 2.0 Gaussian blur on it and erased the blur over the machine itself. You can do a much better job working on the large file.

OK, it is not letting me put it in, I don't have the priveleges to do that, it tells me. Very frustrating.

The other thing you could do is to put a dark scene of trees or something as a layer and actually cut the white areas so it looked like a real scene outside.