Recently, I completed another project for my friends at Vineyard {511} in Calistoga. Aside from creating classic wine bottle shots of their current releases, I was tasked with photographing a minimally styled bottle shot that included a wine bottle and glass of wine.
The challenge??? Clip out the bottle and glass from the background so the photo can be overlaid on their website, which has a photo background.
This may sound pretty easy but if you want it to look seamless and somewhat natural, you need to implore some Photoshop magic. While I won’t get into the specifics on how to do this (many tutorials can be found on the web), I will show you the following examples of the results along the way.
First the original photo of the bottle and glass photographed together.
If we simply cut out the bottle and glass from the white background and laid it on a photo or textured background on a website or printed collateral, the result would look awkward. Notice how the bowl of the glass looks like a white blob.
Next we tweak our photo to make the bowl and stem of the glass transparent and accentuate the highlight on the right side of the glass to make the background show through. And voila! We get the following results…