product retouching - adding shadows or reflections

[mattp]

All,

I have produced the following wine bottle shots and done some retouching on this image, what I don't like is that the wine bottles have no base I.e. reflection or shadow. Any ideas how to add something in post production. If you have time please can take a look and post your version of the solution.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/3987220...n/photostream/

Thanks
Matt

[chillin]

Maybe a reflection.

[Heretic]

i prefer just a simple grounding shadow when you have a clean background, some times i add a little reflection shadow just to make it more realistic.

[mattp]

thanks for the posts so far:

chillin, your reflections are very subtle - I could not even see then on my screen until I looked a bit harder (although it's not calibrated).

heretic, any simple advice on how to do this?

Both of these are very subtle, I know I done want to go overboard but I was thinking of something a little more noticable :-)

[Caravaggio]

Here is a quickly done reflection. If you like it I will tell you how to do it.

[mattp]

Thanks, Caravaggio that looks effective, please tell me more.

It think that type of effective will work best plus Heretic's shadow effect to provide a short transition between the bottle and it's reflection.

cheers

[Flashtones]

Originally Posted by mattp

Both of these are very subtle, I know I done want to go overboard but I was thinking of something a little more noticable :-)

IF you do your effect on layers set to "multiply" you can just keep duplicating the layers until they're dark enough. Or clip a curve to them.

[Caravaggio]

Yeah, I was in a hurry and agree that it needs a better transition between the bottle and reflection.

This is what I did.
1.Duplicate the background layer. Name it bottles.
2. Put a solid white layer between the background layer and the bottles layer.
3. Cut a path around the bottles with the pentool. Turn the path into a selection and apply a less than 1 pixel feather to the selection.
4. On the bottles layer, mask out the bottles with the selection you made with the pentool.
5. Command click on the layer mask to get an active selection of the bottles.
7. Go to edit>copy merged and then edit>paste. The bottles are then copied to their own layer. Name this layer reflection. Move the reflection layer below the bottles layer. Go to edit> transform >flip vertically and nudge the reflection into place using the keyboard arrow keys.
8. Apply a gaussian blur to the reflection layer. On your low res file I used a 1.6 pixel blur.
9. Create a layer mask on the reflection layer. With the mask active choose a black to white linear gradient set to about 30 % opacity. Drag a gradient from the bottom of the reflection to the top holding down the shift key to make the reflection fade more at the bottom. I then lowered the opacity of the layer to 75%.
10. I then made a duplicate of the reflection layer, named it motion blur and put it on top of the reflection layer. I applied a motion blur set to angle -90 and a distance of 32.

I hope this kind of makes sense. I am attaching a screenshot of the layer stack to make my explanation a little clearer. Ask any questions if you want.