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The primary thing you notice about commercial advertising photography is the product, and how unbelievable it looks. Profitable and effective commercial advertising photographers will be able to create an image which stands out for all the right reasons, grabs the eye of the target market and communicates the proper message almost instantly.

But whilst it’s easy to admire the look of the product and the skill of the photographer, in most cases commercial advertising photography is not about what you see, zaibarul02 however about what you do not see. You might think that once you look at an advertising image what you are seeing is what the photographer noticed, however that is invariably not the case.

After all, all of us know that there are tricks of the trade and many individuals will immediately assume that any image will have been doctored utilizing a graphics instrument such as Adobe’s Photoshop, and whilst this could be the case, there’s far more happening than meets the eye. One of many first things to understand in commercial advertising is that what you see is almost certainly not quite what you’d see should you were looking at the product your self in a shop.

Lighting, the setting and lots of little known tricks of the trade all come into play, serving to to create an illusion which would not just look real, it really looks more real in some cases than it would in real life. For example, if you happen to had been looking at a television in a shop then you’d probably either see a complete lot of distracting reflections in the screen, or the television could be on and you would be watching a picture. In a product image although you’re either going to see a screen that doesn’t have any distracting reflections in it, or it will look as though it’s switched on and displaying a picture.

The difficulty is that if you take a photograph of a television, either switched on or off, neither end result will look very realistic. So how do product photographers make their images appear to be so realistic, whilst still being totally different to how a standard photograph of a television would look?

In an effort to take a photograph of a television switched off commercial advertising photographers will either have a studio which includes a 360 degree backcloth to remove any probably distracting reflections, or they will edit the image afterwards, replacing the screen with a shaded black rectangle which looks realistic, but which does not even exist as part of the screen in real life. However how about taking a photograph of a television that is switched on?

For those who’ve ever tried this you will know that the result will look terrible- very fuzzy and half missing. This is because the camera lens sees what your eyes and brain can’t see – the fact that the image on the screen is only an illusion created by quickly flickering lights. So professional photographers will often take a screen grab from a computer and then superimpose that onto the photograph of the screen to improve the quality. The ultimate image will look just as you expect it to, regardless that you know that that is not how it would really look if you happen to took a photograph of it.

Effective commercial advertising images allows us to be fooled, even once we know that what we are looking at cannot be real, despite looking very real. The art of illusion and of fooling the eye is a subtle one, because consumers will not be eager about an image which has been clearly doctored, but will be enticed by an image which they know can’t be fully real. When you’re undecided how one can achieve the appropriate balance then it’s far safer to go away it in the fingers of the experts.