In the Box Photography

In the Box Photography is a uniquely fun composite project created in Photoshop. All you need is a box, a camera and Photoshop! I'll walk you through step by step: how to build a box using laminate shelves, setting up the box and camera, taking lots of photos and all the steps in Photoshop to make your composite come together!

This project can be done with people, pets... people and pets! Capture birthdays, special occasions, graduations, favorite hobbies or just for fun! Once you start making Box images, you'll find so many reasons to have your box out and your camera snapping!

Arguably one of the most important parts of In the Box Photography is the box! You can build your own box, use a cardboard box or get creative (I've seen people use patio chairs!).

For my box, I used laminated shelves that are 28 inches long by 14 inches wide. You can use regular wood or LINNMON table tops from IKEA work quite well for a larger box. If your wood is not finished already, painting the pieces before assembly is easier than building it and then painting.

Once the sides are ready, arrange them into a square. Check out the first photo for how I laid mine out. You don't have to make your box square, but it does give you more options later on down the road if you do. Use one of the sides to mark a line down the edge of the wood (or use a ruler) and mark at least two spots to add screws. The larger the box you build, the more screws you'll want to use to hold everything together.

Pre-drill each screw hole and then use a spade bit to countersink the screws. Once all the holes are drilled, assemble the box with wood screws that are least an inch and a half long. I found it easiest to use one hand to hold the boards and the other to wield the drill.

Once the sides are attached, trace the box onto the backing board (or again, use a ruler... I apparently need to invest in a ruler, lol). I used a piece of scrap MDF but you can use whatever wood you have handy. The backing board helps to stabilize the box. Cut the wood to size and drill screw holes like you did for the sides. Paint the backboard with light coats of paint and allow to fully dry before attaching it to the back of the box with more wood screws.

Now that your box is ready, let's put it to use!

The box: Place the box on an elevated surface. This not only helps with "overhangs" but also helps in centering your camera with the box. I set my box on a small pallet. Whatever you place your box on, make sure it is stable, you don't want your box tipping over mid shoot! I added a sheet of white paper under the box to help bounce some light up towards the top of the box. The white also helps make editing easier later on too.

The camera: Set your camera up on a tripod. A tripod is essential, you simply can't handhold your camera and get perfectly aligned shots needed for this project. Make sure the camera is level and the box is centered in the field of view. I used the gridlines on my camera screen to help achieve this. You'll want every side of the box to look the same (I could have done this a little better myself!). The more centered your box is, the better your end result will be! Add something in the middle of the box to focus your camera on, I grabbed a stuffed animal. If you are using auto focus, turn your auto focus off once you have focused the camera on your "subject." Make sure your camera is set to a higher aperture (F16+) to get more of your subject in focus. If you have a quick action or sports setting on your camera dial, switching to that setting can be helpful too.

Make sure to get great natural lighting or use lights and reflectors. You'll want as few shadows as possible.

TIP: Double check that your camera battery is fully charged and that your camera card has plenty of space. You don't want to get all set up and then realize your camera battery is dead or your card is full!

Vocab:

Overhang: any part of the subject that exceeds past the edge of the box.

Aperture: similar to the pupil in your eye. This is one way to control how much light will get into the camera. A higher aperture will let less light in and blurs the image if there is a lot of movement, which is helpful if you are shooting something like a waterfall. A wider aperture will let more light in and helps more of your subject to be in focus.

Reflector: photography equipment that bounces light into a desired direction from a light source.

Now that you have built a box and have everything set up, on to the fun part! Taking lots (and lots) of photos!

Pet photography can be a little tricky. Pets sometimes are well mannered and listen... and sometimes they pee all over your set up and refuse to sit still. You never know what will happen! (The same is true for humans, haha.)

Have everything set up before the pet arrives, including your camera. Make sure they have eaten and maybe ask the owner to take them for a good walk beforehand. Ask the owner to bring lots of toys (especially ones that squeak) and small treats. Set up a bowl of water and have a towel on hand for any drool or messes the dog may leave in the box. It's easier to periodically brush crumbs and marks out of the box than it is to Photoshop them all out later!

Photo box hack: I drilled a 3/4 inch hole in one side of my box to help get the dog to look where I wanted her to. We passed treats and put toys in the hole to grab her attention and even rotated the box a few times to get her head to move a specific direction.

Make sure to take pictures the dog doing different things. Looking every which direction, sitting, standing, laying down. With toys, without toys. Getting ready to jump out of the box on you (again). The more variety you have, the better story you can pull together later. I held down the shutter button a lot during this session and took over 200 photos! I obviously didn't use all the photos, but I wanted lots of options to pick from!

When I do box sessions with people, I find it helpful to think of what poses I want to take beforehand and sketch them out stickman style so we make sure to get the shots needed. With pet photography, sometimes you have to take what you can get. It doesn't hurt to give some prior thought to the shoot, but being flexible will be helpful in the long run. Thankfully this pupper was really good! For only being 4 months old and wiggly, she sure was a lot of fun to work with!

Once your session is complete, take a look at your photos and decide which ones you want to use. How many photos do you have that you love? Which ones tell a story? You can use any amount of photos that you want! I will usually look at my photos and move the ones I want to a folder and decide how big my template needs to be.

Once you pick out the photos you want to use, open them all in Lightroom or Photoshop, whichever is your preference for editing photos. If you use Lightroom to edit the photos, you'll eventually need to then bring the images into Photoshop to create the composite. I prefer to open each image in its own tab in Photoshop and then bulk edit. I'll walk you through the editing process in the next step.

You can use any number of images that you'd like to build your composite. Once you decide how many photos you will use, you can make your template in Photoshop. Photoshop is a photo editing software and does require a monthly subscription with Adobe. If you're taking lots of photos, it's worth the investment! I'll talk about a few tools below. If you've never worked with Photoshop before, search YouTube for tutorials on how to use these specific tools for a better understanding of how to use them if you need a little more detail.

For this example, let's make a Facebook cover photo. Facebook cover photos are 312 pixels high by 820 pixels wide and you can fit 3 photos across horizontally. In Photoshop, go to File>New>Custom and add in the dimensions on the right. Set the Resolution to at least 300 pixels/inch and then click Create.

Photoshop will open a white rectangular canvas sized to fit the given dimensions. On this canvas, you can build out the template for your composite.

Add a new layer by clicking the new layer button at the bottom of the layers panel. Color that layer any color other than white. You'll need to see the edges of the template so you'll want some sort of color. I picked a hideous mauve color (we will be changing it later...).

Create a square that is .88x.88 inches wide. The size will change depending on how many photos you are using. I decided on the size of the box I could use by taking the width, dividing it by how many boxes I wanted to fit across then subtracting a little bit more so there are spaces between the box. If you have a rectangular box, you'll need to make rectangles instead of squares and you can always make smaller boxes to fit in more photos too.

Duplicate the square twice by clicking on the square then pressing control C and Control V to paste. Equally space them by using the alignment buttons at the top of the screen.

Once all three squares are where you'd like them, click on the first square and use the Magic Wand Tool to select the square. Click on the mauve colored layer and then click delete. You won't see a change on screen, but if you look at the mauve layer in the layers panel, you'll see the square is cut out. Click on each square layer and repeat the steps to delete all three squares from the mauve layer.

Once all three squares are deleted, you can hide the square layers by clicking the eyeball next to each layer on the layers panel.

Now you have a template! If you'd like to use the template again in the future, save it now as a Photoshop file.

Vocab:

Composite: an image made up of multiple other images.

Photoshop: An image processing software that allows you to digitally edit images.

Pixel: Pixels are the little squares you see when you zoom in too far on an image. Pixels can be used to measure image sizes.

Canvas: The workspace around an existing image, within the image window in Photoshop.

Resolution: the amount of detail in a image, measured in pixels per inch. The more pixels per inch, the greater the resolution or the clearer the image will be.

Alignment: The arrangement of images, usually in a straight line. Objects can be aligned horizontally or vertically.

Magic wand tool: A tool in Photoshop that selects similarly colored pixels quickly.

Once you have your template all set up, next you will want to grab your photos and bring them into the file. Go to the tab with the photo you'd like to use and use the rectangular marquee tool to drag a square around the image. I usually try to get just outside the edge of the box.

Copy the image (control C), click on the tab where your template is, then paste (control V). Your image might paste in VERY large. Use the corner of the image to make the box smaller and adjust it to fit inside the template.

Drag the template layer to the top of the layers panel then move the image to the place you'd like it to go.

Add in all the images you'd like to add to your project and arrange them accordingly.

Now that we have our photos in our template, we need to clean up the images and fine tune the edges to align with the template.

First, let's clean up the images by using the Spot Healing Brush Tool. Select the Spot Healing Brush Tool then simply click on the spots that you'd like to get rid of. Photoshop will fix the spot by sampling the area around the spot. In my pictures, I had to fix the hole in the top of the box and a few treat crumbs by her feet.

Once the images are cleaned up, we can fine tune the edges of the box. Making the template layer a little translucent will help get the edges lined up. Click on the template layer and then slide the opacity to about 80%.

Next, click on one of the images and go to Edit>Transform>Distort. Drag the corners and edges of the box until they line up with the template paying special attention to the corners of the box. Adjust all the edges to match up with the template then press return to lock those changes in. Repeat on all the images.

Vocab:

Spot Healing Brush Tool: quickly removes spots from your photos. This brush tool uses sampled pixels from an image and uses that information to correct the selected spot.

If you have something overhanging the edge of the box, you'll need to add a layer mask to hide the template or the image to let the overhang show. In my example, I have two overhangs where the dog's head is over the edge of the box. I will need to remove part of the template that goes over her nose, and the edges of the images, to make the composition blend.

Adding a layer mask in Photoshop is a little advanced, but masks allow you to hide a portion of the layer while still retaining the image. It might be tempting to just erase the image portions you don't want instead, but a mask makes it easier to fix any mistakes and do minor tweaks.

To apply the layer mask, click on the layer that you want to mask and then click the "add layer mask" button at the bottom of layer panel. Using the brush tool, paint the color black over the area of the image that you want to hide. If you accidentally mask a portion of the image that you didn't intend to, switch the brush color to white and undo the mask by painting over the area again in white. The color of the brush won't show on the image, but the layer will appear or disappear based on the color used.

For my first image, I have both the dogs nose poking over the side of the box and the edge of that image covering the middle image in the template. This will require two masks to fix. One layer mask will be applied to hide the template that is over the dog's nose and the second will remove the edge of the image that is overlapping the middle image.

Click on the image and then add a layer mask by click the "add layer mask" button at the bottom. Click on the layer mask then select the brush tool. Pick black from the color picker at the bottom of the tools panel then brush black over the edge of the image. Make the brush size smaller to get around small details like inside the dog's mouth.

Next, click on the template layer and add another layer mask. Click on the layer mask and then use the brush again with black to paint over the parts that overlap the subject. If you accidentally mask a portion you didn't mean to, click on the white color and go back in to unmask the area and bring it back.

Repeat the steps for each part that overhangs.

We are finally in the home stretch!

Now that all the editing has been complete, we can change that ugly template color. Select the template layer then use the magic wand tool to select the template. Use the paintbrush tool to change the color of the template. I prefer white for a clean look between the boxes but a brown color looks nice if you have a cardboard box. Use the paintbrush and brush over the template to change the color. Adjust the layer opacity back to 100% and double check your overhangs.

Now we are finally ready to save the image! Go to File> Export> Export As.

Click Export and name your file and save as a png file.

The file is finally done! You can now upload it as your cover photo on Facebook :)

There is no limit to how many photos you can add to a box photo. Follow the steps and make adjustments to make different sized composites. If you want to print your images, start with what size print you want to make then size your squares to fit.

If you have any questions, make sure to leave them below and I can help!