Photographing dog portraits - photo shoot in the studio

You will learn how to take dog portraits from the wealth of experience of a professional photographer.

Here you can find out what equipment you need to take impressive dog portraits in the studio. You don't have to have your own home studio, all the equipment is inexpensive and easy to buy and allows you to have a professional shooting setup with you at all times.

Here I explain all the settings you should make on your camera and flashes to achieve the best possible result. The settings are made manually on the camera and the flashes are also controlled manually. However, once the settings are set, they no longer need to be changed during the shoot.

Here I show you the setup of our small home studio. You'll see exactly where I place the background and the flashes to achieve the best results later on. You'll also get tips on how to work with large and small dogs.

Now the photos are being taken! Here you'll get an insight into the shoot itself and how we worked with Max the Labrador. Then you'll find out the best way to handle the dogs and how to get your dog to give you their full attention.

The first step in image editing should be good organization of the image files. That's why you can find out here how to use Lightroom to organize your images and create a pre-selection from the shoot.

Also in Lightroom, we will give one of the images a basic edit to prepare it for later processing in Photoshop. Lens correction and the reduction of contrasts are particularly important here.

In Photoshop, we will first remove all distracting elements from the image. To do this, we use the repair brush as a tool to remove and replace individual elements from the image.

In this chapter, I'll explain how you can create your own textures and backgrounds from scratch in Photoshop, which you can customize to suit your image. This way, you'll always have the right background or texture to hand when you need to insert something.

Now we can insert the new background into our picture. You will learn that it is much easier to insert a color-coordinated background than a background of a different color. The background is then selectively edited.

The next step is to make the first adjustments to the image look. First, the contrast on the dog is selectively increased with a dodge-and-burn layer and areas of the image that are too light or too dark are adjusted.

Various further adjustments to the image look will now follow. In this way, the foreground and background merge more and more into a uniform image. Colors and contrasts are adjusted and selectively highlighted.

The final step in image processing is sharpening. There is a technique for this in Photoshop that can sharpen completely without artifacts. With this technique, you can achieve impressive sharpness in your image.

Finally, we take another look at the image in Lightroom. Here we can make a direct comparison with the unprocessed image and see what we have changed in the image. If necessary, final corrections can also be made here in Lightroom.

You've made it! Now you know everything there is to know about dog photography in the studio. And that's why I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you and refer you to my Facebook group on the subject of dog photography. And at the end you'll receive a little surprise!