Quickfix: Faking White Background when Displaying Photos of Devices

When writing about devices and hardware, technical writers will frequently have to post, copy, attach, insert, or Place (Adobe) a photo of the device.  In most cases, the layout or graphics artists will provide the photo, but the independent writer can easily "fake" the professional-looking white background by taking a photo of the hardware himself.

1.  Place the object or hardware on a clean, white sheet of A4 or Letter paper.  The sheet needs to be thick enough and bright enough to accomodate any Flash settings of the camera.  

Professionally-taken photos of devices are normally edited using Masks and Layers to provide a clean, white background.  This can be created artificially using any basic photo-editing software.

 2.  Arrange the device or hardware on the sheet of paper in such a way that when the photo is taken, only the white parts of the paper are seen as background.  Alternately, focus on a particular angle taking note of areas that can be cropped later on.  Use the digital camera's white balance feature to increase the whitness of the paper area further.

A photo of this Flash drive was taken on a sheet of office paper.  The shadows and dull white can be edited using basic software later on.

3. Once copied to the hard drive, open the image in a photo-editing software such as open-source Gimp and increase the white Levels to make the white areas even brighter.  In Gimp, the Levels feature can be found on the Colors Menu. Further editing, such as Sharpness and Color  Saturation, can be done afterwards.

Levels increases the white and dark areas of an image.