How to make a background of a portrait photo completely white with Lightroom

Hey all,

Most of the time when I shoot portrait photos, the client want med to use a white background. Personally, I think completely white backgrounds make the photo look too harsh. But when your client wants it white, white it is…

So when I shoot photos like this I always put one flash behind the person or object. I set this flash to a high power value in order to simply blow away all possible shadows and colors on the wall. If you’re in a hurry and perhaps miss something during your setup or your location for the shoot isn’t large enough the background might not end up as white as you thought. This happened to me on my last session. I didn’t have time to measure the light the way I wanted and the room was very small so the person had to stand very close to the wall behind him wich also made him stand very close to my flash. To make a long story short I just fired off my camera and was prepared for that I had to fix the background later on when I came back to my office.

Even though the background looked white in my display on my camera ( I didn’t bother checking for over-exposure detection at that point) it ended up being a bit gray in the corners.

I sent my final photos to the client. They shortly came back to me just to inform me that the photos backgrounds didn’t look completely white on their website.

In this video below, I will show you how you can change the exposure of a gray background behind a person in a portrait photo so that the background instead turns completely white (overexposed).