Thanks guys for the comments.
Firstly - doing bottles is probably the most difficult for me to do - because my standards for producing bottles is unrealistically high.
And I simply cant hack it to that standard. No matter how I try - I just dont get it.
I have seen images of bottles that I though was absolutely the right way to do if you wanted to produce outstanding wine bottles in adverts/brochures for top rated wine farms. SO that remained my frame of reference.
Since I couldnt wax it properly in camera - I started investigating how it was done and this is what I came up with.
Photoshop.
You literally shoot and re-build the whole bottle in Photoshop.
While I regard this not as photography - its digital art in my opinion - it is how I want the bottles to look.
I am totally sure that others may not like this so I did it for me - and me alone. And for stock
Every imperfection is edited out. Bottle sides duplicated to ensure perfect symmetry.
curved reflection added in PS
light reflection smoothed out with gausian blur
colour of bottle done in PS
the bottle top is also fixed in PS - and one side duplicated over to make sure once again its perfect symmetry (because despite what people may think - its NOT "right" )
once done - image is duplicated and layers blended - this intensifies the colour, makes the image appear sharp and also thins the reflection - but even without this extra duplication and blending it is a good image.
The first bottle was completely finished off, it is saved and a duplicate is used to change colour - in Hue and Saturation. several times till I get every colour I want for every bottle.
So we see this exercise takes a lot of time in PS - and only covers one shape of bottle. There are several shapes in wine bottles - but I recon if you build a library of images in every shape, you can do colour when and if needed for your client.
The bottle I photographed was red wine.
The white wine bottle still has my stumped. It's not easy to build a see though glass bottle!
I have sold several of these images so it must work for some people. In my own mind I know I want it to look like this - but at the same time realise its not really photography at all.
