What's the best setting on a digital camera to take pictures with for some photoshop work?

I would use full manual or variable aperture so that you get the fastest shutterspeed and, more importantly, the lowest aperture setting.

The effect will be a decreased depth of field. Hopefully this will yield a sharp image of yourself and an out-of-focus background. This way it will be easier for photoshop to determine the edge.

You are in effect trying to accomplish a “green screen” setup. You may find more information about how to better achieve a high quality shoot if you Google for “green screen tips” et cetera.

I can offer you some tips though, as I have lots of green screen experience.
1. Color of the background. Since you are doing a still shot, it is OK to have a white BG. If you ever wanted to make a movie though, go for a color that you will not be wearing or is a part of you (white is your eyes and teeth, which actually looks really funny when they’re green screened out… transparent face), as the video editing program can remove all that color automatically and give you a pretty decent result.
2. Shadows. Shadows are your number one problem. You want there to be zero shadows cast by you onto the white BG so that the background can be masked out more easily and more successfully. Use whatever lights you have, position and angle them however they need to be to eliminate most shadows while still keeping you looking good and well lit. You can also move yourself and the camera a step away from the screen, but sometimes this will leave your feet “ungreened” and thus they can’t be in the cover. If you wanted a torso shot though, this is perfectly great.
3. Quantity. Take as many shots as you can stand to take. Two hundred, three hundred. Pose, snap a few, and adjust a light a bit. Take more, adjust lights. Rinse, repeat. This is a photography tip in general, the more shots you take, the higher the odds of one that is awesome showing up. It’s simply odds.

Onto your actual question, your camera settings. You need the photo to be big enough for printing at 300dpi. Bigger is better, bigger is never really bad, so take the biggest shot you can take. This of course means bigger files, which means less capacity on your memory card, so you’ll need to be able to dump the card and take more shots quickly. There are also some ISO settings that you may be able to change. These vary depending on your actual lighting condition, but in general, the lower you can go, the better quality of still image you will get. But the camera needs to be exactly still, and so do you, when you get very low in ISO. So try around 400 and do some test shots.

Ultimately the exact settings don’t matter. What does matter is you getting the image you want. So if you can, bring a laptop so that you can check the image immediately when you take it, in order to tweak things to produce the best image you can.

If you want more info, you don’t need to tell us your exact idea, although in reality no one is going to take your idea no matter how cool it might be, ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s the final product that they’ll rip off. The more details you can give us, the better advice we can give you back :)

If you have Photoshop CS4 make sure it is set to RAW. The options for processing the photos when you open them, before taking them all the way into the program, are amazing. You can literally allow for almost any condition or mistake.

I rather like the ‘ON’ setting on my camera. I can never get the ‘OFF’ setting to focus quite right.

Bri’s right, if your camera can do RAW that would be the most ideal setting as it allows you to tweak the exposure even after the photo has been taken because RAW images store most of if not all of the possible data whereas other formats involve a lot more compression therefore limiting your ability to adjust the different variables.

‘ON’ helps also. :cD

@artem and Jamspoon lurve for on!!!

I don’t think the Samsung L100 does RAW. It is a 90$ camera. The quality of the person working with Photoshop is going to be the most important part.

Cheers JP!

I should’ve looked up the camera before answering but since it doesn’t do RAW the second most important thing next to a strong knowledge of Photoshop is that your images are as high a resolution as possible and just as noise free.

It would be best to take the photos with the camera sitting on a solid surface – a tripod ideally – from there you can use longer shutter speeds which most inexpensive cameras need to maximize processing of their not-so-stellar image sensors.

And wear a hat if you can. Hair is the hardest part to work with.

I would shoot outdoors. I like outdoor lighting of everything better then artificial light.

@johnpowell – Good call my friend!!

I always take in RAW format now. I did change it for RAW/jpg just to make my husband happy.