The Elevated Glass Setup That Kills the White Background Cutout Workflow
White background product shots are the bread and butter of e-commerce, and for years the standard workflow has been: shoot, mask, cut out, composite. It works, but it costs time on every single frame. When I was helping a friend overhaul her Etsy shop, I was shooting dozens of products a week, and the cutout step was quietly eating hours I didn’t have. That’s when I started looking hard at in-camera solutions that produce a clean white straight out of the shutter.
In this Visual Education tutorial, photographer Carl Taylor walks through a setup that does exactly that. It’s built on straightforward physics, a piece of glass or clear acrylic, a light aimed at the floor, and a diffusion tool he calls the Carl Taylor light cone. The result is a pure white background combined with genuinely attractive product lighting, no selection tools, no masking, no Photoshop compositing. I watched this one twice before rebuilding my own version in my studio, and I want to walk you through it step by step so you can follow along without needing to pause and rewind.
Step 1: Build the Elevated Surface
Glass sheet raised on blocks above white floor surface
The foundation of this entire setup is a sheet of glass or clear acrylic raised a few inches off the floor. Carl uses a pair of blocks and some stacked bricks to create that gap, but the exact riser doesn’t matter as long as the surface is stable and level. The product sits on top of this elevated sheet, and the gap underneath is where the magic actually happens. If you have a sheet of tempered glass left over from a broken table, this is a great use for it. Clear acrylic works too and is lighter and easier to store.
The surface underneath the glass, visible through it, is your background. Carl uses a sheet of white matte acrylic on the floor, but white-painted floor or a large sheet of white paper both work. Matte is the right call here because you want the surface to bounce light, not create its own reflections.
Step 2: Light the Floor, Not the Product
Single LED light aimed downward at white floor beneath glass
This is the step that most photographers get backwards when they first try white background work. The floor gets its own dedicated light source, completely separate from whatever is lighting your product. Carl uses a single LED pointed straight down at the white surface below the glass. That light bounces up through the glass and creates the white glow you see in the final image.
The exposure relationship is what matters here. You’re not just blasting the floor with light and hoping for the best. You’re dialing the floor light up until the white reads as a true, clipped white in your histogram, while keeping your product exposure metered separately at the top. Two floor lights will make this easier and more even, but Carl demonstrates the technique with one to show it’s achievable at minimal cost.
Step 3: Add a White Reflector at the Back
White reflector panel positioned behind the setup
A white reflector or card positioned behind the setup bounces additional light forward, filling in the background behind the product so the white wraps around rather than dropping off. This is a small detail that pays off on anything with height, like a bottle or a candle, where you’d otherwise see the background fade to gray as it recedes.
This reflector doesn’t need to be expensive. A foamcore board from a craft store does the job. Position it so it catches the floor light and redirects it back toward the camera.
Step 4: Set Up Product Lighting Separately
Two LED panels positioned above the product on the glass
Your product lighting sits above the setup and is metered independently from your floor light. Carl uses two LED panels plus a square LED panel for the product itself. The key point is that these lights are doing a completely different job. The floor light creates your white background. The top lights reveal texture, shape, and detail in the product.
For most products, this separation is enough to get a clean, usable shot. Shoot it this way first before adding any diffusion, so you can see exactly what the raw lighting looks like and what problems you’re solving in the next step.
Step 5: Diagnose the Reflection Problem
First test shot showing harsh specular highlights on glossy product
The test shot without any diffusion is an important diagnostic frame. On glossy, spherical, or highly polished products, you’ll see harsh specular highlights, meaning bright, hard reflections of the light sources themselves sitting directly on the surface of the product. Carl shoots a glossy sphere and a chrome door handle to demonstrate this, and the results are exactly what you’d expect: the product surface becomes a mirror showing the whole studio back at you.
This is not a failure of the setup. It’s the expected behavior of that kind of surface, and it’s why diffusion is the next step rather than an afterthought.
Step 6: Introduce the Light Cone for Diffusion
Light cone placed over product with camera shooting through top opening
Carl’s light cone is a proprietary tool, but the principle is standard diffusion technique. A cone-shaped diffuser placed over the product surrounds the entire subject with soft, even light. The camera lens shoots down through a small hole at the top of the cone. Because the light now hits the product from all directions at the same diffused intensity, the harsh mirror-like reflections smooth out into clean, gradated tones.
The results on the chrome door handle and jewelry examples are significant. The same product that looked unusable in the diagnostic shot reads as clean and professional with the cone in place. If you don’t have a light cone specifically, a DIY version made from white ripstop nylon or a translucent white fabric draped over a wire frame will get you into the same territory. The goal is to eliminate any direct line of sight between a hard light source and the product’s reflective surface.
What I’d Add From My Own Experience
The glass setup described here is genuinely solid, but I want to add one thing: test for color cast before you commit to a long shoot. Some glass has a slight green or blue tint that’s invisible to the naked eye but shows up on a white balance card. Shoot a white card sitting on the glass surface under your actual floor light and check it in your editing software before you’ve photographed 50 products. A small tint is easy to correct in batch, but it’s easier to catch it at setup time.
For jewelry specifically, I’d also add a second diffused light source at a very low angle coming in from the front. It doesn’t need to be powerful. It just catches the facets in a way that reads differently than overhead-only lighting, which can flatten the dimensionality of cut stones.
The single most useful idea in this tutorial is the exposure independence principle: the floor light and the product light are separate systems with separate jobs, and you control them independently. That one concept unlocks clean white backgrounds without any post-production, regardless of what diffusion tool you’re using on top.
Watch the full tutorial on YouTube to see Carl demonstrate each product type live, including the before-and-after on the chrome handle and the jewelry shot.