Photographing Round Objects for Texturing

[shushens]

Hey guys! I have a question that has been bugging me for a while now.

Say, I want to collect some textures of potatoes. If I just place them somewhere and shoot in natural exposure, the roundness is too obvious and even if you crop out the outer portion of it, the central portion either has a dull highlight or it has a sense of rotundity. Theoretically, I realize this depth information could be somewhat compensated using fill flash, but I just have a point and shoot camera, which is not very sophisticated (Canon Powershot A2000 IS) and I somehow can't make the textures appear flat-ish.

Is there a simple way of achieving this? Can this be cured in Photoshop by some sort of light compensation? I once used the demo of PixPlant and it had a certain light normalization feature. If the image was darker near the corners or something like that, it would normalize the image and make it appear somewhat flat.

Have I been able to explain the question correctly?

[Hirazi Blue]

As a workaround couldn't you just peel one potato, flatten some of it's pieces, photograph them and do some creative "photoshopping" to turn them into a usable texture? (Luxology's Imagesynth comes to mind...) ;)

[Grubber]

Some time ago (actually 5 years ago) some guy on other forums came up with idea of using scanner to capture textures of oval vegetables/fruits. What he did, he just rolled the vegetable at the same speed as the scanners light passes under the glass. If you got a scanner You could try it

[shushens]

No, unfortunately I don't have any. But thank you very much for your responses! I actually peeled it piece by piece and photographed them under diffused sunlight and came up with something like the attachment. Of course, after clone-stamping and stuff. What do you think?

Potato_diffuse.JPG

Just a small version to save forum traffic.

[Mathaeus]

Nice

what I learnt as some 'rule of the thumb', it's to find shadow somewhere in sunny exterior - enough light, but indirect light.
About 'roll scanning' technique, here is an old scan of apple, done by my friend long time ago. Anyway, he say it doesn't work well with modern scanners, too much distortion with these.
If someone is interested in tutorial, I'll ask him