EEVblog #1372 - DIY PCB Photography Light Box

How to build your own DIY light box for photographing PCB's
Dave experiments with a cardboard box, some alfoil, and a hacked YujiLED high cri studio light.

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#LED #Lighting #Photography

[WizardTim]

Nice work!
Something worth mentioning about this is that it’s a reflectance light box, most ‘professional’ light boxes on the market are transmission light boxes. This is important for two reasons, transmission light boxes massively attenuate the amount of usable light you will get, often half and transmission light boxes (especially DIY ones that use cheap printer paper with fluorescent whitening agents) will ruin your CRI and CCT (can be on the order of 2, 000 K) completely defeating the point of using 95 CRI LEDs. You could see this when Dave used it without the Alfoil® everything had a cardboard brown tint.

But by using reflective Alfoil® you don’t attenuate the light in fact you reflect light that would be wasted going off-scene back into the scene and aluminium has a reasonably ‘flat’ spectral reflectance response so you won’t ruin your CRI or CCT (unlike horrible printer paper) just make sure to use the matt side.

The downside is you will still get specular hotspots from the LEDs, but if this is a major issue you can mount the LEDs at the bottom edges pointing up but that has its trade-offs. Reflectance light boxes are also just harder to use and more limiting hence why transmission light boxes are so popular.

TL;DR buy a thousand incandescent bulbs and paint them matt black except for a small window if you want to take photos will ‘acceptable’ colour rendering, however Dave’s thing is probably good enough for 99% of use cases.

[ikocheratcr]

Do not cut the box just yet to change height. Just put the PCB on a "pedestal". You will get rid of the border shadows (diffuse them), and by controlling the height you get different zoom, without touching the lens. Once you have the"right" pedestal height, you might go in with the cutter on the box.

[EEVblog]

NOTE: My camcorder was set to a whitebalance of 5000K (my lab and studio lights are all matched to that), so the colour is a bit off compared to the photograph camera.

[GeoffSeeley]

The only thing missing from this arts and crafts POC was some glitter.

[warialinth]

Here goes BigClive's secretto good board photos D:
Well not entirely...

[PlasmaDan]

Put a spacer under the part so white light can get under it. That will help a lot with the shadows.

[creepyloner]

as a photographer who builds his own lighting from scratch, this was hard to watch. especially for macro, bare leds and foil are the worst options. the leds should be facing away from the board so the light is reflected evenly from the inside of the box, which should be painted flat white.

[SwitchAndLever]

If you want to get even more softer lighting and cut down on the reflections even more skip the alfoil and go with covering the insides with just white paper instead. It will diffuse the light more, while still providing lots of reflected light, softening those shadows a fair bit. Oftentimes when I shoot stuff I direct the light away from the camera onto a big white wall, or white paper if I have a big enough one around, and it will just cancel out all the harsh shadows nicely.

[RAUK]

I don't know much about photography but I definitely liked this project. Simple and works well.

[petersage]

Very good job, Dave!

Regarding adhesives, if you need to cover cardboard box with al foil (many of us have done this done this for solar cookers), you can't do much better than glue stick. It won't wet and delaminate the cardboard, it holds well enough, and it has a very forgiving working time. There are spray adhesives that give better hold, but they either have critically short working times or wet the cardboard too much.

[SMPTE]

Hi. Nice idea :)
just a completely different method : I used a flatbedscanner. :)

[rene]

Dave vs Clive: Dave: $Thousands lab power supply. Specialist studio lights. 3-day project to build all. Prototyping, measurements and calculations. Clive: 20" light strip left from xmas. Tupperware box. Cellphone. The Tupperware being most expensive item of the construction. Safety warning regarding cutting holes in Tupperware.

[roybixby]

Alfoil is much less diffused than white paper.
A large cone of white board would give a softer light and be simpler to make...

[carloatromero]

Edge shadows - add distance between the board and background.
You can also use a light gray background so the board pops-out of the photo. Also addresses the over exposure concern with smaller boards.

[udhayakumara]

White acrylic will do better. You can make a box by bending the sheet and you can provide 360° light source with individual on/off control

[lambda]

Styrofoam is super diffusing and Color neutral and you can get ready made Styrofoam boxes.
(that's an good excuse to order dryice)

[tom_something]

If you want an even softer shadow on the background, flatter objects can be placed on a white platform to hold them up a bit. A block of foam would probably do the trick.

[Atetus]

Thank You Dave for Your channel - i watch You like 10 years of more, I grew up on Your videos, now I'm engineer and I do my own YouTube channel about electronics and stuff ;)
You changed the world, I will also try to :)

[galier]

I use a flatbed scanner. Its field depth is generally sufficient to get everything sharp up to 2 cm height. Lighting is also always perfect. Resolution of 1200 dpi is unattaignale by any other camera. The setup time is also much more rapid than with your contraption.

[jimquinn]

I routinely use 8 1/2" × 11" white paper folded at 90degrees, standing up in four corners. I stand up
4 oxyled strips in the corners. Quick and easy setup and tear down, takes one minute or two minutes.