A good workflow helps with your processes and improves productivity. And with product photography is no different. Big or small, your company benefits from the organization of your processes.
Below we show you a basic workflow that will help you take better photos in less time. Quality photos of your products will help you sell more and decrease your return rate.
This workflow is perfect if you sell a limited range of products on Etsy, Amazon, or even in your own Shopify store and you don’t have the budget for a professional setup.
Prepare and organize your products
It doesn’t matter if you have one product or more a bit of preparation before can make wonders. Create a simple Excel or Sheets file with the Product name, SKU if any, colors, or any other variations. It also helps what details you want to capture for your product and what you want your potential buyers to see.
Depending on your product you can add more images for different details or angles as we will see below.
Download this example file here.
Make sure your products are clean and shiny, clothing items are ironed, with no wrinkles. You want to display the products at their best.
Also now is the moment when we organize our lifestyle scene if any. We will create a place where we can show the product used in a certain way or how it would look in a certain place.
Setup and gear
A basic setup would be a plain surface with a lot of natural light. Think ahead about where will you take the photos and do a few experiments with the location and the time of day for the particular spot.
For the surface, it really depends on the size of your product, it can be the floor or a table. Add a white background if possible, there are a lot of cheap options on Amazon and they come in different sizes.
If you have a camera it’s great, if not, your phone will suffice at this stage. We also suggest you buy a tripod and another source of light that can balance or improve the natural light that goes in the room. Or get a photo tent, they work well for smaller products.
Shooting your products
When you are shooting your product you want to think about 2 things, sharing information and also sharing your product story.
Information
The information is things like scale, colors, or variations. We do this by shooting the product from different angles, show its features, details, texture, and so on. A quick overview of the best angles will help decide what is best for your product.
The best angles for Product Photography are:
- The Front angle
- The Three Quarter angle ( also known as the 45-degree angle)
- The Profile angle
- The Back angle
- Top Shot
- Closeup Shot (Macro)
- High shot angle.
Different Viewpoints of the angles:
- Low shot
- Eye level shot
- High shot
Story
The story is how the product works or the context where the product lives and what is useful for. Now set up a lifestyle scene and use your creativity to show the features of your product, how it’s used by a person or just a creative way of displaying it.
Use colors, textures, and props but make sure the product itself is the star in your lifestyle scene. Depending on your product you can have one or more lifestyle images.
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Running shoe closeup of fitness woman getting ready for engage in the gym.
Image post-processing
The fun part is over and now we start to process our images. When processing our product images we are looking to get consistency. Consistency is quality when it comes to product images.
For the most part, you want to use the same background, margins, alignment, and other common properties across your images.
This is what keeps the customer focus on the product without distractions like changing backgrounds with every image. Quality photos show attention to detail, which translates into professionalism in the eyes of your potential customers.
That’s why you want to have a pure white background for most of your product images. Amazon and other marketplaces know that a white background eliminates distractions, focusing the customer’s attention on the product.
This process used to be a hassle with many steps involved and usually done using Photoshop, Lightroom, and a few others. Now is no longer the case as we can use DropSpace that does the job automatically.
All you have to do is upload the images in the app and our AI does everything:
- Batch background removal to clean our images and give us the pure white when we want to.
- Auto image enhancement to correct the lighting, brightness, and colors. Works great with your lifestyle images as well.
- Exports the images in the format we want PNG, JPG, or modern formats like WebP for the best image quality.
- Compresses and resizes the image in lossless format to help our website load faster and better SEO.
If you want to use one of the images for social media, we got you covered with our Smart Image Editor. You can edit any product photo and turn it into a promotional image in just a few minutes.
And above all, you get unlimited storage and backup of your photos, access them from anywhere and at any time.
Final words
Using this simple product photography workflow you will work smarter, not harder. Also, will help you grow your brand quicker and run your store more profitable. You can experiment and improve upon it, iterate and do it all again.