From The Blog

By Aaron Sananes

06 June, 2010

13 Comments

Product Photo Tips

If you are reading this blog then you are more than likely selling products online using the best open-source eCommerce software available, Magento. Even if you are not yet selling products online or are using a system other than Magento (you should check out Magento!), you should keep reading because this information will help you out regardless.

Typically when selling products whether it is online or not, it comes down to pricing, product presentation, marketing, and credibility or authority.

In this blog post, we are only going to cover image quality but please look forward to more blog posts on the topics of pricing, marketing, social media, and other eCommerce aspects.

As with any market but even more so with the internet, there is fierce competition. You are trying to sell a product that thousands of others are too. How do you separate yourself from the others? One way is to make sure that your image quality is far above the others. Too many times when perusing the web for a product, you come across a lot of websites that are selling various products but the images are horrible or just small to be able to see what you are buying.

Lots of times the picture is big enough but it is grainy, blurry, or distorted. Typically, most of the problems associated with poor images are simply because the people taking the product pictures do not understand product photography. There are professionals that all they do is product photography and can spend up to 4 hours to take one photo. Obviously, you are not doing photography on that level but there are a few tips that I want to share with you to help your image quality standout from the rest:

• Use a tripod (handheld photos generally have blur from slight movement)
• Do not rely on the cameras flash, use good lighting equipment
• Use image editing software like Photoshop
• If your camera has manual focus, use that instead of auto-focus
• Use a white background, try a white sheet or white cardboard pieces

These are just a few simple tips that will hopefully help your image quality standout among the competition. One of the biggest things is to use a tripod, the slightest motion while taking a handheld picture can create minor blur and other defects in the image. To the naked eye it seems okay, but a consumer browsing your website can tell the difference, trust me.

You also want good lighting and to use manual focus. You can always get better image quality using manual focus rather than auto. Lighting is extremely important, you can get cheap lighting at Home Depot or Menards on a tight budget. Setup a nice white backdrop or use white cardboard to create a mini-studio and then light it up real good. This will help your images a lot!

As always, thanks for reading. Feel free to comment and lend us your thoughts!