All about taking product photos / images for your online store or other website.

If you’ve got an online store, unless you’ve got someone to do it for you, you’ve got to learn how to get photos of your products into your website.

This is a four step process:

1. Take your product photo with a digital camera,
2. Edit the photo,
3. Upload the photo to your website,
4. Confirm that the photo looks right in the website.

Step 1: Take Your Product Photo With a Digital Camera

A digital camera is essential. It doesn’t need a very high resolution — most any digital camera will have enough “megapixels” to do the job right. But use a dedicated digital camera — not your cellphone with its tiny cheap scratched lens. You may also want to invest in a little tripod to hold the camera steady, a couple of lights, and a solid black and/or white velour backdrop.

Artificial lighting tends to impart a false color to product photos, so you need to get professional lighting, or compensate for the color later in the process. Or, you can dispense with the lights and just shoot your product photos outside on a sunny day. Try to do it around noon when the light is brightest, and do your product shooting in a bright yet shaded spot.

You would normally put a flat background behind the product. Velour is a good option for all but the tiniest of products. Cloth where you can see the weave pattern is not good because the weave will cause all sorts of interference patterns in the final photo. In a pinch you can also try regular printer paper, but not textured hand-made paper. Again, you want the flattest textureless background you can find.

Of course there are exceptions: you might want to photograph a box of grass seeds sitting on a lawn.

Step 2: Edit the Photo

Once you’ve taken the photo, follow your camera and/or camera software’s instructions for getting the photo onto your computer. You will then need to edit the photo.

It’s true that certain shopping carts will resize and even crop photos for you, and while this is certainly something you can go with, for truly professional and consistent results you should manually edit each and every product photo yourself.

This will require that you get and learn how to use some kind of graphics software. On the high end this includes Photoshop, but that $649 behemoth is overkill for what you need. Only use it if you already have it.

Windows does not come with graphics software that is up to the task. “Paint” won’t cut it. Macs come with iPhoto, which will work. You can also download the free software called Gimp, which works in Windows, Mac, and Linux. It’s almost as powerful as Photoshop but is not as easy to use (as if PS were easy!).

Editing the photo involves six steps:

1. Crop the image,
2. Color-balance the image,
3. Set the levels correctly,
4. Touch up any glitches, specks of dust,
5. Resize the image,
6. Save the optimized image.

1. CROP THE IMAGE
Follow your software’s instructions for cropping, and crop the image so that there’s about five to ten percent of background around the product. Keep in mind the final size and proportion of the product photo for when you get to step 5.

2. COLOR BALANCE THE IMAGE
Not all software has a color balance feature, and if the color of the product in the photo looks good to you, then you can probably skip this step. But if you take your product photo under artificial lights and it looks too yellow, then follow your software’s instructions for color balancing.

3. SET THE LEVELS CORRECTLY
Levels control the “darks” and the “brights” of the photo, and ensure that the photo’s dynamic range spans from jet black to eggshell white. Follow your software’s instructions for setting levels.

If after setting levels the photo still looks too dim overall, or too washed out overall, you’ll probably have to reshoot the photo. There is no way to rescue a badly exposed product photo without making the picture look doctored.

4. TOUCH UP ANY GLITCHES
Not all software allows you to make touch ups. The high end software like Photoshop or Gimp lets you take any part of a photo and copy and paste it onto any other part of the photo. This feature is useful for digitally touching up scratches or imperfections in the product photo.

Another use of digital retouching is to completely erase any backgrounds so that the product appears with no background, or perhaps with just a drop shadow.

Refer to your software’s help files. This is a huge topic and whole books have been written on digital retouching. Your library may be helpful.

5. RESIZE THE IMAGE
For consistency’s sake, you should ideally resize all the product images in your store so that they are the same size.

You should resize them to the largest size necessary, but no larger. If your shopping cart displays all product photos at 500 by 500, then crop and resize all your images to 500 x 500. Depending on your shopping cart, you may also need to create a smaller thumbnailed version. Again, make these all the same size.

100 pixels roughly translates to an inch on a computer monitor. So if your product is 300 by 300 pixels, it will look about three inches by three inches on the monitor.

Some graphics software has batch processing features that allow you to resize every image in a folder all at once to a specific size, and then save the resized versions to another folder. This is useful for creating thumbnails. Refer to your graphics software’s help files.

6. SAVE THE OPTIMIZED IMAGE
When you crop and/or resize the image, you make it smaller in its dimensions. When you optimize an image, you make it smaller in file size (though not smaller in dimensions). This is accomplished by making the image more and more fuzzy.
Optimizing is critical for all digital camera photos in order to make them faster loading on the web. One non-optimized product image on a web page is no big deal, but if you have a catalog page with twenty non-optimized thumbnails, that is going to annoy the customer.

Refer to your graphics software’s instructions for optimization. Most product photos should be saved in JPG format at between 60% to 85% compression. You want to use the lowest percentage compression that will still leave the photo looking good.

Many digital camera photos default to 99% compression straight out of the camera, and most digital camera photos can be reduced to 80% without any noticeable loss of image quality, but a huge reduction in file size.

Step 3: Upload the Photo to Your Website

Uploading the photo (and thumbnail) is usually taken care of within your shopping cart’s admin. Refer to your shopping cart’s help files. There may be a batch feature.

Step 4: Confirm That the Photo Looks Right in the Website

You should always check your work within the live website. Something correctable about the photo may be noticed only when you look at it within the context of the website. If you have thousands of product photos, then you can just spot-check.

Written September 12, 2007 on 11:25 pm in category(s):
Helpful Hints, Marketing, Visual Design, X-Cart, eCommerce | Comments Off