The eyes are easily your key to attracting customers. And keeping your product images updated and looking crisp is important to doing so.
But before you spend thousands of dollars on expensive professional equipment…
…we’re going to show you a way to make upload-worthy shots using your phone.
In today’s post, we’re going to discuss the essential factors in making quality product shots.
And then later, we’re going to make actual product shots together. So, let’s dive in!
5 Things You Need To Create Quality Product Shots
1. Good Lighting
If you want to effectively promote products online, grainy images are a big NO for product shots. And you need great lighting to avoid this.
To make crisp and clear looking product shots, you just need to set up your mini studio either:
- near a window with natural light, or
- with artificial lightings like a lamp, a softbox, or a ring light.
2. A Steady Phone
To be able to create quality product shots, avoid blurry images by keeping your camera phone steady.
For straight-angle shots, use a tripod to hold your phone in position.
3. Solid Background
Unless you’ve staged it as a lifestyle shot, always go with a flat white for your background.
This is especially true if you’re doing product photography for eCommerce.
This will give you the ability to easily change the background to any color or edit your product into a lifestyle shot in post-processing.
4. Photography App
Smartphones come in a different assortment of brands, and they each have different default settings on their built-in camera apps.
Unfortunately, they usually give you minimal control over more in-depth options to best suit the type of shots you need to produce.
Thus, lowering your chances of creating quality product shots.
Apps like Pro Camera by Moment costs $3.99, and it will give you manual control much like an actual DSLR.
You’ll have control over shutter speed, ISO, and exposure value, which will give you better control of the quality of your output image
5. Post-processing
You can post-process your images using Adobe Lightroom or Adobe Photoshop.
Or, you can also use popular image editing sites like Canva or PicMonkey.
Change the background color, add complementing elements, and play around with the color temperature.
Whatever you feel would make your images pop on your website and social media.
The best way to show you how all these can be applied to your own product shots is by making one with you. So let’s get started.
How To Produce Quality Product Shots
We’ve laid out the steps below, but if you want to see how it looks like in action, then go ahead and watch the video at the top of this post.
Step 1: Create a mini studio
Let’s start with clearing out an area to act as a mini studio.
Before anything else, let’s quickly create a small stage area, AKA a box made of illustration boards.
You can go ahead and use whatever box you have lying around.
But, what we like about using illustration boards is that they’re already white, so you don’t need to paint them afterward.
Step 2: Prepare the lighting
Place a lamp directly above or, something like a ring light directly in front of, the stage box.
When it comes to artificial lighting, be sure to use a neutral white rather than warmer toned light to have better chances of producing quality product shots.
This is to avoid any color inaccuracies in your shots.
And also, this way you can apply it to any type of background later and change the color temperature during post-processing.
Step 3: Keep your phone steady
To keep our phone steady for straight angled shots, we’ve set up a tripod in front of our stage area.
But, placing your phone on a table will work just as well in holding it in place.
For this guide, we’re using this moon lamp as a product model.
So, let’s go ahead and place that at the center of the lightbox.
Step 4: Open the photography app
Now that everything’s in place, let’s open the Pro Camera app to produce better and quality product shots.
- Shutter speed
Going to the left-most tab of the manual controls is the shutter speed. Since this is product photography, it’s best to set it to 1/13.
- ISO control
Moving to the right you have the ISO control.
The lower you set your ISO, the less grain you’ll have on your image. So, try to keep your ISO within the ballpark of 33-200.
- EV or exposure value
The next setting is your EV or exposure value.
Just like ISO, try to keep your exposure value low, around 0 to +1.
This will keep your image from looking washed out.
If you’ve finished tweaking these 3 settings and notice that the preview image looks too exposed or too dark…
…your light source is either too bright or not bright enough.
So, play around with the distance between your staging area and light source as well.
With the Pro Camera app on our phone, we’ve taken shots of the product from different angles.
Feel free to play around with multiple angles, because you can never have too many product shots to play with in post-processing.
Once you’re happy with your phone shots, we can now proceed to post-processing or editing.
Here are some of the raw shots we’ve captured for this example.
Step 5: Time for editing
This is when we add the final touches to our images to prepare our products to be uploaded on our website or social media.
In this guide, we will be using Canva to produce quality product shots.
This is a free website, but you can upgrade to a Pro account for $12.99 per month.
When you do, you’ll have full access to their library of templates, elements, and, most importantly for this guide, image editing presets.
On their website, set up a square graphic at 1080×1080 pixels.
Once we’ve set that up, we can now load our images into the website. Now here’s where the magic happens.
1. Click on your product shot and you’ll see an “effects” button on the left side of the Options bar.
2. Click that, and with your Pro Canva account, you can magically remove the background of your product simply by clicking the “Remove background button.”
And then, the image’s background will be removed.
3. Just like that you can now change your background to a different solid color.
You can also add elements, or move your product around to go along a background image to look like a lifestyle shot.
And voila, now we’ve created quality product shots that are ready for your website and social media accounts.
Final Takeaways
When it comes to showcasing products for your business, the key is to feature them in a way that draws people’s attention.
As well as impress them with the presentation and quality product shots.
By capturing your product shots…
- in good lighting,
- with a steady camera,
- using a solid background with a photography app, and
- taking the time to post-process or edit them
…you can do your products justice and make quality product shots without the need for expensive equipment.
So that’s it for today’s post!
Next up, you might want to read our post on how to promote a product or how to write the best product description, since you now have your product shots.
And if you don’t have time to do your product images, then no worries.
Check out our eCommerce product photography or Amazon product photography services today.
