How do You take product photos?

[Guest charleyramm]

I am curious about how all you shop owners do your product photos. I'm guessing you are not all 'big professionals', and some of you probably do it something like the way I do.

My self, I currently have a metal frame with a white sheet over it and two angle-poise lamps on the outside. I'm pretty confident that my photographs are close to studio quality. My editing is still pretty slap dash though. I use the gimp to do a simple mask then 'white out' the already white background to kill any shadows.

It's a work in progress, but I think I'm doing pretty well. Something I am having a lot of trouble with still though is WHITE products. It's very hard to autoselect just the white background, or even get a good edge to work with. This is one of the better ones, since it is black on white and it was very easy to edit. Any tips greatly appreciated!

Straight from the camera

After editing with The GIMP

I have an unbranded 5 megapixel consumer camera, about two years old and a cheap tripod.

It would be great to hear about some of your solutions to this problem, since I'm guessing it bothers so many of us.

Cheers!

Charley Ramm

[Guest Brivtech]

5 megapixel camera - Purrrrlease! That's overkill if I ever saw it!

We work on 96dpi for web graphics! Even a web-cam can take a suitable photograph at that resolution, and what you may not get in terms of lighting, you can easily correct in just about any standard graphics package.

Of course, if you're talking about selling stock photos, then that's a completely different story.

For large items, we use a white wall

For small items, we have a sheet of white card.

Either way, we always mask the image out from the background, or where possible, recommend scanning in from a supplier's catalogue.

[Guest vrakas]

Nice short tutorial Brivtech, thanks :wub:

[Guest gwizard]

Well, I use 4Mpx Minolta Z3 with a cheap tripod and home made white light (the long one that gives you day light like lumisence).

I shoot at maximum resolution and then crop and resize to 300px (must much GD settings in cc admin to avoid problems with gd faulty resize).

you can see how it goes at www.natalie-shop.com

Of course, proffessional photography will be much better but will also cost me much more then my own time.

[Guest Brivtech]

Of course, proffessional photography will be much better but will also cost me much more then my own time.

Not at all, the photography is fine, you just need to do a few minor adjustments to the images. Here's what you've produced:

It took me less than a min to turn it to this:

All I did was load it into Corel PhotoPAINT, crop to a mask, then increase the colour intensity to +25%.

Simple as that, and you have a much better image. I could have spent more time on it, added a drop shadow, etc, but didn't really need to to improve the image straight away. By the way, I have no idea what this thing is. Can you eat it?

All you need to do is crop and tweak! :wub:

[Guest SaraW]

great topic.....

Hmmm I checked out the price for 4Mpx Minolta Z3, and it's expensive(atleast in my standards). Would it be sufficient if I would buy a digitalcamera for approx. 100 us dollars or even less, wouldn't I get the same results?

I have photoshop so I can use it to create a clear white background.

That do I have to think about when buying a camera to take product images?

[vokf]

I am curious about how all you shop owners do your product photos. I'm guessing you are not all 'big professionals', and some of you probably do it something like the way I do.

My self, I currently have a metal frame with a white sheet over it and two angle-poise lamps on the outside. I'm pretty confident that my photographs are close to studio quality. My editing is still pretty slap dash though. I use the gimp to do a simple mask then 'white out' the already white background to kill any shadows.

It's a work in progress, but I think I'm doing pretty well. Something I am having a lot of trouble with still though is WHITE products. It's very hard to autoselect just the white background, or even get a good edge to work with. This is one of the better ones, since it is black on white and it was very easy to edit. Any tips greatly appreciated!

Straight from the camera

After editing with The GIMP

I have an unbranded 5 megapixel consumer camera, about two years old and a cheap tripod.

It would be great to hear about some of your solutions to this problem, since I'm guessing it bothers so many of us.

Cheers!

Charley Ramm

I can personally recommend a product callled "ephotomaker" - seach for it on google. I've got no connection, other than a happy customer.

Its basically consists of

• a white tent, with reflective material on one side.
  
• a small cheap tripod
  
• colour correcting gel + clips for a normal desk lamp
  
• a calibration card
  

Get a 100W desk lamp, put the gell over the lamp -this corrects the colour so you don't get lots of yellows..

Place your product inside the tent, set up your camera, and shoot.

The results are very very good - and require little if no tweaking.

The reflective material reduces shadow, so your product is well lit from both sides.

On Brivtechs coin picture, you can see the reflection of the light on the right-hand side of the coin, this system will greatly reduce that effect.

The downside is that its about £50, but if you're selling (and making money..) physical products, its worth the money.

I've tried messing with white sheets etc, but unless you've got good diffused lighting, you'll always get shadows - and you've still got to worry about colours, sorting this mess all takes time. A good studio photographer will get it right 1st time.

Your camera is fine - on cheaper cameras, having a high res is less important to having good optics. However, for web-based stuff with JPEG compression (*at least* 2 cycles if you've dumping from camera to CC), it's fine.

If you don't want to spend £50, you could consider 2 lamps, and bounce the light off some white card to light your products. A local camera shop (or online) should be able to sell some colour correction gel to place over the lamps. This should give you nice whites, and greatly reduce your shadows.

I'm not an expert photographer, but have spent lots of time trying to get good results.

Jason

[Guest netrix]

I'm no photographer but from searching other photography related forums I've found that most of them recommend whats called a "light tent" so there is no single source of lighting. Ebay shows a whole range of prices but you can see that it would not be that hard to duplicate something like that.

They also recommend high-quality ink-jet matte paper which does make a marked difference when used as a background.

Lastly you have to know your camera. Ex: Most digital cameras have a specific mode for closeups that is perfect for smaller items. For what its worth adding that extra $100 dollars may give you a camera thats easier to use. I have a 6MP Kodak I bought on sale from walmart which has about 25 different preconfigured modes (where it automatically sets Aperature & F/Stop etc...)

[Guest Brivtech]

great topic.....

Hmmm I checked out the price for 4Mpx Minolta Z3, and it's expensive(atleast in my standards). Would it be sufficient if I would buy a digitalcamera for approx. 100 us dollars or even less, wouldn't I get the same results?

I have photoshop so I can use it to create a clear white background.

That do I have to think about when buying a camera to take product images?

Don't forget, the resolution on the screen is very low, and pretty much any digital camera on the market is going to be way way beyond what you need. Even free ones! It was very different 5 years ago, things have really moved on!

If you are looking to purchase a camera specifically for taking product photos, here's some considerations:

- You may want to use the camera for other things, so at the end of the day, buy something you'll like! It's your money, spend it as you will. Perhaps even consider these new quality cameras built into phones where you can bluetooth the images stright to your PC!

- Obviously a good camera will make minor differences in exposure quality, but something that vokf covered is lighting, and just by having a good lighting setup, a simple webcam would get you excellent results! You don't necessarily need a tent, but the principals should be observed - Try to diffuse the light source, and avoid flash reflection. I use 3 X 150W halogen spotlights shone about 50cm distance at 3 large (A1) sheets of white card, with the light refelecting onto the product. I have 3 lamps set up like this, and I get a nice, even diffused lighting over the whole product. I get a slight colourcast, but a single adjustment in PhotoPAINT clears that immediately. Also, a sheet of white card reflector positioned around the camera can help illuminate the product from the front using some of the reflected light that's being lost.

- A flash memory card reader that can read images straight off your camera's memory card saves time. Having to download by cable can take ages on some cameras, and can run your batteries down if you don't have an external power source.

- Don't be afraid to experiment with different exposure settings. It's a digital camera, and photos cost nothing to take and re-take if they go wrong. If you find a setting that works, it'll save you some time when editing the photo in a graphics package later.

Let me just stress this one more time, a megapixel camera takes a photo where the width X length = 1,000,000 pixels (a million pixels). So Gwizard's camera at 4 megapixels would give a photo size of say 2560×1600 pixels. Which is great for taking detailed photos, but when you're dealing with an image that's only 390 X 292 (0.1 megapixels) pixels, you can see there's a BIG difference, and you're wasting about 3.85 million pixels by having to downscale your image (by 35 times in this example)! You don't need a fancy camera! Only buy one if you want to use it for other things.

I actually use a 3.2 megapixel camera for web photograpy, but use it on the minimal setting of 0.3 megapixels (640 X 480), which is more than large enough, allowing me to have a border than I can crop later.

[Guest groovejuice]

Brivtech makes some valid points, but there is another issue here as well, depending on the type of products you sell. Lens quality is important for detailed items such as small peices of jewelry. A mud flap will look pretty good shot with any camera, but a handworked bracelet generally requires a superior lens to look as sharp as possible. A macro setting is also helpful for those small items.

[Guest gwizard]

@Brivtech

Actually I didn't do photoproccessing on purphose. The whole point of our shop is to show people actual products in real life without any modifications. I even went as far as putting whole prices (instead of 9.99 I put 10). WYSIWYG

@vokf

Great idea with the tent !

Never though of that, but I will definatelly will try emulating it.

The biggest problem is with jewelry, though.

We have quite a lot and making quality pictures is a pain.

You can't use flash becouse it will glare and you cannot use anything other then Super Macro mode because the products are too small. Eventually I just waited until noon (high direct sun) and did the shooting outside. Worked very well !

[Guest Brivtech]

@Brivtech

Actually I didn't do photoproccessing on purphose. The whole point of our shop is to show people actual products in real life without any modifications. I even went as far as putting whole prices (instead of 9.99 I put 10). WYSIWYG

Exactly, which is why is was a great example! :)