Saturday, July 12, 2014

Product Photos

 
One of my favorite things is taking product photos. I love staging the items! Stationery photos can be kind of dull and hard to spice up but I think I have a good process now. It's always improving though! It seriously can take me all day to take all the photos I want but it is so worth it to have a nice, uniform Etsy shop.

I went from having a shop page that looked like this:



To this:


What does it take?

Take pictures on a sunny day, in a well-lit area. The first photos I took were done at night, with a very terrible lamp as my only light source. I did my best to lighten them up in Photoshop but, as you can see, that didn't work very well! With these first photos, I was impatient and just want to get my shop up and running. I work during the day so the only opportunity I have to take great photos is on my days off. It's limiting but worth the wait.

Be consistent. It makes things easier! All of my product photos are staged with postage stamps that fit the product's color scheme. I know exactly what photos I'll be taking and in what order. It also makes editing much easier as you don't have to sort through a billion photos looking for the right one!

Decide on your background. It's popular opinion on Etsy that all product photos should be on a white background but there are certain things that just look great on other backgrounds, or in other situations. I wanted to keep my stationery on a white background as I wanted them to be able to stand out. I use a 12x12 piece of white piece of paper as my background. No fancy light boxes here!

Staging. I think it's pretty fun to add some extra elements to your photos but it certainly isn't necessary. Some things look natural and others don't so you just have to experiment. My first photos featured the same postage for every envelope. I realized that I like to pick out stamps that match the stationery. Plus it's fun to dig through my stamp collection! An important thing to remember with staging is that the focal point of your image should be your product! You should reconsider the photo if the first thing you look at in the photo is whatever you used to spice it up.

Editing. I'm not big on photo manipulation at all but there is a time and a place for it. With my photos, I always crop them (because, duh) and lighten up the shadows a bit. Below you can see my before and after product photos.



Do you have any tips or tricks for product photos?

2 comments:

  1. Tara your stationery is fantastic!! I love it! Had to order some immediately...!

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    1. Thank you! And thanks so much for your order! :)

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