5 basic rules for taking product photos... and more!

Last month I took part in a shop critique on Etsy and the one point that all participants agreed on was that some of my photos need improving.

This wasn't a big shock to me as I know that my photos aren't the best out there... although not as bad as some ;-)

Here are the basics rules:

1. Don't use your flash - EVER!
2. Take photos on a cloudy day (as opposed to a bright sunny day) and take them outside if possible.
3. Take photos of your products on a plain (preferably white) backgroud
4. Use the 'manual focus' button on your camera to get good close-ups
5. Don't take photos with the lights on - use natural daylight

And lastly....
Don't use your flash! (Important enough to mentioned twice!)

However, even when following these pieces of advice, there are still some tweeks that you can do on the computer to help enhance the photo (this isn't cheating - it's just making the most of your photo)

I'm very new to this digital editing of photos, so I had a play around and I'm happier with the results (although I think I still have a way to go and a proper white backgroud would definitley have helped)

First of all I played about with the exposure of the image, taking a photo from this:

to this:

And then I change the contrast, so it looked like this:

At this point it looked a little washed out and I was wondering if I shouldn't have changed the contrast, but it did make the next stage look better, when I started changing the colour saturation:

And then finally the temperature gets a little tweek:



This image above was actually shot on a pale greeny/blue window sill inside on an overcast day, but the editing has still helped the end result.

As a lot of my orders are custom made pieces there won't be an overnight change to all my shop photos, but over time, now that I know I need to spend a bit more time working on them, hopefully they will continue to improve!

PS. I made these edits using the Google+ editing tool on Chrome - have a look at some other photos that I've edited on my Google+ page