5 Steps to Taking Better Website Photos

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and this is doubly true of website photos, which must both communicate information about an item to a potential buyer and make it look appealing enough to buy.  So forget about putting up a couple of quickly taken, poorly thought out product snapshots up on your site.  For the amount of time you’ve invested in building your website, it’s worth spending a little extra time taking good pictures of your inventory.

Here’s how to take website pictures like a pro (without investing in expensive camera equipment or spending years attending photography school to develop your technique):

Step #1 – Stage Your Photos like a Professional

When you set out to take pictures for your website, the first thing you’ll want to consider is how you stage your pictures.  Don’t simply toss your items on to a table and snap away – instead, think about the best way to present your items for maximum effect.

With a few simple props, you can create a product staging area that will enhance the visual appeal of your products.  First, consider two surfaces – a horizontal one that your item will sit on and a vertical one that will form the background of the picture.  Both should be relatively plain so as not to detract from your product within the image.

For example, a wooden table and a white panel in the background could create a subtle, yet professional looking stage for your items.  You can also consider incorporating other items like plates, napkins, flowers and more where appropriate, but be careful not to overwhelm the items you’re selling.

If this all sounds too complicated, consider purchasing a roll of white craft paper from your local arts and crafts store in order to form a plain white background for your image.  Your item will really pop and give your website photos a clean, professional look.

Step #2 – Consider Your Lighting

Once your stage is set, it’s time to create a lighting scheme.  Although the professionals invest heavily in different types of lamps and other light fixtures, you can achieve a similar effect with lights from around your house (assuming the product you’re photographing isn’t too large).

The key to creating your own professional-style lighting scheme is to avoid pointing a single light source directly at the product, as this can wash out elements of your item and create harsh shadows that distract from the product that should be featured.  In addition to using multiple sources of light, it’s important to “soften” the effects of your lamps, to ensure that light is distributed more evenly over the product you’re photographing.

Consider the following “at-home” lighting set up from a tutorial on The Switchboard website:

This set up is built on a clear, frosted Rubbermaid container, into which a sheet of white craft paper has been draped.  The two lamps are directed towards a piece of interfacing fabric, which also helps to soften the light that reaches the product.

As you create your own at-home lighting scheme, you may need to experiment in order to find the perfect balance of illumination and harshness to suit your products.  Don’t be afraid to take a few pictures and then adjust as necessary to find the lighting system that works best for you.

Step #3 – Set Up Your Camera Correctly

Once your lighting scheme is in place, it’s time to start taking pictures!  The first thing you’ll want to do is to position your camera securely, as “wobbles” can lead to your pictures looking blurry.  If you have a tripod, that’s great.  If not, use a stack of books or other items so that your camera can remain stationery while you take your pictures.

In most instances, using the automatic settings on your digital camera to take your pictures should provide sufficiently high quality images.  However, if you’re feeling creative, you can experiment with adjusting your shutter speed, aperture and white balance manually to create different effects with your pictures.  Be sure to also adjust the position of your camera itself, taking closer shots, pictures from farther away and images from different angles in order to improve your chances of getting a shot that will work.

Step #4 – Modify Your Image in Photoshop

Now that you’ve got some raw material to work with in the form of image files, it’s time to make a few modifications in Photoshop (or a related program like Photoshop Elements, Gimp or Pixlr) to make them really pop.

If you’re an advanced image editor, you’ll want to adjust the “Curves” of your image to set the appropriate white balance and color balance.  But if that instruction went over your head, take the following steps to improve the quality of your images quickly and easily:

1. Crop your photo – Depending on how you set up your product stage, you may have a lot of excess background information that detracts from your item.  Use the crop tool to cut the image to feature your product more prominently.
2. Experiment with auto adjustments – For the less technically inclined amongst us, Photoshop and related graphics programs offer a number of auto adjustment options that simplify the process of correcting your images.  The current version of Photoshop offers Auto Tone, Auto Contrast, Auto Color and other options to enhance your pictures automatically, so experiment with these until your image looks as good as possible.
3. Sharpen your picture – Although most digital cameras today are incredibly strong, they can still sometimes lack the definition that really makes product images pop.  If your picture still doesn’t look quite right after applying the auto adjustments listed above, consider sharpening the image a few times to see if that makes the difference.

Step #5 – Save Your Photo for the Web

Congratulations!  By now, you should have professional looking product images that you’ve created yourself.  The last step is to get them up on your website so that they can start convincing your customers to buy the products you’ve chosen to feature!

First, you’ll need to resize your pictures.  When possible, try to resize your images within Photoshop to the exact size you’ll need them to be on your website.  Doing this ahead of time, in your image editing program will prevent any goofy compression errors from distorting the images you’ve worked so hard to create.

You’ll also need to consider the file type and compression level that you’ll apply to your images.  For file type, choose “.png” if your image contains any transparency, and “.gif,” “.jpg,” or “.png” for all others.  Experiment with different levels of compression in order to get your file size as small as possible without losing image quality.  Remember, you want your pictures to look nice on your site, but the larger the image files you upload, the slower your site will be to load for your customers.

That’s it!  If you’ve followed these steps correctly, you should be able to create the kind of clean, professional looking images that will display your products to maximum effect and result in more sales for your ecommerce website.

Image: Pryere