How To Snap Beautiful Product Image With Limited Budget

When you are selling stuffs online, pictures matter. By nature, we are all visual and we’re attracted to visual images, especially beautiful images. Research shows that eCommerce sites with better product images tend to generate better traffic and therefore, more purchases.

So the question comes in. How much budget do I need to allocate to product photography? A professional photograph session may look like the scenario below may cost you thousands.

You will get an awesome image from professional photo shooting but if you have a start-up company and do not have so much budget, remember one thing, you have a camera in your pocket. Here’s what you need to capture amazing product photographs using your smartphone.

1. A camera phone

You need a good camera phone, preferably 8MP and above for a nice product shooting. iPhone would be a great choice. The image shown above is using a “Foldio“, a foldable mini photography studio which unfolds a whole new possibility for smartphone product photography.

2. Find a nice background

In photography, a clean white background gives the best result as it focuses on the product. You may DIY a plain-white background using white a colored cloth or paper. It is best to use the infinity curve background (as shown in the image above) for blank whiteness in the background with no horizon.

Image source: www.justagirlblog.com

3. Natural Lighting

Sunlight is free! Find a good spot with good natural lighting and it’s best to shoot during the day. Avoid direct sunlight as you may get a product image with hard shadow.

4. Photo Editing

Editing is important to enhance original image effect. There are various free photo editing tools available online if you are not Photoshop savvy. Simple image cropping and color correction can create a huge difference in a product photo. Some useful free photo editing tools are PicMonkey, Splashup, iPiccy and Pixlr.

Shortcuts to DIY Product Photography

Taken using iPhone 5

 

If the steps above seems complicated or requires too much time to complete, there is a new Kickstarter project, Foldio, that can simplify all process above and allows you to take good product photographs using only your iPhone. The image above was taken using iPhone 5.