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Taking Good Digital Product Pictures for On-Line Selling
By Joseph Charpentier
If you sell on eBay or anywhere else on-line, you know the importance of taking good pictures for your customers to view. However, this is sometimes easier said than done. When taking product pictures you want and need true/natural colors, no glare, good closeups and limited background white space. You do not need a fancy high mega-pixel camera to take good pictures. I have taken equally good product pictures with a 3 mega-pixel camera as I have my brand new 9 mega-pixel camera. Mega-pixels (number of them) is only important if you plan to blow your pictures up to a very large size. It has no impact to a typical computer screen sized digital picture. It may be important for your camera to have a "macro" setting if you are taking pictures of small items and need good close up shots. I will talk a little more about that later. Having a tripod for you camera is not absolutely necessary but it will make your job easier. Getting the correct lighting is probably the hardest part of taking good pictures but don't fret. Even if you can't get it perfect while taking the pictures, your camera probably came with software that will allow you to adjust lighting and colors on your computer. Even the basic Windows picture viewer has some limited editing options. Backgrounds - For most of my pictures I use a flat white background but you can use colored backgrounds if you like. You should be careful though because contrast is important, you may not get good results if you have a red product on a red background. The great thing about digital is you can experiment with different settings. Lighting - Outdoor natural lighting is the easiest way to get crisp true colors with little or no editing of the picture. If you decide to take your pictures outdoors it is best to be indirect lighting - a lightly shady place can work well. Cloudy days are perfect because you get the natural light without the glare. If you decide to take your pictures indoor with artificial light, you will need to do some editing to get the colors correct because artificial lighting will effect the color that the camera records. This is not a big deal because you will have to do some editing of your pictures regardless and correcting for indoor lighting is an easy process for most editing software. I do not recommend the use of a flash for indoor pictures because it can cause glare and it can also wash out the colors. Bright, indirect light is best. Close up pictures - The "macro" function of your camera allows you to take very close-up, in focus pictures. This is an especially useful feature if you are taking pictures of small items. Editing - You will need to do some editing of your pictures. This is where you will adjust for lighting colors and background space. You will have to get familiar with your editing software to do this. Most software that I have used has an automatic feature that will adjust color, contrast and lighting with one click. In most cases it works great. If it doesn't you may have to do some manual correction yourself. You will probably have to crop the picture a little to eliminate background images and bring your product front and center. Cropping is also a good way to get even closer close-ups. Be patient and do some experimenting and record your results so you can learn what works and what doesn't. Good pictures take some time but once you have mastered it you will get good results every time. I have included two sample pictures that I have taken. The first was taken indoors and was cropped, and edited for color and light. The second was take outdoors and it was cropped but not edited in any other way. |
 
Indoor - Edited for Color/Lighting
Outdoor - No editing for Color/Lighting
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That's the advantage of digital photography, you can edit it with photo editor software to your advantage. I too manage to use my 3.2M compact camera for some good photography.
 |  | NIX Nov 11, 2008 02:24 | |
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This intel was contributed by jcharp
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