Making the most out of product photos

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Making the most out of product photos

Product photography is crucial to any ecommerce business. Having strong imagery is extremely important to help sell your products online whether you have a physical store where people can come and see your items up close or not. Its important to make sure that your products are best represented by the correct imagery and presentation.

To make sure you achieve this, we’ve come up with a range of tips to help and guide you in creating beautifully displayed product images for your ecommerce store.

BACKGROUNDS

When it comes to presenting your products it’s always good to keep in mind that people are on your website to see your amazing products, so its good practice to make sure they are the focus of your photos and presented in the best possible way. Many items look their strongest, visually, when they are against a white or a single colour background. This will give your product photos a clean and polished look whilst keeping the users attention focused on the product itself. If this style of product photography isn’t possible or simply doesn’t work for your products then another option would be to represent them in their natural environments to convey their size and functionality. This can work very well with certain products but do make sure this isn’t distracting potential buyers from the product itself.

If your products have already been photographed against a rather cluttered and unprofessional backdrop, it can in most cases be resolved by using services such as ‘Automatic Background Remover’ or ‘Retail Ready Photos’ who will carefully crop your images out to remove the unprofessional backgrounds.

Tip: Make sure you compress any images used as it will decrease load time and your customers won’t be left staring at that little rotating circle in the middle of their screens.

CROPPING & SIZING

There is a key ingredient to maintaining an aesthetically pleasing and successful ecommerce website for the products you’re selling – and that is consistency!

When it comes to having more than one image per product it’s vital that each image is aligned correctly and images are the same size. When product images are cropped identically, your customers will have a seamless experience on product pages - plus it keeps product pages looking organized, clean and professional. Keeping products all to the same size and centered within their container can really add quality to the presentation of the page and its good practice to make sure all angles and edges of your products are aligned with one another. It also pays not cut off any parts of your product unless the focus isn’t on the entire item. This can come across rather unprofessional and messy.

Tip: The easiest way to ensure that your alignment is spot on is to create a template with guidelines to use for all your product photos.

how to crop your photos to remove backrounds

ATTENTION TO DETAIL

Adding an interactive element to your photos is a fantastic way of allowing customers to really see your product as though they were there in person; allowing them to view material quality close up, stitching, logos etc. A great way to achieve this is by uploading a high-resolution version of your images and adding a zoom feature to allow people to really see your products’ finer detail. However, if this isn’t possible, you can always have single images of key features of the product, displayed next to the main product photo. We believe where possible, its best to include several photos of the product, including close-ups and the whole.

FEATURED IMAGES

We mentioned earlier in this post how to make sure you don’t distract visitors from the product on sale with a cluttered background BUT that does not mean you cannot have backgrounds in your photographs. Showcasing products in their real environments, conveying how they are actually used can work fantastically as featured images on a homepage and encourage viewers to click through and find out more about the specific product – for example, having such images to represent popular collections can work very well. An added advantage to using this method of photo arrangement helps potential buyers to visualise themselves using the products, which can make your product much more relatable and ultimately lead to a purchase.

product environment photos on homepage

These are just a few different ways you can make the most of your product images on your ecommerce store to help display your products smartly. You can present your items for sale in whichever way you see fit so that it benefits not only your products but your customers too.



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