Looking for simple ways of taking product photos of high quality on a low budget? Making your own catalog or opening an online shop?
There is no need for you to waste funds on bulky equipment or outsource workers to give your shop a trustworthy look and an increasing client turnover. Just study this simple guide on how to take pictures of products professionally on a low budget.
The quality of your item photos is essential for your site rating and for the customers as well. Certainly, even a good phone camera is no strong competitor to a professional camera with a high-quality lens when it comes to the tiny details. A product photography camera can be used for more genres and the different changeable lenses can play a major role in taking product photos of different sorts of items.
However, if you’re not yet thinking of how to take product photos on a grand scale, like for glossy magazines or advertising billboards, you can consider investing in your smartphone, which also has its advantages. It is cheaper, easier, more convenient, the picture quality is also good.
Don’t worry about selecting the right lens for product photography, since the main thing that you need to do is to take a sharp photo with the right aspect ratio.
If you are wondering how to take product photos without any distortions, avoid using wide-angle lenses. It’s more convenient to work with zoom lenses. Most often, I use a classic 50mm lens that is suitable for all types of product photography.
You may be bored by the idea of setting up a tripod, but since you’re wondering how to take product photos on a low budget, this is one inexpensive, easy to use thing to make a huge difference in the clarity and quality of your shots.
A tripod will eliminate your hand shaking and allow your camera to be more stable. It will help any camera remove some blur and is essential when you learn how to take professional product pictures. A tripod is definitely a must-have if you want to do 360-product photography, which is impossible to create without a tripod.
The first thing that you need to do is to create a perfect product photography background to take photos of your subject with a wide empty space behind it. You can attach it to the wall and then set up the lighting. Besides, you can make your task easier by using a lightbox for product photography.
It’s up to you to decide whether to make a DIY lightbox or purchase a ready-made one. If you want to learn how to take professional product photos, then the latter is your choice. This way, you won’t need to worry about setting up lighting since such lightboxes have an in-built lighting system.
I recommend the Fotodiox or Amazon Basics. The size 20x20 will be enough, if you are not going to shoot large products. Among the main advantages of the lightboxes are built-in lighting, fast adjustment, as it is equipped with velcros and additional backgrounds and the reasonable price about $80.
Make sure to learn how to use the right camera settings for product photos. If you use the wrong settings, you might take blurry, overexposed or underexposed images that require further post-processing.
ISO – 100-200
Aperture – Between F/5.6 to F/11
Shutter Speed – 1/20 or lower
White Balance – Auto
Make sure to take photos in RAW mode since it will be easier for you to enhance high-quality pictures during post-processing. As for product photography camera settings on your phone, it’s very important to avoid using digital zoom, the built-in flash, and various filters if you don’t want to spoil photos.
The question of how to take product photos includes also cleaning your product as smooth as possible in different ways. Such small imperfections as dust on computer screen or lint on the clothing may ruin perfectly composed shot and raise doubts about the purchase.
For example, jewelry can be cleaned with the baking soda, the shoes with a brush, and technical equipment with special cleaning substances. You should also use latex gloves not to leave greasy prints on the surface of the products.
Now, when you learned how to take pictures of products, you can start shooting. You might face some difficulties in the beginning if you don’t know how to position your object within a frame in the right way. Experiment with various product photography ideas, search for reference photos on the Web and try to re-create them.
Take as many photos from different angles as possible. It will allow you to select the best photos later. On e-commerce platforms, a large number of product photos can boost your sales. In any case, you need to take photos at least from 2 angles.
After you found out how to take product photos and took perfect shots, you will have to take care of making them retail-ready for stores. You have two ways – outsourcing or edit by yourself.
Outsource services. It is definitely more expensive than doing everything yourself, but time is money, and you will be able to save a lot of hours. FixThePhoto service, in this case, will be a perfect option for you. The average price for such work is about $2. It will be done by professionals, qualitatively and quickly, so you will only have to shoot the products and simply upload the images to the service.
Your own work. Before start work with photo read the requirements of the marketplace on which you are going to show the goods. Then go to photo editor and do clipping path, cut your object out on a white background, remove all small motes, fingerprints, and glares. Mind, if you have dozens of photos or need to change the product color, it will take more than several hours.
To quickly enhance photos after a photo session, seasoned photographers apply a variety of effects that allow them to fix the white balance, clean up the background to make it a solid color, adjust the color saturation of the object, etc.
