E-Commerce Photography Tutorial

In this video, Karl explains five key things you should consider for e-commerce photography, whether you are a professional photographer working for a client or an online retailer looking to photograph your products in your own small e-commerce studio.

Shooting product and still life images is important for many businesses – there are many small online stores, Amazon resellers, Etsy shops or eBay stores all needing to display their products in the most favourable light. The techniques for achieving reproducible results are fairly straightforward and allow you to photograph batches of many similar sized products under the same conditions over and over again.

Concepts covered in this tutorial include:

  • Preparation and planning for e-commerce shoots
  • What equipment you need for e-commerce photography
  • Lighting setups for e-commerce photography
  • How to photograph e-commerce products
  • Post-production and retouching e-commerce photography

Other related classes you may enjoy include:

To learn more about e-commerce photography, please read the full article on e-commerce photography. For more examples of how to photograph products and e-commerce, take a look at our full product photography course.

Comments

  1. bhanukaran

    Dear Karl,

    I have a question in regards to post production of Ecommerce shots. I am bit haphazard in terms of deciding the right workflow.

    I will explain my current scenarios. I want to stick to one workflow from the beginning till the end.

    – I shoot tether using Capture One and then I do basic adjustments such as exposure, contrast, shadows, highlight etc. anything that lightroom does.

    – Then I often get indecisive whether I should import in Lightroom just to keep them in cloud and make some corrections such as cleaning up any marks, blemishes, spots or dust, instead of doing it in Capture One. But, I would want to do more as sometimes Capture One & Lightroom is not powerful enough to do things accurately, thought it uses AI generated way to cleaning things up, but it is not satisfying though.

    – While it is in the cloud, I tend to then use photoshop to access the lightroom files and try to do the retouching there. So i am not able to define a clear workflow myself.

    – So either after capture one, I directly import files in Lightroom only to store and then access them in Photoshop and do the entire post production process only in Photoshop without thinking of Lightroom anymore and only use Lightroom to organize and store my files.

    If you could advise on this thought process of mine or I should reconsider something again here.

    I just want to stick to one workflow throughout. Please advise.

    1. Hi,
      1. You can do everything you need it Capture One and what you are doing there is correct (exposure, contrast, shadows, highlights, colour, saturation etc.)
      2. There is no need to import into LR unless you have some specific requirements for catalouging or other tools that C1 doesn’t have
      3. My workflow is to fix blemishes, dust etc in PS (from the exported 16bit PSD file from Capture One or Phocus)
      4. I don’t use LR at all, I use the RAW processor such as C1 or Phocus, I adjust and then export as 16bit PSDs.
      5. I don’t use any software for cataloging – I just create my own folders based on client, date, project etc and store my selected RAW files in a folder and then my PSDs in a folder and then my retouching layered files in another folder.
      6. I store all my images on large raid hard drives and then we back up to tape for video and images as we have so much data tape drives are less expensive than duplicate hard drives. We then take the tapes of site.

      1. bhanukaran

        Dear Karl,

        Thank you so much for this advise. I was about to folder structuring myself as per the project, products and product category.

        This eases my thinking a lot. Thank you once again on the clarity of the overall workflow.

        Thank you. Bhanu

      2. bhanukaran

        One more question, can you recommend some reliable hard drives for storing my files. I am also facing difficulty in managing large files now. But I understand eventually i need to start migrating to external drives. Can you suggest something for me to begin with, atleast 3 to 5 TB for now?

        1. Hi, it really depends on your speed requirements. Sandisk Portable SSD are pretty good value but we use mostly Raid 5 drives such as the G-Raid Shuttle (western digital) as this gives us some form of backup within the drive itself and they are fast enough for video editing work too. Drives come in all different speeds and configurations the faster they are the more they cost etc. So if editing video isn’t necessary then you don’t need the fastest drives. You will need to look up and read about Raid 5 drives and what that means but you might not require that you might be OK with a few Sandisk portable drives and just have one or two for working files and one or two as backups. When you start to get into huge amounts of data like we do then it’s more economical to go to tape back ups.

          1. bhanukaran

            Dear Karl,

            Thank you so much for this info. I will start my research based on what you have suggested and settle with the suitable ones.

    2. photographydad

      Hello Karl

      My questions are about the workflow. When photographing e-commerce pack shots do you have procedures for tracking the products when they arrive at your studio? Do you have a method for storing products? For example, how would you plan on storing 100 items that you must photograph over several days? Also, do you take a few shots and then collaborate with the client to ensure the results are satisfactory prior to moving forward?

      Thank you for your input.

      EJ

      1. Hi EJ, I’m afraid no real plan other than have a shot list of every item that needs to be photographed and then I organise them into sizes and types of material to make the photography more flowing and not having to go back and forwards. Yes sometimes the client will be on set at the beginning to approve images.

  2. It would be nice to also know how you price these. Full day of shooting plus retouch pr. image. Or a start-up fee and then retouch pr. image etc. Thank you.

      1. Hi, yes I have. From what recall, that´s mostly covering dayrate based shooting, usage fee, pre-production etc.. But for e-com you have said in one of your videos quote: “The more you shoot in a day, the more you´d earn.”, and you mention packshot photography “..£5 for 100 images or £2 for 500 images” in a pricing video. But I can´t find a good way to calculate a pr. image fee.. I know what I need to earn pr. year, pr. week, pr. day etc. But not how to transfer that to different types of pr. image fees. A dayrate is of course optional, but not always a good “carrot”.

        1. Hi Marius, pack shot pricing has to come down to the complexity of the initial setup and how many shots and how long they will take and how much post work. For example I could create a packshot setup for bottles of wine or shampoo or similar in about an hour and then I could photograph about 1 per minute if I really had to and to a standard that they wouldn’t need and post work. So in a half day if went non stop then I’d shoot 4 hours x 60 mins = 240 bottles in 4 hours. Less cups of tea etc etc then lets say 200 bottles, so if your half day rate was £1000 then 1000 divide by 200 shots would give you a pack shot rate of £5 per shot BUT there’s no way I’d do them that cheap as I know the client will want them resized, put on a memory stick etc etc so I’d be doing them at what I think works for the client and worked for me so for example I’d say at least £10 per shot. The client gets 200 ready to go pic for £2000 and the photographer gets £2K for half a day.

  3. Hey KArl, I have been following you since a very long time, I really appreciate for the contribution in growing people skills, Can you please help working with Product shoot Table like manfrotto. How can we get the best out of it for faster ecommerce results? is it really helpful or not?

  4. Is there a video from the series e-commerce photography, where you actually shoot photos? I’d like to see how you position lights for a pure white background, camera angles, camera settings and so on..I have seen this same video on YouTube, I was hoping to find some more information on the paid website.

    Please let me know.

    Thanks

    1. Hi Niccolo, please head to our product photography section in the top menu and then view the thumbnails and you will find several classes related to packshots or white background photography. You might also like to checkout some of our previous live shows.

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