Preparing for Product Photography

Ensuring your products are photo ready

Consumers rely solely on product images and product descriptions when shopping online. The images you present on your website, eBay, or  Amazon listing are often the only experience a consumer will have with your product before making a purchase. Therefore, it’s critical that your product photography look attractive, vibrant and flawless; ensuring that your products are ‘photo ready’ is a critical step in preparing for a product photography session and ultimately influencing a customer's purchase decision.

Photoshop is an  invaluable tool and can fix a host of issues, but repairing damaged or defective products can be costly for our clients. Unless otherwise indicated, products shipped to our Connecticut studio are photographed in ‘as is’ condition.

We make every effort to prepare each product before a shoot, our stylist dusts, steams and preps each product to ensure they present their best on camera, however we rely on each client to ensure the products they ship us accurately portray the quality of their company and brand.


Clothing product photography

We’ve encountered the highest number of manufacturer flaws when photographing clothing.
By taking a few moments to inspect clothing items prior to shipping, the majority of these can be avoided, ensuring your clothing product photography looks crisp and flawless.

• Check each clothing item for tears, holes, popped stitches, color bleed, dirt, stains or poor cuts.
• Take each product from the packaging and remove any tags, labels or anything else that you don’t want in the photo and have each pressed or ironed in advance. While we do steam certain garments before shooting to help them lay flat and shake loose any wrinkles that may have formed during shipping, ironing out sharp creases is charged as a separate fee.
• Make sure every item is new and unworn! Wearing an item even once stretches and changes the shape of the material.
• We recommend using a hanging wardrobe box for all shirts and dresses and a garment box for slacks and socks to ensure they arrive in photo ready condition.

Jewelry photography

Jewelry flaws are often so small that they cannot be seen by the naked eye, however high resolution photography magnifies each piece much larger than they appear in real life, making even the smallest of scratches or flaws much more apparent. For example, a dozen scratches of just a quarter of a millimeter are too small to be seen without a loupe, but are very visible when professionally lit and viewed on a computer monitor.

Retouching jewelry can quickly become very difficult and expensive, so we ask that clients take the time to have their pieces professionally cleaned, polished and inspected. In the end, it saves both time and retouching expense!

• Fine jewelry should be cleaned and polished to ensure that scuffs and scratches are at a minimum
• Costume jewelry should be examined with a loupe to ensure that there are no glue marks, heavy scuffing or tarnish.
• Delicate pieces should be individually wrapped and we recommend using jewelry boxes or cases.
• We strongly recommend purchasing shipping insurance

Visually inspect your products

Unbox your produts from their retail wrap!

When we receive items in their retail packaging we know they have not been inspected for flaws. Rather than selecting merchandise off the shelf, or "blind shipping" your products from a manufacturer, please take the time to choose the items worthy of "Best In Show", the items that best represent your brand.

Most flaws can be avoided with a quick examination, plus you may experience serious delays in your project while we wait for a replacement product.

Worse still, a product photographer may not realize that your product is defective until the shoot is complete and they receive feedback from clients.

All product photography projects

• Remove your products from the packaging and visually inspect each item in good light being mindful of scratches, scuffs, dents or other superficial flaws.
• We recommend sending two of each item especially if a packaging shot is required.  Photograph the packaging without having to remove the product will help ensure the packaging remains in pristine condition.
• Clients may arrange to drop off their products at our Connecticut studio or may ship them to SophterLight Studio. We cannot stress enough that you should only send items using a trackable shipper. This means UPS, Fedex, USPS, etc.

          
           SophterLight Studio
           91 White Street
           West Haven, CT 06516

• If return shipping is required, please include a prepaid shipping label along with your products.

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Fast

Staged environmental product
shots are fast!

Convenient

Ship product to us, we'll
take care of the rest!

Effective

Professionally styled or minimally treated - always effective

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