The short answer
Three things matter most: soft light, a steady camera and a clean product. Get those right and the rest is polish. Get them wrong and no amount of editing will rescue the shot.
Light first. Soft, even light from the side shows shape and texture without harsh shadows or glare; the lighting guide goes into it properly. Then steadiness: a camera that doesn't move gives you a sharper picture. And a clean product, because every speck of dust shows up once you zoom in. You don't need expensive kit for any of it. The iPhone guide shows what a phone can do, and the guide on cheap product photos covers doing it on a small budget. So here are the twelve tips, in the order you'd actually use them.
Before you shoot
Most bad product photos are lost before the camera comes out. The product is dusty, there's no plan, and the surface is a mess. Ten minutes of preparation saves an hour of frustration later.
Tip 1: clean the product. Wipe it down, remove fingerprints, lint and loose threads, and check the corners and seams. A camera is far less forgiving than your eyes, and small flaws that you'd never notice in the hand look enormous on a screen.
Tip 2: plan the shots. Decide what the buyer needs to see before you start: the front, the back, the detail, the scale. Jot the list down and tick it off as you go. It sounds fussy, but it stops you packing up and then realising you never photographed the underside.
Tip 3: prepare the surface. Clear the table, smooth out any creases in paper or fabric, and make sure nothing stray sits in the frame. If the product sits on something, check that it's flat and clean. Wrinkles and crumbs are the sort of thing you only spot after you've uploaded.
Light and background
Light does more than anything else to make a photo look professional. Fair enough, that's a big claim. But swap a dim room and a bare ceiling bulb for a bright window and the same product looks like it belongs in a different shop.
Tip 4: use soft side light. Place the product next to a large window, with the light coming from one side, so it falls across the surface rather than straight at it. If the shadows look hard, soften them with a thin white curtain or a sheet of white card opposite the window to bounce light back.
Tip 5: use a plain backdrop. A plain, uncluttered background keeps the eye on the product and makes your listings look consistent. White paper, a pale wall or a simple fabric all work; what matters is that nothing competes with the thing you're selling. A gentle curve where the surface meets the wall avoids a harsh line behind the product.
Tip 6: switch off the flash. On-camera flash flattens the product, throws sharp shadows and bounces glare off anything shiny. Turn it off and use daylight instead. If it's too dark, move closer to the window or wait for a brighter hour, rather than reaching for the flash.
Camera and composition
You've cleaned, planned and lit. Now the camera. This is where small habits make a visible difference, and none of them cost anything.
Tip 7: use steady support. Rest the camera or phone on a tripod, a stack of books or a sturdy shelf so it doesn't wobble. Even a tiny shake softens detail, and you can't sharpen it back in later. A timer or a remote shutter helps, because tapping the screen is itself a little jolt.
Tip 8: let the product fill a good part of the frame, with room to crop. Get close enough that the product is the clear subject, but leave a margin around it. That space lets you crop to a square, a tall or a wide shape later without cutting off an edge. Cropping tight to the edge is a common mistake.
Tip 9: shoot several angles. One picture rarely answers every question a buyer has. Take the front, the side, the back, a close-up of any detail, and one showing the product in use or beside something for scale. More angles mean fewer questions.
Colour and accuracy
A beautiful photo that shows the wrong colour is a problem waiting to happen. The buyer expects the thing they saw, and if it turns up looking different, that's a return, or worse, a bad review. Good product photos shouldn't change the product.
Tip 10: match the real product in daylight. Hold the product next to your screen in daylight and compare. If the photo looks warmer, cooler, darker or more vivid than the real thing, adjust until it doesn't. Daylight is the fairest judge, and it's the one your buyers will use too.
Tip 11: keep white balance consistent. Pick one setting and stick with it across the whole set, so your whites look white in every shot. Mixing a warm lamp with a cool window gives you a yellow tint on one side and blue on the other. Shooting everything at the same time of day, in the same spot, takes care of most of it.
After you shoot
You've got your pictures. Don't rush them out of the door.
Tip 12: zoom in and check before you publish. Open each photo at full size and look at the edges, the corners and the details. You're checking for dust, smudges, soft focus, stray objects and colour that's drifted. It takes a couple of minutes and catches the flaws a small preview hides. If something's off, reshoot it now; it's far easier than explaining it to a customer later.
A quick word on rules. Every marketplace has its own requirements for images, and they change. Rather than guess, check the platform's own help page for the current ones before you upload.
How Product Photo Shots helps (and what it doesn't do)
Here's the honest version. A photo that follows these tips is a great starting point for us. We make scenes from it: you give us a clean, sharp, well-lit picture of your product, and we put it somewhere new. If you'd like to see how that works, here's how to put the product in a new scene.
What we don't do is fix a blurry or badly lit photo. If the original is soft or dark, the result will be too, so the tips above matter.
Before you pay anything, we study your photo and list what must stay the same about the product. That check is free and takes about a minute; our precheck was measured at 11 seconds on 2026-10-01. It's there so the product stays the product.
If a shot changes the product, we remake it with a specific fix, up to three attempts in all. If it's still wrong after that, a person checks it. It's never delivered as is. You also get one free redo per delivered shot.
Shots come in four shapes: square 1:1, portrait 4:5, story 9:16 and wide 16:9. Every shot is reimagined with AI and labelled as such, and the files carry standard AI-provenance metadata.
On price, packs are 3 shots for £19 (£6.33 a shot), 5 shots for £29 (£5.80) and 10 shots for £49 (£4.90). A custom order of 11 to 40 shots is £4.50 a shot. Prices include VAT.