Transcripts
1. Introduction to Class: All right. Welcome back for another class here today, we're going to go over how to make stunning, high converting product photos for your e commerce marketplace. We're gonna go from this to this, and we're gonna go step by step to get you there so that you can have beautiful product photography on your e commerce store to increase your conversions and customer engagement in this class, we're gonna go over why it's important to have good looking photos on your marketplace. What difference that will actually make for your brand, for your company and for the customers that are coming onto your marketplace to engage with your brand and products. By the end of this class, you will understand the ins and outs of having produce high quality product photography for your commerce marketplace by either using photo shop or affinity photo In this class, we're gonna use affinity photo. But all the tools and steps that we take are gonna be exactly duplicated in photo shop. So this classes for anybody who has an e commerce store through shop, a fire WordPress or if you sell anywhere else online, whether that be Facebook marketplace, instagram uh, eBay or xy dot com. If you're selling something online, you need to make sure that you have great product photography for the products that you're selling. This class is also for anybody who does any type of product design, any type of product photography, any type of design work in general. This will help you tune up or learn new skills around how to make great looking product photography so that you could better serve your clients in the future. I know this is huge again working with other people and outsourcing. This is always an option. So being one of those people that could deliver high quality product photos is very important. And finally, what you're gonna need for this course, we're going to do this as bare bones as we need to. You're gonna need an iPhone or smart phone that has a camera. You're gonna need a light box. Or you can use some source of white light and white pieces of paper, and we'll discuss how that works. If you want to use Ah, higher quality camera, you certainly can. But everything that we're gonna be doing and our results that you saw in the beginning here are gonna be are done on an iPhone. So this is very possible to do with little cost and just a little bit of hard work and knowing the right tips and tricks and ends an ounce of of the editing software to make your product photography look great. I'm really excited to teach you guys this. There's so many tips and tricks that have helped me along my way and my in commerce journey to make sure that my marketplaces look amazing. This is a really exciting and useful tool Teoh incorporate into building your brand online . So I'm excited to show you all the ends announced. Be sure to stick through the entire lesson, and without further ado, let's diamond.
2. The Difference Between Good and Bad Product Photos: Alright, guys. So first we're gonna discuss why having great product photography on your marketplace is so important. Um, I think this gets overlooked and people try to do the bare minimum here when you really gotta understand what this product photography means especially put putting yourself in the shoes of a consumer potential customer coming on Terry Commerce Store, experiencing your brand and seeing what you guys have to offer. So let's go through this road quick. Let's understand this a little bit more. I've got some examples pulled up on my computer here. I really want to drill into everybody that is interested in this class and he commerce in general that your digital assets, your product photos, your advertisements, the things that you post on your social media, all of those digital assets are sales materials. So however you're representing yourself with those sales materials is gonna exactly correlate Teoh how much people are engaged in your brand and and the quality of customers that you're gonna get and how long you're gonna be able to retain those people for for a lifetime. So if you skimp on your product photos, you're gonna you're gonna see, probably one time customers. And there's a reason for that because people want to engage with a brand that they can see eyes going to treat them as a valued customer. And one way to show that to people is with your digital assets. In the time and effort that you put into presenting your products to people. Think of your product photos as a resume for the product. So when you go into a job interview, your resume has all your best qualities all your highlight reels, and you're really showing the best side of yourself. And getting the sale is like getting the job. So when somebody comes to your your site and they see the product page and that product photos, a piece of that resume when they make that sale, they're saying you got the job. So let's look at a couple examples here. I just found a random website that I thought, uh isn't bad but could use some work, so I'm gonna blur out the site name just Teoh. Give some privacies whoever site this is. But you can see these air, obviously just some basic products off of, um, some wholesale supplier s so you can see that these air really generic product photos. They don't really light up the products they don't. They don't showcase the best side of the products. They're very generic. And you can tell that as a consumer, you go on this website, you can tell that so you can see almost immediately that if I were if I were to come to a website and see this, I probably would be purchasing from it because I don't know if I'm gonna get my product on time. I don't know. The products could be a good quality. So all these things are communicated either consciously or subconsciously, to the consumer on, But we can go over here. This is the classic, um, you know, e commerce. Uh, e commerce. God here. Almost movement watches. Right. So we'll click on toe some of theirs, and you can see these product photos pop at you at the page. You can already see the quality of these of these problem photos and of these watches, you can tell that they really took the time in the effort into making these look amazing. Right? Clear These. So let's click on one of these see what it looks like here. Yeah, so they've got several product voters from different angles that really highly, even a lifestyle photo picture of box. So this is an entire army. This is a sales page, right? But it's a resume. Two years you're selling yourself and the quality of your product photos is a big piece of that because especially if it's something that, like an accessory, where somebody's gonna be wearing it. So showing showing the highest quality version of an accessory is gonna be extremely helpful. So, guys, I hope that helps clear up kind of the standard we're looking for here. Why it's important for us to take the time and effort into building these product photos out. All right, let's get into actually created a private photo into the next into the next. Last year,
3. Setting Up & Taking The Photo: Alright, guys. So we're gonna talk about lining up the photo first. Here. We've got our light box. You can buy these off Amazon for about 40 bucks. They're super affordable. We've got our product in our lightbox and we've got our iPhone set up with our little tripod here. So the first thing we're gonna do if you don't have a light box, let's discuss this for a quick don't have a light box. What you can do is set up a bunch of white pieces of paper against a wall. So you want to get a perpendicular surface, probably a table up against the wall, so that you can have this white backdrop like this. That's really all you need. And then you need a source of white light coming from above. So in here there's an L E. D strip. You can buy those for about 10 bucks on Amazon, right? Your hardware store, or find another source of white light that you can put over your product to create. A similar effect is this. That would be even more cost effective. Way to do this on. You certainly don't need the tripod, but makes it a little easier for your iPhone. Just Teoh, especially. We're taking a lot of different product photos, too. Swap the products out, keep your phone in the same spot. So with that being said, we're going to start start with our lightbox, so will turn on our light. And this is very simple. Inside my light box, I drew a little X on where the center is, so that every time I put a new product and I swap out, I take a photo of this product and I put a different one in. I know exactly where the middle of the frame is gonna be, so I don't have to move the product around. I just put the middle of that product right on that little X. So that's a huge key to getting nice, consistent product shots for your entire marketplace. So and then we we simply line up our iPhone. I'm not gonna take the picture here today. I've already take have already taken this photo, so But you simply want to line it up and make sure that when you're taking the photo on your iPhone, you or your smartphone, you press toehold on focus on one of the front pieces of the product. And then you snap your photo, and that's as easy as that, man. It really is as easy as that. And and then we go through the rest of our products and swap amount and get all our base product photos in the phone. These photos are gonna look very unfinished. They're gonna look like the lighting isn't right. But we're gonna fix all of that in the computer, so make sure that you just light it well from the top and take a nice focus photo with your iPhone, so very, very simple.
4. Developing the Photo (Before Editing): Okay, guys. So we're back here. We have loaded up the photo that we discussed lining up with our lightbox and our iPhone into affinity photo. So if you're not familiar with affinity to photo, it's a much cheaper version. I'm not sure if it's available for, um for, uh, non Apple products, but you can bite in the Apple store. It's about 40 bucks, and I've used photo shop an affinity photo for several years now. And there's certain things that I like about photo shop, and there's certain things that I like about a funny photo. Both are just as powerful as tools is one of the other. So and all the tools that we're gonna be using are gonna be synonymous Teoh working in photo shop. So anything that I do here with any of the tools that you see, you'll be able to do in Photoshopped as well. So definitely check out affinity photo. If you don't have a photo editing software, it's really easy to use intuitive, Um, and it's super cheap. So the first thing we're gonna do with this photo is we're gonna develop. It s so if we go up to the top here. Let's see. And we had developed persona right here. So this is our raw photo, right? We've got the white light on it. It doesn't look to clear it doesn't look too, too dark. But there's a lot of things that we could do to improve this photo just off the back before we start editing it. And you could do this with Photoshopped as well. So we're gonna take this, we're gonna develop it. The first thing we're gonna look at is everything on the right hand side here. So we've got a lot of things to play with. We've got our exposure, which is gonna be how much light we take in, right? We've got our black point. We've got our brightness on. Those are things are we're gonna play with We've got our enhanced tab here, which is gonna be contrast clarity, saturation by vibrance on that. We've got white balance, shadows, shadows and highlights and profiles were just gonna play in here. So if you're in photo shop trying to find whatever is closest to this, um, they're gonna have very similar names. It's just gonna be about where it is within your program So the first thing we're gonna play with is the exposure. So we're gonna do this real time together, and the idea here is we want to blow out the back, the white. This is why it was important to have the light box or either white pieces of paper behind your product because we want to blow out the white. So as we do that, too, it will bring up the exposure on our product. So there's a nice, fine line here where that's gonna be too much. You can see we're at 2.7, where the blacks in our in our product are starting to get manipulated. We don't want to touch that. We want We want to keep the integrity of the of the product itself in the in this developed stage. But we want to get as much as the background blown out as we can without manipulating the product too much. So that's looking pretty good. Around 1.268 there. Next thing we're do, we're gonna leave Black Point where it is. We're gonna play with the brightness if we can play with it a little bit to get a little more blown out, and we're looking at the background here. Right? Cause think of what you what you see on a ah, a website where you purchase something, usually the background in the product. Photography's what? It's white. It matches the page. It looks like the product is just there. Kind of floating. Looks great. So we're gonna play this brightness little more, See if we can't bring it up a little bit. Yeah, we're gonna start. We're gonna start messing with the blacks and the product photography again. So I may only leave this at about 5% here because I don't want to mess with the blacks too much. Um, And then our contrast down here under enhance, we can play with this, too. So we want to bring in back some of those some of those darker tones. I actually like that. Bring that up to about seven. Then our clarity. I really like this knob so you can kind of go all the way to one side and all with the other to see what it does on this one. It's not doing a lot for us. That's okay. So we don't have to touch it. don't. Here's a key thing about editing. If it doesn't add to it, don't touch it. So if you're playing with the parameter and it doesn't actually add to the photo in, ah, positive way, then don't touch. You don't need it. So don't feel like you need to move every parameter that edit a photo, because that's not the case. So I'm pretty happy with this. This is a good start right here for our developed stage. So we're gonna hit, develop, and we're gonna go onto the next step here.
5. Setting Up Your Project for Editing: Alright, guys. So the next step after we've developed our photo is we got to set up our projects that we could begin to edit this photo. So the first thing that we're gonna do is head up and go into file, and we're gonna do go into file and we're gonna create a new project. So the type of project we're gonna use it's gonna be for web. You can? Yep. Where it's gonna be for web we're going to do document units is pixels. We're gonna do color format RGB B and color profile. We're gonna use this. And the page dimensions is what we're really focused on. So most marketplaces, whether using Shopify, whether using Amazon at sea, eBay, they're gonna ask for a square photo. So what I like to do is I like to make these photos around 800 by 800 pixels and that else that'll start our project off in a really, really good place. Okay, so now that we've got our project set up, what we're gonna want to do is head over to our developed photo. We're going to copy it, and we're gonna Look, we're going to copy it and we're gonna paste it in. And so we're gonna zoom out. I'm using option command and scrolling out. We're gonna head over here. We're going to click our point or tool. We'll click on the layer that we want and we're gonna resize this. Okay, so what we're looking for here, as we're setting this up, is we want to make sure that our product is level, so you can already see that we're going to need to tilt this a little bit. It looks a little off balance, and we're gonna want to make sure that we get it centered within the square. So that's what we're doing here with our developed photo before even start editing. So let's make this a little smaller. So there's a little more space on the sides, and we're gonna bring it up to about there. That looks like about in the middle, and I'm gonna rotate it just a few degrees to the left. That looks pretty good. The guys that was really centered, it looks level. It looks like a good foundation to start working with. There's a lot of dead space here, guys, so we need to fill that in with something. There's a few different ways we could do this. We can make a pixel layer down here in the bottom right hand corner, and that layer will come over here to our layers section. We want to drag that below are developed photo that we can head over to the paint tool and we want to set our color Teoh White and both right. So that's why we wanted to blow out that background the developed photo, so that when we do something like that, when we put a white background behind it, we can already see that it's gonna match, because if we didn't develop, you know, blow out the background toe white. We're going to see a change in color there. Even if it's slight, they're gonna be different shades of white. Another way to do that. That background is to just take, um, the rectangle tool, the shape tool, and draw a rectangle the size of of the project. So this is looking pretty good. I may shift this down just a little bit, clicking on the layer and using the arrow tools to bring it down. The left little, uh, maybe back up a little bit. There we go. That was pretty good to me, guys. So this is a photo that's now ready to be edited. Eso we'll go through and we'll discuss what we're gonna do to edit this photo.
6. Isolating The Product Layer: All right, So now we're gonna dive into edit in this photo, and this is going to be the most like, lengthy process. So there might be some things that I speed up in here, but stick with me. There's a reason all these steps I'm gonna try and explain them the best that I possibly can. So the first thing that we're gonna want to do is we're gonna want to cut out our our product. So we're gonna head over and we're gonna look for the pen tool on the left hand side and with the pen tool, we're gonna go around and trace the entire products so that we can cut it out, and we can start to manipulate it in certain ways. So what this looks like is I'm holding option command and I'm zooming in with my scroll on my mouse and we'll go over and we want to zoom in so that we're getting to a point where we're pixelated. Once we're pixelated, Weaken, start outlining with clicks. So the way that I like to do this is both in Photoshopped an affinity photo. You can click and hold and go around curves like that you can certainly do it that way, but I personally have found better results. Cleaner results by just clicking around the shape. It's small passes. So we're gonna do this around the entire product, and then we're gonna come back. So bear with me here. It is important to note that you can when you're zoomed in this far, you can cut in a little bit into the pixels because we're zoomed in. So far, you're really not going to see it once we're zoom back out. All right, so we've just gone around the entire outside of our product, and we've got we connected our entire selection. We're gonna go up to the top here. We're gonna hit selection. Now what we're gonna do is we're gonna select our pixel layer of our background, and we're gonna get command C and Command V. So what this just did for us is if we turn these layers off now we have we had command D to undo the selection. Now we have our product single down. So the next thing that we're gonna want to do is we're gonna want to cut this out for us for ourselves as well inside here because there's gonna be, Yeah, there's gonna be some manipulation we want to do there as well. So let's go ahead and make this selection and cut that out. So go back over to our pen tool and we're gonna do the same thing around the outside here. Okay, so we've got our inner selection. We're gonna hit, select, and on this one, I'm actually gonna hit delete. So we're gonna remove that entirely. And now we bring back our background layer. It looks like nothing was ever done right? But the reason we're gonna do this is because of the next step here. So the reason we're gonna do this is because the next step here. So let's go into the next video and we'll talk about what we do next. After isolating our product
7. Editing Our Product: Okay, so we have our product isolated, right? And we've got our background or pixel layer. We've got our background that has everything in it and then our product over top of it. Right? So the next step we're gonna do is let single, let's name these isolated product background and pixel that work. So the next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna remove a bunch of our white space, and the reason we're gonna do this is because we're going to start to manipulate the isolated product. So on the background, I like to do this just in case we missed anything while we were developing it. And I go over to my eraser tool here, and that is way too big. So I'm gonna hit the left bracket on my keyboard to make that smaller, and I'm gonna go over two brushes up here, and I'm gonna pick a lighter brush so that it's a little less damage around certain things . So we're gonna go around the products and we're going to just erase a lot of this because guys remember, we have that pixel layer under it that will account for the white that we need to fill this in. And we're keeping this because we have the shadow of the product. We want to keep some of the shadow on the product, um, to make it look natural. So that's how it should look. And now if I put on my pixel layer, it looks like we didn't do anything. But this is important because we're gonna start manipulating everything. So let's turn on the isolated product and let's start playing with this. So the first thing I'm gonna want to do with this isolated product, um I think what I'm gonna want to do here really is Let's do some brightness and contrast on the product itself, so we'll pull apart brightness and contrast. The first thing we're gonna want to do is group this Under are isolated products to take our brightness and contrast layer and put it under. You can see it gets grouped into their right. Same thing in photo shop. We don't do that. It's gonna affect everything all our layers, and we don't want that. So let's start MoveOn's and dials. We've got the brightness. Let's pull the brightest up a little bit in contrast. Okay, You know what I may actually want to go the other way with this. Yeah, okay to see that. Cool. So I'm gonna do that first to make this a nice deep black to really bring out the black pieces in this in this piece. But there's a few things that we want to highlight here. We've got some really nice white in these marbles. So in order to bring that out, let's see if we can do it through another brightness and contrast layer and let's blow it out. Right? Yeah. There we go. Okay. So let's blow it out. The next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna go back to our race or tool, and we're gonna pick this lighter brush. Right? So we've got a soft edge. That's why we have the letter brush. So we have a soft edge and not a hard edge so that we can blend a little bit with the eraser tool. So we blown this out. We're gonna click on, are blown out brightness. Later, we're gonna race the rest of the we're gonna erase over the rest of the products. So what this is going to do? The eraser tool is going to remove the brightness blow out from the parts of the product that we want to stay a deep black. So that's gonna be everything but these marble pieces, We're gonna erase this. Erase this. And guys, you can see. This is why it's important to have the isolated product layer away from the background, away from the pixel layer of our weight and away from our shadow layer. Okay, you can see how it almost most just painted into perfection. Right? So now we've got this really nice touch. If we take this off and see those go away, I can see that I missed a few spots with the eraser tool. Take this little big right bracket on the keyboard will make the eraser tool bigger on. There we go. So we zoom out. That's what I'll look like on our marketplace. That looks really, really good, guys. So the next step that I think I'm gonna want to do here is let's go and add some clarity. So let's add our clarity, filter and God placed in the wrong layer. So let's put it going to that. Yes. I'm actually gonna blow this out again. I'm gonna do the same thing of the clarity filter. I'm gonna erase everything except for that marble layer, because the pieces of the bracelet back here are a little out of focus. We actually don't need charity layer Teoh. Touch those parts really just want to bring out those marbles, right? So let's take that off. But back home, let's see a little but all the way up to 100. It's very subtle, but it really does make those those white lines on the marvels pop. So there's one more step that we're gonna hit and and finalizing this and just cleaning it up a little bit and we're gonna do that in the next video help. This was very helpful in terms of editing the isolated piece. It's very simple, guys. It's really, really simple in the next step is going to tie it all together and I'll see you there
8. Fixing Blemishes and Finalizing: Okay, guys. So the final step is we're going to remove any blemishes or take away anything that doesn't really make the product look perfect. So luckily on this one, we don't have a lot of those pieces, so there's not a lot we're going to need to do, but we can still hit a few of these, and I can show you how so we're going to select are isolated product layer, and we're gonna go over to our tools and we're gonna choose the clone brush here so the clone brush will take you make a selection on your photo, are on the layer that you have that you want to clone, and you can put it anywhere. So we're gonna make this brush a little smaller. We're gonna hit the left bracket, right, and we're gonna zoom in option command and scroll in, and there's already some pieces. You can see there's a smudge here on this part of the product, right? So I'm gonna make a selection. I'm gonna hold option, and I'm going to click on the selection that I want to clone. And now you can see I can clone this right over to that piece that we want to fade out, but we zoom out. Looks like I need to pick a different piece. So you need to play with this a little bit. So let's actually make it a little smaller. That might make it a little easier. Let's take this gray spot. Oh, there we go. That'll blend nicely. So that blends really nicely. Now. We don't see that, so I can see I have another one over here. There's a little bit of a glaring there, so let's get rid of that. Just picks a live pixel, right Here we go. Here we go. We can see that looks a lot better. I can even come in here and get some of these browns out. Bring in some more blacks, right there We go down here, this one will be easy. I'm gonna make this little bigger. Just get that people act. That one was super easy. There we go. And there's a few up here. Actually, that's part of the product. But over here we can get rid of this little white glares. One Claire's of life we don't necessarily need. And there's some brown over here that I don't like. There we go, guys. Okay, that looks really good. So we just kind of smoothed out some of those pieces. The next thing we could dio we can go over here and we confined our blur tool And we could go back to the pieces that we edited And we could just do a really light drag and hold on that See that? So I click and I swirl I hold my click down to keep the brush activated An icon just blends everything together a little bit. Oh, like it was never even there. There it is. All right, so we zoom back out. This is our finished product. Does This is our finished product here. We're gonna go to exporting it will do a quick overview.
9. Exporting Our Finalized Product Photo & Overview: Okay, so we're back. We ever finished product. He started here. We ended here. Um, actually, we started here before this was even developed. We started there, and we ended here. So all that done with a small late blocks and our iPhone pretty awesome. You can see how this will upgrade our entire marketplace. Right? We do this for all our products. Um, So let's come in here. We're gonna hit file, but we're gonna go toe export. And the way that I'm gonna export this is as a PNG, um, or J Peg. Whichever one you prefer on P and G is gonna be a bigger file. J pegs would be a little smaller. So if you're worried about your site speed, I go the JPEG. But we'll do the I will do the J peg today, Actually, so do the J. Peg Will do the highest quality best quality. Call 800. Whole document 108 100 by 800. And we're gonna export. And you're gonna say this wherever you want to say that, right? So we'll go to our desktop. It will save it there. Um, stunning photo. Example. So there we go, guys. So we've gone from understanding why we need, uh, stunning product photos for our marketplace. Help us with our customer engagement building a nice brand, bringing in sales consistently to going in, taking a photo with light box with our iPhone with the tools that we have available and then importing it into the computer, developing the entire photo. Um, editing that photo, bringing that photo life, isolating the product, taking away blemishes, bringing out the best pieces and really coming out with a great piece of product photography that we can showcase on her site. So I hope this this lesson in this class was beneficial for you. I hope all you are getting work on making your part of photos look amazing and stunning again. This was all done with an iPhone and a photo box. If you have a higher quality camera, these are gonna come out even better. So but realize that this is all it takes to get started to start making great product photography so much love to everybody on. I'll see in the next class
Alex Huston, Coach
