Instagram Photography for Product-based Business Owners

1. Introduction: Branded Instagram photography is very important to convert a viewer into follower and eventually into customer. Hi, I'm Prachi from Prachi's Bohemian Art. I am going to teach you how to take branded high-quality Instagram photos. I started my business in 2020, and within few months I was approached by a local magazine. They wanted to feature my business in their December edition, and this was all possible because of my Instagram for geography. In this class, you will learn how to take branded photos of your product. You will also learn how to tell a story in every photo to have high engagement with your audience and build a connection with them before. We will go through making an inspiration in Pinterest and in Instagram to figure out what you want your feed to look like, we will figure out what props and background you should use consistently to have cohesive feel in your feed. We will also understand how a camera works without getting overwhelmed. I will show you two ways of how to take a branded photos and how to edit them out. In this saturated market, it is very important to stand out. Taking high-quality branded photo will help your product stand out and it will make your business shine. For your project, you are going to take branded photos of your product using the techniques I'm going to teach you in this class. And you can post it in the project gallery. So let's get started. 2. Class Project: For your class project, we will take branded photos of your product that also tells a story. We will use the knowledge of branding to decide what props and background you should use consistently, you can select one other two composition techniques that I'm demonstrating in this class. For this project, you need a photo editing software. I recommend Adobe's photography package where you get Lightroom and Photoshop together. You get 30 days free trial, which is enough time to figure out if you like the software and if you want to keep using it. Once you're done taking photos of your product, you will edit it out and publish it in the project gallery. It is very important to implement what you learn to get hands-on experience and understand, where are your shortcomings? Where are you struggling, so that you can keep working on it or even ask questions below, so that I can help you with it. A hot tip done is better than perfect because you don't want to get bogged down into perfectionism. That will just hold you back from finishing your work and publishing your project. If you think your photo is 70 percent good, I'm sure it's really good. Go ahead and publish your work in the project gallery. So go ahead, open Pinterest and Instagram. We are going to figure out inspiration for your brand. See you in next lesson. 3. Finding Inspiration: Welcome to finding your inspiration lesson. This lesson is very important to figure out what kind of background do you want, what colors do you want in your background? What props should you use consistently. Today, we are going to find inspiration for your brand and Pinterest. We're going to save some photos that you like and your customer might like and make a collage out of that photo. And then we are going to figure out our brand colors and get five brand colors from that collage. This will basically help us decide what kind of background do you want. We will also find inspiration on Instagram, follow some people, and basically get inspired regularly. So before we get started in searching for inspiration in Pinterest, let me explain you how to find inspiration in Pinterest. What are you going to think about while searching for inspiration in Pinterest? So first we are going to find photos that you find attractive in Pinterest because this is your business and you have to be comfortable with the visuals and how it looks. You have to be happy with it. So we need to find something that you find attractive. Also need to find something that your ideal customer might find attractive. And you need to think about that. Who is your ideal customer? What are their pain points, what kind of aesthetic do they like, do they like colorful stuff, do they like muted colors. You need to think about what your ideal customer might find attractive visually. For example, my ideal customer, like colors. And usually when I get my customers, they like colorful stuff. So I'm attracting right kind of people. And this like, center wiggly stuff over here is basically your inspiration for Pinterest and even Instagram, that's like your perfect inspiration. So we are gonna go to Pinterest and search for inspiration for your brand. So we are here on my Pinterest inspiration board. I call it final inspiration because I selected some for those that I find the best. And as you can see, there's a lot of pink and there's a lot of floral and like, pretty aesthetic. And I have that in my brand a lot. Let me show you my Instagram page. This is my Instagram page. And I have floras, pink And even though I have different color products, I still have the same brand aesthetic. And it's inspired by my Pinterest page. And while saving photos, I saw that I really like the satin Look. If you can see, let me zoom in right here. I really like this satin look and I use it in my Instagram. Let me show you like here. I'm using a satin. This is a satin photo. And I'm using the satin look that I am inspired from. And this is another photo that I really, really like. And I used satin. So as you can see, I liked satin a lot and I use it. I even use different color of satin. And I also like using magazine. I'm not sure if it is Vogue Magazine, but I use Vogue magazine a lot. See look here. There's a Vogue magazine. I use Vogue magazine a lot as prop because my brand is a fashion brand and using Vogue Magazine makes sense. And as you can see here, there's another set of fabric as background. And I use fabric a lot. And I use flowers and I also use babies breath, as you can see here, there's some babies spread and babies make really good prop, like in this photo, I'm using babies bread on the side and they make really good progress. They are small, tiny, and they don't distract from the main object that is your product. So yeah, this is my inspiration board and I really like coffee. And I do use coffee in my blog pages. Like I have my sweater, my earrings, and a coffee on side. And I'm kind of telling a story that, hey, I'm going to wear this sweater and I'm going to put this earrings on and I'm going to be all cozy drinking that coffee, even though I'm going to stay at home, I'm going to look good. That's kind of story is what I'm trying to tell. So how to get started with inspiration. You click this and you think about what you get inspired from. Is it a forest vibe? Or Is it the muted tone? Or do you like dark and moody stuff so you can search it in the search bar here. I'm going to do forest aesthetics, as-the-tics. So there's some dark and moody stuff if you're attracted and there's some sunlight. So for example, just to give you an example, if I want to save this photo, you can create a board. So basically, if you like this photo. You can create a board and you can saw branding for course. And you can click secret over here on. And basically it will be saved. Yep, it's saved for this board. So that's how you save photos in your board. So go ahead, start saving inspiration to your board. After you are done saving inspiration to your board, you can save five photos that you really like in your computer, open canva.com, we are going to make a collage. So this is what canva while look like and you can make an account in Canva. And you can also get 30 days free trial if you want. First, we are going to go over here and click Create design. And then you have to choose what dimensions do you want. You can just go ahead and choose Instagram post. And then you're going to click Upload over here and upload media. You should have your inspiration save to your computer. And you're just going to click all the photos and open it. So we're gonna take these photos and just put it in... This one is to one ratio composition. And we are gonna make a collage, that will help us figure out our Backgrounds and props, and all the good stuff. So as you can see, I'm just making collage, it doesn't have to be perfect. We just need like color from these collages so we can delete these photos after we're done. We don't need the photos. Okay, and now you can go ahead download, so we can click PNG and you would have these open if you had premium version of Canva I don't because I used up the premium version, so I'm just gonna go ahead and click Download. Okay, so now it's downloaded. After you are done making collage, we are going to use this collage to get our brand colors in Adobe Color. So this is what Adobe color looks like. You will have this screen right here. If you want, you can sign in, I think Adobe color, it is free. And we are going to go to extract theme right here. And then we're going to select the collage that we saved in our computer, and I guess I saved it in my downloads. We are just going to open this collage over here. And wow, it will just give you colors. You can have colorful, bright, muted, ohh I like that, deep, dark. So I really like this muted color and colorful. So I think I like this muted color right here. And you can definitely change if you don't like, for example, this color, you can kind of move it around and select the color that you like. And that's it. I'm just going, I like the previous one, sorry. Muted. So either you can take screen shots of this screen. And now you have brand colors or you can save it. And while saving, you need to sign in and everything. I'm not gonna do that. So yeah, basically you have these beautiful colors, so you can select your background color using your brand color. We are going to go in depth in next lesson. The lesson is on backgrounds and props. Now we are going to go to Instagram to find inspiration on Instagram. I just wanted to show you guys how to find inspiration on your Instagram page. So I'm here on my discovery page. This is my homepage. You click on the thingy right here, and this is the discovery page. And as you can see, I do like mirrors and floras. Instagram knows basically what do I like. And for example, if I want to save this image to my inspiration board, you see this right here. You just hold over here and save it in the inspiration board. If you do not have an inspiration board, you want to save this image. You will hold this right here. You will hold this plus sign, you'll say inspo, save. So yeah, that the image is saved now. In order to access those images, you can click the three dots or three lines over here, and then you're gonna click saved over here. This is all post, this is inspiration, so I already have pretty good inspiration board. So for example, you are just starting out and Instagram does not know what is your inspiration, what to show you, you'll do the same exercises as the Pinterest Part and you will search for maybe dark and moody. You can search for dark and moody hashtag. Click here, ooh, look at that, that looks beautiful. So this will basically give you an idea of composition and layout and you can save it in your inspo. I don't want to, I just wanted to show you how to search for inspiration. So you can basically write wherever you are inspired to. You can write forest, and you will find all the top, look at that. That is a really good way to showcase your product. You have forest in the background and you're using your hands as prop, this is like the best way. You can save that for composition, purpose. And this is a beautiful background. If you like forests and floral, you can get these flowers from the forests and use that as props. That's how you search for inspiration on Instagram. I'm going to show you like my inspiration board on full-screen. We are here in my inspiration board on Instagram. And as you can see, it has a lot of flat lays. I like to save flat lays for future inspiration, if I want to use a certain composition I like, and I also like to use these flowers. So sometimes I use tulips or a branch with flowers in my photos. Whenever you save photos, I recommend saving flatly photos because you get inspiration on different composition. We are going to learn about different compositions in later lessons. But I just wanted to show you like how you can use your Instagram to get inspired everyday. Like for example, over here. I use Vogue Magazine, so maybe I will use vogue magazine in the background. So I have a lot of options to try in my photos and try in my photography for Instagram, Let's recap what we learned. So, by now you should have a good understanding what you want your feed to look like. You should also have your brand color palette that will help you figure out your background color, or backdrop. And we will figure that out in the next lesson. And you should be following some Instagram accounts and photographers so that you can get inspired regularly and inspired to take amazing photos. Okay, let's figure out what props and background should you use for your brand. See you in next lesson. 4. Props and Background: Hi, welcome to this class. Today we are going to decide what backgrounds and props do you need for your Instagram Photography, Let's go over background selection first. you use your brand color backdrop for your Instagram photography, you can even use poster, paper, or fabric of your brand color as backdrop. This is the easiest way to create a branded feed in your Instagram. However, if you think the brand color backdrops is too loud and distract from your product, you can go for a white background. If you have a marble counter in your house, you can use it. You can buy marble backdrop from Amazon. You can use white cloth or white foam board as backdrop. If you don't want to choose a white background or your brand color background, you can go back to your inspiration board and understand your inspiration. Maybe you like a wooden look, or dark and moody look. If that's the case, you can choose. Wooden table or black slate tile. If your inspiration is forest, maybe you can have forest in the background while you are holding your product. So good, check out your inspiration in Pinterest, I have categorized different teams for you. Maybe your brand may fall under these themes, magical and whimsical theme. You can use linen or wooden table. White background. You can use white paper, fabric, marble counter or white backdrop, sweet and chic. You can use pink background, any brand color background, satin look. Our white for blanket, dark and moody. You can use black background are a blank slate, tile, neutral level, you can use neutral color, backdrop, paper or fabric. One important tip, do not use heavily textured background. It will distract from your product. However, you can use texture fabric as prop, sometime texture background works, but you have to be very careful while choosing it to be saved. Just try to use white textured background. Now, let's go over prop selection. Props can help you tell a story in your photo. It can help your product stand out, and it can also help you make your photos and your feed look branded. Let me tell you some of the best props that you can use. Packaging material, business cards, stickers. This is the easiest way to create branded photo. The customer can recognize which brands photo is it because you are using your brand elements. And also you are going to help them visualize the unpackaging experience. You can even use flowers and leaves as prop. Tried to use smaller flowers and leaves. If you have smaller products like dainty earrings, you can go for bigger flowers like tulips if you're showcasing a bigger product, another prop to use is anything that can add story in your photo. For example, I use cosmetics and fashion magazine in my photo because my brand is jewelry brand. And I'm trying to tell the story that I'm going to put on these cosmetics where this earrings and read my fashion magazine. This way the photo will look cohesive in my feed, you can use raw material or supplies in your photo. This will help your customer have a good idea of how you make your product. This will also help them get connected with your process and your brand. Your inspiration board can be very helpful during prop selection process. So I recommend checking out your inspiration board to decide on which props you want to use, One tip, use one prop consistently in most of your photos, people will start relating that prop to your brand. And when they see your photo, we'll know which brands for the is this using one prop consistently can add cohesiveness to your feed. For example, I use circular plate for my earrings and your eyes falls on my earrings and it makes it easier to go through my feed. Let's recap what we learned. Now you should have an idea of what background to you want to use. If you're still unsure, you can go for a white background. You should stay away from distracting textured background. You should have some idea of props you can try. You should try to use one prop consistently. Now let's figure out what tools and equipments do we need to take a photo see you in next class. 5. Tools and Equipments: Hi, welcome to this class. Today we are going to figure out what props and equipments do you need to take an amazing photo. First, you need a window. My window is north-facing window. It gets enough light. Any window with enough light would work. You can use a tripod. A tripod will help you have stability while taking photo. This will also help you avoid getting a blurry photo. Next, you need a table or anything that resembles and functions like table. I use a box and a writing board because I cannot fit a table in the area I have. You'll also need props, backgrounds, and your product. And of course you need a camera. I recommend using DSLR camera over phone camera. And let me give you some reasons why. First, because you get a raw file using DSLR camera instead of JPEG file. When you take photo from your phone. Your phone processes the information, compresses it and shows you the photo. The JPEG file is smaller and have low definition. The raw image captures all the information from the photo, from your surrounding and it does not compresses your data. It preserves all the data, and that's why you have high-definition photo. The next reason is to stand out in crowd. You need to up your photography game. A lot of makers and business owners started to use DSLR camera and they have upped their photographic game. So taking photos using DSLR camera will help your product and your business shine. Another reason is to have more potential to grow. The smartphone camera are amazing, but they will keep you wanting more. Having a DSLR camera will help you grow as a photographer. So now let's understand how a camera works. See you in next class. 6. How does the Camera Work?: In this lesson, we are going to understand how the camera works. You can do crazy things with camera. But in this course we are going to focus on basic concepts for you to understand how to take good Instagram photo. Every business owner wants one thing that is having a well lit photo, also called a well exposed photos. So to attain that we need to focus on three concepts, shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. Let's understand these one at a time. I'm going to use an analogy of window to explain these concepts. So our camera has a window. When you click to take a photo, the camera opens the window, lets light in, closes it processes the photo and shows you the photo. This window is called shutter. So for example, if the camera opens the shutter for a long time, it will let in a lot of light, and therefore, it can give you an overexposed photo. On the contrary, if camera opens the shutter for a short time, it will let in just a bit light and you might get underexposed photo. This concept is called shutter speed. By definition, shutter speed is a time the camera shutter is open when taking photographs. Another definition is the length of time the sensor inside the camera is exposed to light. Shutter speed is denoted in terms of seconds. When you see shutter speed, 1/500 seconds, shutter is open for that much amount of time. So by adjusting shutter speed, you can get a perfectly lit photo. Remember faster shutter speed, for example, 1/500 second, we'll let less light in and it can give you a darker photo, slower shutter speed, for example, 1 second. We'll let a lot of light in and it can give you overexposed photo. One thing to keep in mind is camera shake. When you hold your camera to take photos, Hand may shake. If you have slower shutter speed, for example, 1 sec, you can get a blurry photo. You can avoid getting blurry photo by increasing your shutter speed. Now let's understand what's aperture. You can manipulate the opening of the shutter. You can have it big or small. The opening is called aperture. If you have bigger aperture, it will let in a lot of light and you will get a brighter photo. If you have smaller operation, you will let in small amount of light and you will get darker photo Aperture is denoted by f-stop number. This is going to be confusing. So bigger aperture has smaller f-stop number. Smaller aperture has bigger f-stop number. For example, f-stop number 1.8 will have bigger aperture. Then f-stop number 22, apparition will also let you control the depth of field. Depth of field is basically how much you can see in the photo or how far you can see in the photo, in this photo of flowers, you can just see the flowers. You cannot see the background behind, the trees behind, it's all blurred out. So you can see that this photo has shallow depth of field. In this photo you can see everything in pictured, nothing is blurred out. So you can say this picture has a larger depth of field. So the flower photo was taken with the larger aperture F-stop number 1.8. And the other photo was taken with a smaller aperture, F-stop number 22. So basically larger aperture, smaller f-stop number will give you shallow depth of field. And smaller aperture larger F-stop number will give you larger depth of field. For this Instagram photography since you will have all your elements right in front of your camera, you can just focus on shallow depth of field and you can have maximum aperture that your camera can provide. That is smallest f-stop number. Now let's understand what is ISO. ISO is your cameras sensitivity to light. So basically if it is dark outside and even though you have big aperture and slowest shutter speed, you might get a darker photo. You can get a brighter photo by increasing cameras sensitivity to light. You can do that by increasing the ISO of your camera. For example, you can increase the ISO from 100 to 1600. The only downside to this is that you will get a grainy image. I recommend taking photos for your product in afternoon when there is enough light around so that you can leave your ISO at 100. And let's recap what did we learn! Shutter speed helps you take control of how much light do you want to expose. A slower shutter speed will give you more exposed photo, than a faster shutter speed. You have higher chances of getting blurry photo. If you have slower shutter speed, you can avoid that using a tripod and aperture can also help you take control of light. A bigger aperture that is smaller f-stop number will give you a shallower depth of field and really let more light in the camera. ISO is the camera sensitivity to light. In darker setting, you can increase the ISO to get a brighter image. But you will a grainy image when you do that. In next lesson, we will combine everything and understand how to use these concepts to get a well photo. See you in next class! 7. How to use Camera Settings?: Hello, welcome to this class. Today we are going to understand how to use aperture, shutter speed, and ISO to take an amazing photo, you can keep your camera in manual mode while taking photo. I recommend taking photo in daytime when you have enough light around so that you can keep your ISO at minimum that is a 100. And you won't get a grainy image, since we are going to focus on our setup that is right in front of our camera. And we want a well lit photo. We can have biggest Aperature, that is minimum f-stop number that our camera can provide. So now we can tweak shutter speed to get a good photo. To decide on perfect shutter speed, we are going to use light meter in our camera. When you tweak shutter speed from low to high, you can see in your light meter showing you if you have too much light or too little light, this will help you figure out what shutter speed do you want? If you are too, intimidated by this, you can put your camera on aperture mode. You can put your camera at an aperture mode at low F-stop number, and you can play with the exposure meter in your camera. That way your camera will figure out perfect settings for you. Now we know how to play with our settings. Let's take photos. See you in next class. 8. Triangular Composition: Welcome to this class. Today we are going to plan out a triangular composition. Triangular composition is like the easiest composition ever. Basically pick three elements out of any of this. So first let's see what do we have for background. I'm using this soft blanket for background. And the reason I'm using it is basically I'm trying to have a storytelling, that I'm on my bed. I'm gonna write something in this book. It is hand stitched by Emily and I'm using her handmade product. And I'm telling a story that I'm gonna write something in this book. And I might use this flower or this flowers as prop and I might use coffee and a candle. When you use coffee as prop, you are showing that it's a daytime and I'm going to have coffee and I'm gonna write my to-do list or whatever I usually write in the morning. And I included flowers because who doesn't like flowers? And if you don't use coffee and if you use this candle, It's, it will tell a story that maybe it's night and you are sitting down writing something in your notebook. And now let's go over the colors. Since our book is like brown and blue, I'm trying to keep everything muted except for this because when you put a light on, it looks very pretty in the background and it might get blurred too, so it will give a pretty color and pretty vibe, but rest everything, like this flower, or this flower, the pen, it's all black and white, even this cup, It's like white and neutral color. So you have to keep that in mind like what colors are you going to use when you are going to decide on props. It has to be a bit cohesive and it shouldn't be all over the place. For example, if I use yellow flowers and some weird color cup, it's going to be slightly all over the place. And that's why I usually go for white tulips or white flowers like this. Okay, now that we understood why are we using this background and why are we using these props? Let's make a composition that is triangular composition. So as you can see right here, I have arranged everything in a triangular form. And I have left like corners, like kind of empty, because When you do a square, you need some spacing in the corner. And I think that this coffee is far over there, so I might put it slightly closer. You know, since this is like the simplest composition, It's gonna look slightly empty, but I wanted to keep it this way so that it's easier to basically take photo in triangular composition. What we're doing here is the pen is right over here. It's like parallel to the book. And usually I put a book in certain angle. I don't do it straight. You can do that, but I just like it is visual pleasing and something is going on when you put it in diagonally. I can put pen over here and see how it looks. Yeah, I like the pen over there more. And let's see if I put it like this. How does it look? So basically you have to play around with your setting and see what works the best. And it's okay like this part is empty but don't worry, we are going to crop all that. And you're on this this area looks slightly empty, ish. So what you can do, you can put these flowers like these flowers are from here. And I can put it right in between. And you may be able to see it or maybe not. I might get some more flowers. I might add some over here, some over here. So I think I'm happy with this structure right here. You can put this book over here like this and see how it looks. I really like it like this. So you can play around with your composition and see what works the best for you. I am happy with it. And sometimes I use this reflector. Put it right here, I got it from Amazon. It's like for $11. So I will use the reflector right here and I'm going to take a photo of it right now. This is another triangular composition right here. Instead of those delicate flowers, I put like these, tulips and coffee. And the book, again, I'm sorry about this spot, but, you know, it's my fault, but we can remove this spot out in editing. So what are we doing right here is we're telling a story that it's morning. We love tulips. We looked, love coffee and we love writing our to-do list. So that's the story we're telling. And it helps people visualizing better how we are going to use our product. And I had this in triangular composition, coffee and tulip and When you see Tulip, this must be blurred out because there is a depth of field happening over here. We're focusing on our product and the tulips are like above of our product. I'm sorry, I didn't show you guys how I did this. Basically, you move things around. You move this if you like it over here, if you like it over here, you move the angle. I usually like this kind of angle because it feels easy to look at. If I put it like this. That's cool too. But I think like diagonal angles look better for some reason, especially when it's, There's a rectangle over here, we are going to have a square photo. It's just better to have it at an angle. sometimes. You can definitely play around with all the angles, but I think this photo, looks really pretty. Our product is in-focus. So I'm gonna take photo of all this and it's going to look amazing. So as you can see, you can also have your tulips lying around Like the previous flower. And we can do another composition. Let's see now, I want to put this right over there. Okay. So you can spend entire day, playing around with it. But I think this is final composition for me, 1, 2, 3, and while taking photos, I'll make sure that there's enough space over here and there's space over here or here, so that it will look slightly spacious. And I think I like this. Okay, I'm going to take photo of this now. Now I have put candle instead of coffee and it just has different vibe. And I might take photo at higher shutter speed. That will give me lesser light. Because I just want to create a vibe over here. And it will just look pretty. And I just wanted to show you what will happen if you remove this tulip to the previous flower we had. So I am gonna arrange, I'm gonna get this closer. I'm going to put these, over here. I'm going to take photo of this right now. So I just wanted to show you another way you can take a photo. And as you can see, this is still a triangular composition. But I'm taking photo onside. And when you do take photo like this because I have like Aperture 1.8, everything else will get blurry. And if you get closer, like that, candle will get blurry. The flowers might get blurry. I have 35 mm prime, so I have to move, cannot zoom in, so I might go farther back so that I can crop at, like a square. But I just wanted to show you another way of taking a photo. You don't always have to be from the flatly position. Or like from top position. You can take it from side and it might create a pretty vibe. Look at that candle in the background. It looks so pretty. So, yeah, like, you know, try to take photos from different angles. Don't be shy. 9. Triangular Composition Editing: Today we are going to edit the triangular composition photo. Usually when I upload my photos to my computer, it shows up in my Dropbox. These are all my raw photos. You will get raw images when you use a DSLR camera, raw images have more information than JPEG images. I have Photoshop installed on my laptop, and it comes up with Camera Raw software. Camera Raw basically edits the raw file of your photo. And when you open your raw file, it opens up in Camera Raw before going to Photoshop. When you jump in here, it can be overwhelming. Let me explain these to you one at a time. This graph is called histogram. It tells you where most of the pixels in your photo lie. X-axis represents brightness. It is divided into blacks, Shadow, mid-tone, highlights, and pure whites. Y-axis represents where most of the pixels lie. In this image. Most of the pixels are in midtone, some are in highlights, some are in shadow, and there is no pure black. There's a small amount of pure white. If this graph was like this, you would say most of the pixels in your photo are in the shadow region. Some of them are in the mid-tone region, and it is a bit amount of pure black. It's good to understand how to read a histogram. When I start editing, first thing I do is remove chromatic aberration and use Profile Corrections. Profile correction removes distortion, Vignette from the corner. The software knows what lens you are using and it shows you the correction. You can do manual correction over here and over here. Let's understand what is chromatic aberration. Sometimes you can get fringing in your photo Let's look at this diagram. Your camera tries to focus different light in one focal point, but since different light has different wavelengths, it will get refracted at different angles. That is why different lights will have different focal points. So instead of having just one focal point, you will have three more focal points. That is why colors go in different direction. And you will see a bit of separation of colors in this photo. This will cause your photo to have a blurry look. To remove chromatic aberration. You can click this option right here. This is always the first thing I do when I start editing. Now we can make some basic changes. Let's understand white balance. If your photo is too yellow or blue, the color of your product is going to look different. And you are going to have a weird white balance. Usually when you take photos during daytime, you won't have this issue. If you are taking photo in the early morning or late evening, the sunlight is going to be different. It's not going to be white. And that will give you a weird white balance. You most likely won't have a white balance issue if you take photo in the daytime, if you think this photo is too blue, you can move the slider to yellow just a bit. Now let's understand these basic correction. Exposure with expose all the pixels in your photo. We don't want to expose all the pixels because we might lose details. I usually don't touch the exposure. Sometimes I would lower it to create a moody vibe. I don't want that right now, so I'm going to leave it like this. You can add a bit of contrast in your image if you want. If you want to brighten up the highlights in your image, you can drag it to the right. Sometimes I like to show more detail in the image, so I drag highlights to the left, same with shadow. If you want to brighten up this shadow, you can go to the right. Or if you want to darken up the shadow, you can go to the left. If you want to brighten up your photo, you can play with highlights and white, not exposure because you will lose details by exposing all the pixels. Sometimes I reduce highlights to preserve details in my photo, but for this image, I will increase the highlights. You can dark in the blacks to add contrast. Texture can increase the texture of your image. Now let's focus right here. Now you can see not so much texture. Everything is burned out. Now you can see a good amount of texture. I don't like to add too much texture. I keep it at low, clarity with increased the clarity of the image, it will make it look more contrasted. I don't like the contrasted look, so I might leave clarity at low too. Let's understand vibrance and saturation. Vibrance will increase the intensity of muted color and saturation will increase the intensity of all the colors. I like to come back to basic correction after I'm done editing everything and do some more changes, That's how I like to edit my photos. Next, we are going to make changes using curves tool. As you can see behind this line, there is a histogram of your image. It shows where all the pixels lie. This part is pure black, this part is the shadow, this part is mid-tones, this part is highlight and this part is pure whites. When you make changes to this curve, you are making changes to that area of histogram. For example, if you make changes to the shadow like this, you are making shadow darker and this will add contrast to your image. If you push this point up, you are making midtone more bright. Now we are making highlights section more bright. If you push this point down, you are softening the whites. Now you are softening the blacks. This is basic S curve that will make your photo look contrasted. You don't always have to make S-curve like this. You can play around with it, see what you like the best. This is a creative process and you should not worry about messing it up. If you mess up like this, you can always double-tap and it will go where it was. One thing I forgot to mention, if you mess up like this and you are like, Oh no, what should I do? You can always double-tap. It will go back to where it was. Now, we are going to make changes in details. We are going to sharpen certain areas of the photo. Here. We might want to sharpen the embroidery in the photo to make it look good, we're going to use masking tool to select certain area we want to sharpen. Masking tool will mask the area that we want to sharpen. Now you are gonna click option if you are in Mac or Alt, if you are in Windows. And you are going to hold down the masking key. And now you can see everything is selected. It's telling me that everything will be sharpen. But when I drag it to the right, you can select few areas that you want to sharpen. Now, only those areas will be sharpen. I'm going to zoom in to show you guys. I'm going to drag sharpening and I usually drag it to the right. Radius tells you how much area do you want to sharpen. You can use details to sharpen the area even more. If you drag it to the left, it will be more blurry. If you drag it to the right, it will be more sharpened, so you can decide accordingly. I am happy with my edits right now. You need to play around and see what you like. It's not like you can use this number and it will work for you. It would be different for your photo and you need to play around with these settings, you can use noise reduction if you have grainy image, for example, if we are using higher ISO number, you might have grainy image. In that case you can use noise reduction. Now let's understand how to use color mixer. In Color Mixer I use saturation and luminance tab. If you want to intensify the red, you can drag the red to the right and make it look a bit more saturated. I don't want to do that because it will change the color of the product. You can play around with different colors in your photo. I always used luminance while editing. For example, in this photo, I think the orange is too bright for me. I might decrease the luminance of the orange to show more texture on my notebook. And I want the notebook cover to be a bit more contrast it. So I will basically decrease the luminance of the orange. Now let's understand how to use color grading. In color grading, you can add colors in different areas of the image, like shadows, highlights, midtones. For example, if you want to add yellow to your shadow, you can drag the circle towards yellow. If you want to add red to the shadow, you can use this tool. I usually drag the circle just a bit to add a small amount of color. I don't drag it completely. And I don't like the too saturated look, so I just drag it and just a bit. If you don't know what color do you want to add? There is one trick. The trick is to increase the saturation completely to a certain color, for example, yellow, and drag it to a different color and find which color works well with the photo. Then you can reduce the saturation of the color that you picked. You can see before and after by clicking this eye, it will hide the settings. You can drag this to increase the luminance of the shadow. I like to decrease the luminance of the shadow to make the photo look a bit more contrast. You can add colors to your highlights using the same technique. Now, I will increase the luminance of highlights and see how it looks. I like the edit untill now, I usually don't change the midtones because it can change the color of your photo. But I'm going to make a small change and add orange in the mid-tones. Since I know my product has orange in it, I'm going to go back and make some changes in the basics. We can see before and after by using this button. You can also use this tool to see before and after. I like this photo, I will save this by clicking Command S. You can choose folder that you want you for due to save it. And it usually saves in JPEG file. Now I saved the photo. 10. Circular Composition: Welcome to this lesson. We are going to learn about how to do a circular composition. So let's first understand what background I'm using. I'm using this blanket and I place satin fabric because this goes with my brand. And I use the blanket below. Because when you put this or put anything, it makes like a beautiful texture around and beautiful shine around. That's why I put blanket below the satin fabric and I'm using my earrings, and I'm using this circular base that I made. I made it using ceramic that I got from Michaels. And I'm using my earrings and I'm going to use my earrings display card. This way. I'm going to brand my photo. And I'm telling a story that I'm going to put on this makeup and I'm going to put on the earring. I'm going to read my magazine and look all pretty. I am using flowers because Flowers always look good. I might use the, these hearts in the center because like pink is like my brand color and this is like dark pink. So I think these small hearts would look super cute with everything else. And I even made these hearts with clay. Yes, very easy. You can make anything with clay. And let's talk about color. So I'm using Vogue magazine because it's a fashion magazine. And the front cover page has like a pinkish fuchsia color. And it kind of goes with my earrings and my branding slightly. So that's why I choose this magazine. And I'm going to choose this bronzer and the brush. And one thing that is same over here is the color and the shine off it. And this lipstick black goes with this black. And the golden shine over here goes with the golden brass frame basically. So, yeah, this is my props and background and I'm going to start making a composition. And we are going to make a circular composition. So basically we're gonna put this circularly around our earrings. So let's see how it goes. I know it kind of looks dark, so I'm going to use this thing right here. So as you can see, I'm filling up this area with these heart-shaped thingy. Let's see how it looks. Kind of cute. Okay. And yeah, I'm going to put this reflector right over here and I'm going to take a photo of it. 11. Circular Composition Editing: So now we are going to edit this circular composition photo. And I think I forgot to use the reflector I was talking about. So photo came out slightly dark. So what we're going to do first is do profile correction. Basically it will remove vignetting and distortion from the corner. And now we can select Remove Chromatic Aberration. We can do some basic correction. I will brighten up this shadow. And as you can see, it looks slightly faded, so I can add more contrast by darkening up the blacks. I will use luminance in the Color Mixer to add brightness in different colors. In my photo. I will crop the image 4X5. I don't like the way it looks. I'm going to use 1X1. So magenta was too saturated, so I reduce the saturation in magenta. just a bit. Okay, I'm going to remove this spot right here. To remove this spot, I'm going to use the Spot Removal tool. This tool samples the area nearby this spot. It will help you remove this spot and have the color that you want. Once you are done removing this spot, you can choose to do color grading. I'm going to add teal color to my shadows and reduce the luminance in the shadow to add contrast in my image. Because color grading is creative process, I spent a lot of time figuring out what colors do I want in my highlights and shadow. But it is worth it because photo comes out really good. I liked the photo. I'm going to go ahead and save it. 12. Bonus lesson: Negative Space Composition: So I just wanted to show you another composition. It is called negative composition, negative space composition. Basically I want to leave this area, Empty so that I can write something over here. For example, the course title, and I might use this photo for the course thumbnails. So what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna leave this earrings right over here. And I'm going to create like a diagonal line with the magazine. And I'm gonna do layering. Layering is basically a technique when you put a layer of something over another. For example, in this case, I'm putting flowers over a magazine. You can also put magazine over a magazine. That is another way of layering, but right here I'm just using flowers to layer over the magazine. Okay. And yeah, don't worry about this water. This water came from the flowers. I might edit it out. And I'm going to put this thingy over here and a matching color over here like this and this are matchy-matchy So I'm going to leave it over here like this. And I might put like these over here. Now. Let's see. Yeah. You can play around a lot with it. What happens if I do it like this? I don't like it. Okay, So I think I like this composition, may be move this right here. And what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna take a photo and I have left this area empty because I want to add title of this course. So that's where I'm going to use this photo. So yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and take this photo and I'm going to show you guys how it looks. 13. Bonus lesson: Negative Space Composition Editing: Now we are going to edit the negative space composition photo, since, I am going to use this image as thumbnail. I will use ratio 16 X 9. First, I will make these changes. I will go to geometry and move the image a bit horizontally and vertically. Now, I will remove the shadows and make some basic corrections. I'm going to make a simple S curve. I will sharpen some areas. I think that green is too saturated for me, so I will reduce the saturation of green. I will increase the luminance of magenta to brighten up the earrings. In this photo looks good as it is. If you want, you can do color grading. I think this photo looks good and I just made a bit of changes in color grading. So water does not look that distracting. I might try to crop it out. Okay, I can add my title of the course over here. I am going to go ahead and open the photo in the photoshop to add my title. Now you can use Type Tool to add content. And I'm going to use color picker to change the color of the font. So I think this looks cute. I will go ahead and save it. 14. You did Amazing!: Congratulations, you've finished this course. We covered everything from finding inspiration on Pinterest and Instagram, getting our brand colors, figuring out our style to choosing props and background, we understood how camera works and how to use camera settings. We saw two composition, triangular composition, and circular composition. We even saw a bonus lesson on negative space composition. We clearly understood how to edit our photos. If there is one thing I hope you can take away from this class is this. You can take amazing photos of your product using the knowledge I gave you in this class. And you will get better with practice. Add your work in progress in the project gallery so that I can take a look and give you feedback when you're finishing your project. Upload your project to the project gallery so that we all can take a look at it. Please leave a feedback if you liked this class and also do follow me so that whenever I make another class, you will get notified. You are welcome to follow me on Instagram and leave me a DM if you have any questions. Thank you again. See you soon.