Hey everybody, it's Wes from Printful!
I'm here with Tim, one of our photographers, and today we're gonna talk about product photography.
Tim, we have really awesome mock-ups on our website that are free to use and people get
them as a part of using Printful.
But one way to really step up your game is doing your own product photography.
Can you tell me about the importance of product photography, and how it can help someone take
their store to the next level?
Yes, sure!
There's definitely a place when you're starting your store for using mock-ups.
The big benefit is that they're free, they're available on the website, and they're easy
to use.
You upload the picture and away you go.
But when you get to the level where you're getting regular sales, you're building a brand
and you want to have a more personal relationship with your customers.
That's where product photography as a custom service really comes in.
When you start making pictures which are not available elsewhere on the Internet, you start
getting real identity to your store and people will associate with your brand a lot more.
It really depends on your target market.
If you have hundreds of different designs in your store, mock-ups are really good for
that because you have a consistent style of shirt and all that people will see when they're
browsing through is the different designs that are on it.
It's really easy for people to just pick out the little details that they want.
If you're working on building more of a whole branding experience, mock-ups are not as strong.
Can you tell me the different types of product photography?
There are three major ones.
The first would be flat product photos.
That's where we take a t-shirt, lay it down on a white surface or a texture, and take
a photo from straight above.
Then you have lifestyle product photos, which is a shirt on a person and you're out in an
environment, so you've got an actual background.
And then the third one is with wrinkles.
It's a variant of the flat ones, just wrinkle the shirt up to get more life there, or hang
it on a clothes hanger.
It's still without a model, but it's not as plain as the flat one.
When you're making listings on your website, keep in mind that it's totally fine to mix
the photos together.
You can have one listing that's got three product photos, three lifestyle photos of
the same product.
It's the same story, but different details of it.
Can you give me an example of a specific time and place for each of the photos?
Flat lays are mostly used when you have large catalogs.
Like I was saying before, we have the same background behind everything, so it lets you
focus on the design a lot more.
The lifestyle product photos are a crossover between product and marketing photos.
You get more of an emotional response from your customers when you have something like
that.
So it's great for website banners and social media.
You can use it in your storefront as the hero image and then have a couple of the flat product
photos to go with it.
But you can also use that same picture on your Instagram channel and get a cross-marketing
feel.
The wrinkled photos on a hanger gonna be targeted on somewhere like Etsy, a marketplace where
you need more character in your photo.
But they have some pretty hard restrictions on how you can set everything up for your
photo shoot.
What are some of those restrictions?
It depends on which marketplace you're going for.
For example, if you're gonna be listing on Amazon, you need to make sure that your hero
image has a plain white background.
It’s got to be pure white, so that it fits into their grid.
Etsy is not so restrictive in terms of colors, but some marketplaces can't have models, at
least not in the hero image, or you can't have kids in it.
If you're listing on marketplaces, you really want to check the rules about photo requirements.
I had no idea that there were different restrictions on those things.
What makes a good product photo?
There's a couple of different points.
The first one - for a product photo you want to make sure that the design is clear or at
least easily recognizable.
I keep talking about lifestyle product photos.
Maybe you'll have a little bit of your model go in front of the design.
You want to make sure that when the customer is looking at it, they can easily see what
it is, what it says.
You want to make sure that when you're presenting a picture as a product photo it's accurate
and truthful.
It's not quite the same as marketing shots where you're trying to get more of an emotional
response out of people.
This is about presenting information.
Good product photo will be clean, clear and honest.
That's my big three points for product photos.
Okay, clean, clear, and honest.
Yes, I like it.
If I'm setting up a photo for a Shopify store, is there a certain type that would do better
than if it were on Etsy?
It's not so much that there's a certain type that does better on Shopify.
On some of the integrations you're working on your own website and on some of them you're
working in a marketplace.
So if it's your own website, for example, Shopify, Woocommerce, or Bigcommerce, people
are only looking at your products when they're on your site.
You don't have to grab their attention with a particular product, they're already there
looking at your stuff.
If you're listing on a marketplace like Etsy your product is competing for attention with
thousands of other sellers.
So if you have a plain white background, chances are that people are going to be less likely
to look at it.
That's where it's really good to have photos with backgrounds in them, or environmental
mock-ups.
What separates a good photo versus a good product photo?
Generally speaking a good photo has a lot of different features than what we look for
in a product photo.
For example, you might have some really dramatic shadows, or movement and blur, and things
that makes it look really cool.
But it's not going to help you sell that product by showing the details of it.
You need to make sure that all of those details are easily accessible by the customer.
Where in general photography you might be taking some awesome wide-angle shot of a person
on a mountain, and it looks awesome and inspiring, but it's not selling your product.
It's selling that place and that emotion.
That's the major difference that we're going for between just nice photos and nice product
photos.
All right, let's talk about some tips real quick.
What are three elements that I can look out for when I'm gonna start taking my own product
photos?
The first thing that we're gonna want to deal with is lighting.
We want to make sure that we don't have any hard shadows coming on the object.
A little bit of shadow is okay, like some texture and realism, but we don't want anything
that's too distracting.
Second thing is framing.
A lot of times when people are just starting out they're cropping off important bits of
the product or shooting too wide and not getting enough detail of the product.
Make sure you get the actual product nice and full in the frame and show everything
that needs to be in there.
And the third thing is a little bit different, we're gonna go with arrangement for this one.
So it’s more if you're doing flat lays that are really popular at the moment, shooting
down from the top with multiple products in your photo, getting their visual balance between
everything right.
Maybe you need to change the order of where things are and work with the gaps a little
bit, making sure that when you look at it, it feels balanced.
What are some do's and don'ts when it comes to product photography?
First of all, you want to avoid wide-angle lenses.
The problem with shooting with a wide-angle lens is it makes a lot of distortion in your
picture.
When things get close to the edge of your frame, they get bent and get unnatural curves
on them.
Which is fine when you're doing landscapes and photos of the starry night sky, but, for
example, if you're doing a poster, you don't want the edges of your poster looking warped.
If you're using a digital SLR, a 50 millimeter or higher for focal length will be best.
With a smartphone if you've got a portrait mode or a tele lens, use that one to do your
product photos.
The other thing that you really want to try to avoid is distracting backgrounds.
Having nice neutral brick walls or distressed timbers and things like that is fine, but
try to avoid doing putting your t-shirt onto a brightly colored circular rug, where the
colors are just going to be swirling everywhere.
Anything that's gonna be too distracting, keep that right out of the way.
Neutral is much better.
If people are looking to commission a photographer, for example, what's a great way to find one
or get in touch with you and your team?
You've got two options for getting custom photos done.
You can either work locally with a photographer that you know or hire in your area, or Printful
also has photo services.
We run it at the moment from our European facility in Riga.
If you want to get your photos done, get in touch with us through the website, the link
is in the description.
You can just send your designs in, we'll print everything right here in the fulfillment center,
take it straight off the line and do the photos here.
There's less time involved in waiting for products to be shipped around and moved to
different places.
We give a discount for items that are fulfilled for a photo shoot.
You get 20% off your order, and there's no limit on how many items you can have shot.
So if you want to order 20 t-shirts for your photo shoot, you get 20% off all of them.
Yes, that's a pretty good deal.
If you have really specific images in your head about what you want to get out of the
shoot… that might be a situation where you want to deal with someone locally where you
can have in-depth conversations, be there in person and be there on the day of the shoot
to help direct it.
But if you just want to make sure you get something a bit different to what everyone
else is using and you like the way that Printful images look in general, but you want your
own custom ones, we're happy to help.
We'll do it every day of the week.
Let me ask you this - you're talking about having an image in your head, do you suggest
people putting together Pinterest boards or little lookbooks or moods of what they're
going for their line and website?
Definitely!
Not just for getting your photography done, but building your brand in general.
You want to make sure that when you're posting social pictures, or working on emails, or
building the theme for your website, when a customer comes and looks at it everything
is working together.
Mood boards are really good for that, Pinterest is great for it, or you can just use Google
images for searching through big competitor websites to get an idea of what works.
Put it all together in a word document or folder on your computer.
Just download all those pictures and keep collecting, refining, and building your brand
that way.
Tim, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you for watching.
Be sure to subscribe to our blog and our YouTube channel for lots of great content just like
this.
Hey, it’s Wes from Printful!
Hope you found that video very helpful.
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