If there is one thing that's an absolute must if you want to sell your handmade
product online successfully, it's mastering product photography.
It's not necessarily easy if you don't have experience at all to learn how to
take your own pictures, so it's understandable that you might think:
"this is good enough. I've worked on this for a few hours,
I'm just going to post this listing with this picture - that will do";
but unfortunately,
our expectations as customers in today's world are right up there for pictures
and for photography.
We spend our days looking at beautiful pictures on Instagram and social media,
and so we're really used to having really beautiful imagery when we're
purchasing items online.
So if you are serious about growing a successful and profitable handmade shop,
you need to pay attention to your product photography.
And in this video I want to give you some practical and actionable tips.
We're going to review the top five mistakes that I see handmade sellers make
with their pictures,
and then also talk about how to avoid those mistakes and fix them. Let's dive in.
Hi, I'm Deb, the founder of Tizzit.co,
a membership community for makers and handmade shop owners.
I'm really excited to talk about product photography today.
It's a topic that I think is really,
really important if you want to make sales online so let's dive straight into it
was mistake number one. Mistake number one is the wrong white balance. Now,
white balance is also referred to as color temperature,
so if you've heard "color temperature" or "white balance" in the past,
they were really talking about the same thing. And what it is is this spectrum,
just like a thermometer, where on the colder side,
your whites in your picture more often than not,
if you're shooting with your product in front of a white background,
that white background is going to look a little purple or a little blue.
And then on the warmer side of things,
it's going to look a little bit yellowish or even a little bit orange.
So how do we avoid our pictures looking purple or yellow and keeping the whites
looking white? Well, the first thing to understand is that color temperature,
that spectrum we've just talked about is actually measured with a unit called
Kelvins. You might never have heard of it before,
but it's actually on any light bulb packaging that you would see at the
supermarket. If you buy a light bulb,
it will actually tell you this is 2,000 K or 5,000 K so that you know what kind
of color temperature that light source is going to create for you.
Because what we want to do is make sure that in your pictures the white looks
the same as in real life in natural daylight,
we want to try to mimic that daylight as closely as possible.
The natural daylight Kelvin temperature is between 5,000 and around 6,000 K -
Kelvins. So when you're buying,
if you're going be shooting inside with artificial lights,
you want to make sure that you're using a light bulb that's around 5,500 K to
make sure that you mimic the natural daylight as closely as possible.
The second tip is to actually set your camera's white balance to match the color
temperature that you know you're using.
So what you can do is of course if you bought a light bulb and you know that it
is actually 4,500 Kelvins then you go into your camera and you tell your camera:
"hey,
the light source I'm using is 4,500 Kelvins" and your camera will auto adjust so
that the whites look white.
Now if you have a DSLR (a manual camera) obviously there is going to be a
setting for that,
but if you're using a smartphone - which most of you guys are probably doing,
and that's fair enough because they're really good enough these days - you can
also do that. I recommend you download an app that's free, that's called VSCO.
As you can see here,
it will let you adjust - with a little scale - the color temperature before you
actually take the shot to make sure that your whites are white.
And then my last tip when it comes to color temperature is for those of you who
are thinking: "but Deb,
I already have light bulbs and I really don't know what color temperature they
are, so how do I figure this out?". There are apps that can help you do that.
I think I did pay something like $2 for the one I'm about to mention,
so feel free to look for free options out there,
but I think that $2 is still pretty reasonable knowing that this is really
important for you to be able to make sales getting that right.
The app I use is called ISPEVO,
but you can also look it up under Light Spectrum Pro.
As you can see in my little screen recording here,
you simply open the app and then you sort of look around and you know,
I'm just moving it around here - hello!
- just to show you that as I'm moving in the room, the number at the top,
which is the Kelvins,
is changing and it's telling me what the color temperature is actually like.
So really handy to have if you already have light bulbs and you're not sure what
the color temperature is when you're taking a picture, then this is really easy:
just look at it through your phone and then you're ready to make the adjustment
that you need. Mistake number two is bad exposure,
and what bad exposure really means is bad lighting.
So in one case your picture is too dark and that means it's been underexposed
and on the other side your picture is way too bright and it's been overexposed.
It's really a fine balance between getting enough light but not too much light.
The reason we want to avoid underexposing or overexposing is first because it
doesn't look good and you lose details on your products when it's underexposed
because the pixels actually go dark and black. And when it's overexposed,
the pixels are actually getting burned and they turn white in part of your
picture - and it's not something that you can fix, even with editing.
So we want to avoid that - and how do we do that? Well,
we want to be close enough to the source of light so that you do get enough
light,
but we don't want to let it be directly onto the product.
If you are using natural sunlight,
then you want to make sure that you're close enough the source of light,
so let's say your window,
but that you're not letting the sun beams directly hit your product.
You want to be in the shade instead or you want to be using one of those light
boxes to make sure that the sun is coming through that and it's being filtered
through that lightbox before reaching your product.
If you're using artificial lights, then the same rules apply:
you don't want the light bulb to be directly reflecting onto the product and
directly beaming onto the product.
You want to use one of those white umbrellas or a lightbox to make sure that the
light bulb is sending light that's being filtered through the umbrella or the
lightbox before reaching your product.
Mistake number three is a weird or awkward angle.
This one is a little harder to explain but really the idea is to use common
sense to sort of pick the right angle at which to shoot your pictures,
because if you don't,
you're really going to distort the perspective and whatever product or object
you're taking a picture of is going to look longer or wider or just weirder.
To avoid it,
my best tip is really to think about how people in real life,
if your product was being sold in a shop,
would hold and look at this product.
So if I'm using my dirty mug here,
if I'm in a shop,
I'm realistically never going to look at it from an awkward, diagonal angle.
I'm always going to look at it like this cause I want to see the front of it and
I'll look in and then maybe I'll look down to see what's written at the bottom
of it, but it's never going to be on an awkward, sort of in between angle.
It's really important to think about that because first,
people can't touch the product so they want to see what they would want to see
in real life, and also because again,
if you take it from a weird angle,
you're going to make it look wider at the bottom than it is at the top when it's
not like that in real life and we don't want to have some distortion of
perspective here. Mistake number four has to do with cropping.
That's something I see in so many different shops all over the Internet,
all over Etsy. It's really easy to fix,
but it's really important to fix it because if you don't crop (cropping means
sizing your image properly) for whichever platform that picture is being used
on...
What you want to have is your product - I'm using my mug again - at the center
of the image. I don't want it to be too zoomed in,
I want it to be too far away from it and I definitely don't want to have one bit
of it cut off by the side of the picture and only see the middle of the cup.
What you want is really to be able to see the product in the picture in its
entirety for it to be not too close and not too far away, so not too zoomed in,
not too zoomed out.
That's really important because it means that you might need to crop and size
each image differently if you're using it on Pinterest, Instagram,
Etsy or on your own website and for whatever use you want to make of it.
Please try to think about the platform and where this image is going to be used
and make sure that I can see your product in its entirety and that it's not
being cut because that is not going to help you get clicks and that is not going
to help you get sales. Last mistake,
mistake number five has to do with editing and there are two sides to that
mistake:
one is you are not editing your pictures at all or enough and the other is
you're editing them too much.
One thing is clear and that is you always need to edit your pictures,
even if you follow all the tips we've covered in this video,
even if your set up was perfect,
there is always something that you can improve even slightly with a bit of
editing. It could be the brightness,
it could be the color adjustment as we've talked about color temperature and all
of that good stuff,
but really you need to be editing your pictures to make sure that they look as
good as they can.
Don't take it too far because you risk falling into the other side of that issue,
which is editing too much.
Editing too much means that you've gone a little bit too far,
maybe because our eyes get really used to it when we're editing a picture,
being on your phone or on a desktop app; you make a change, and then another one,
and another one and you forget what your original picture or your original shot
actually looked like.
It's really easy to get carried away - I've definitely been there myself,
but it's important to check: "Have I taken this too far?".
I see pictures online where you can't see any shadows at all and that's just not
real, it doesn't look real to the human eyes.
You don't want to delete your background and your shadows entirely because that
looks like your product is sort of flying.
You don't want to push the brightness too much because that sort of changes your
colors and then your cute little pink - like this - mug that I keep on showing
you guys (I love this mug) becomes so bright that it's not actually the real
color and then people are going to receive the product and go "that's not what I
ordered". We definitely don't want that.
And then too much editing just really makes your image look like it's not real.
So we don't want to go too far, but do edit your pictures.
If you don't know how to get started with editing your pictures,
I recommend you watch another video I've made and I'll link to it below this one,
all about editing apps and the one that I recommend if you're just getting
started being on your phone or on your desktop.
So if you're interested in learning more about that and diving into more product
photography videos, then check out the link just below.
That's it for today guys.
I hope this was helpful and that it will help you improve your images.
I would love to hear from you!
Let me know below in the comments what did you learn in this video that you
think you're going to be able to apply to improve your images and make sure to
subscribe to my channel so you get a notification each time I release a new
video,
which is every Tuesday and always with the goal of helping you start and grow a
successful and profitable handmade shop. Finally,
you will also find below this video link to my free resource library for makers
and handmade shop owners. It's completely free to access,
and there's a lot of guides and checklists and workbooks in there to help you
take your shop to the next level,
whether you're just starting out or you already have experience. So check it out.
I'm sure it will be helpful and I'll talk to you next Tuesday. Bye Bye.