Having photos of your product on your site is standard for selling your products online. But is there a difference between the best product photos (the ones that lead to the most sales) and the vast majority of them? Yes, there is.

The best product photos can sell the product almost as well as the product descriptions and reviews do. The best product photos bring clarity to your product’s value proposition and make it immediately obvious why people should buy your product. But how do the people who make these above-average product photos do this? How do they create great product photos that make people want to buy?

Below I will share some product photography techniques that, if you implement them into your product photography process, will enable you to create these kinds of photos. The photos that make money.

Get the right positions for your product

Within Photography, there is a technique known as the rule-of-thirds. What it boils down to, is that your product should be positioned within the image in such a way that the attention of the person looking at it focuses on the product more than anything else within the image.

This is achieved by placing the product in a position that it naturally draws the eyes to. Usually, this is in a corner or to the side within the image. Photographers usually use a 3x3 grid system in order to make the positioning easier. You can learn more about positioning, the rule of thirds, and the 3x3 grid system here.

Give a full picture of the product. Shoot all angles

If you only met a person one time, would you really be able to say that you know them well? No. So why would you only give your customers only one opportunity to meet your product? Taking and sharing multiple pictures (and even better, adding videos) of your product allows your customer to get a much more accurate picture of what you offer. It also gives them a great opportunity to visualize having and using your product. Which is key to selling it and getting them to want to buy. Allow your customer to get to know your product better, share more images!

Don’t skimp on a great camera

Imagine that you went to a high-quality jewelry website, looking for a diamond. Imagine that as you clicked through on the one that caught your eye, the next image you saw, the zoomed-in version of the original you had clicked, was a fuzzy, blurry image, that looks like it was shot with a $10 camera.

Would you still be as excited about forking over $1,000+ for that diamond accessory? Probably not. This is the value of having images of high quality. And it is especially when you’re trying to sell a product. Getting high-quality images has a lot to do with the quality of the camera you use. The better the camera, the better the image quality. Nowadays, you can even achieve high-quality image quality with smartphones. But the general rule still stands, better camera, better quality. So make the investment. Get (or rent) the camera for your product, that will give you the image quality that you need.

Get your lighting right

Without good lighting, your product will not have the chance to make the impression that you are looking for. Potential customers will struggle to see the product at its best. Great lighting can be achieved both naturally, with the correct use of natural sunlight and the positioning that is necessary to achieve this (ie by placing the product close to a windowsill).

We can also achieve it with the use of artificial lights, specifically made for product photography. The quality of the camera that is used to capture the photos can also have a big effect on how the product’s lighting ultimately turns out. Taking product photos that work in terms of lighting can be more an art than a science so it would be wise to read up on the ways in which the best photographers achieve their results.

Use a calm background

In most instances of photography, the background of the primary image, the focal point, adds to the overall impact of the image. In product photography, this is not the case. Backgrounds in the context of product photos do not add, they subtract from the impact of the image.

This is because, in product photography, the goal is to highlight the product, to the exclusion of everything else. A product competes with other products in the market to stand out above all the rest. In the same way, within an image, a product must be the most important part of it. Not competing with anything else. Least of all, a background.

The best way to ensure that your product maintains most of your potential buyer’s attention is to use a background that does not distract them. The best kind of background to use that ensures this is the white background.

Even better than a transparent background, which can end up backfiring by blending the image with whatever background exists on the overall webpage your product is on, a white background emphasizes whatever other colors we place on top of it. Maximizing another very important rule of good photography: The rule of contrast. Which you can read about here.

Steady your camera

One thing that the human mind is very good at spotting, even outside of our conscious awareness is balance. In the same way that we can instantly recognize beautiful scenery from an ugly one, your potential customers can recognize instantly when your product photos are out of balance. Even if by a tiny amount.

The best way to remedy this is to use tools that can help. Most people can nowadays use tripods. Which can be purchased at a much more reasonable price than in the past. We can use tripods with either phones or full-scale DSLR’s.

Retouch your photos

Natural photo editing is good. But when it comes to product-centered photography, photos that have been given a little extra with retouching are much better. It is now very common to change photos, even if slightly, to gain that bit more of an effect, and wow the potential customer.

You are competing in a market that has embraced tools such as photoshop and Figma as staples of effective product photography; it makes sense to keep your images at that same high level the market expects. You can learn more about how to retouch and edit your product photos here.

Tapha is the Founder of PlanFlow.dev, the easiest way to plan your website or mobile app