Guideline: Making Images for Your Online Shop

The times are changing: more and more customers opt for online shopping. It is convenient: no time wasted driving to the mall, trying on endless items, and talking to the shop assistants.

For the best online shopping experience, you need quality customer service: prompt support, an intuitive website, and, most importantly, authentic photos to present the actual product.

A customer who does not get exactly what they expected to buy is highly unlikely to come back even if your online shop is almost perfect in every other way. Post realistic, accurate photos, and your customers will come back.

How to take such photos?

All you need is the information presented here, good light (natural light would be enough), and a camera (your smartphone will do just fine). And, surely, some enthusiasm!

Where and how to take photos?

Startup businesses usually lack large budgets. Still, it is possible to take high-quality photos at home. Natural daylight is the key factor. The best time is before noon and in the evening when the sun is just starting to set. This way we get warm and bright light.

First, use a monochrome background. Background materials are available at art stores.

The regular white paper would do for small items. You may also use an inexpensive lightbox (a transparent cube). An ordinary cool light bulb is used in lightboxes. The light inside is mixed and diffused, and the shadows are removed. With this, the customer focuses on the product itself.

A light background is the best option to emphasize your product and make a realistic image. If the product is also light, play with the contrast settings.

You can make the background white in a graphic editor, but the best approach for the beginner is a large light pane as a background.

If you sell clothes, steam or iron them before filming. Clothes look better not on hangers, but real people. In this way, your customers will easily visualize the item and imagine how it will look on them.

As you gain experience, try new techniques: various background colors, more complicated arrangements, and taking pictures outdoors or in a studio setting.

Adhere to your style

Use an identical color palette: the product environment should complement it, not distract. If you sell handmade candles, take photos indoors, add dried flowers, or other fine details. Remember to focus on your product, the rest is just the environment designed to emphasize the pros and present the use scenarios.

Angles and Cropping

What angles are beneficial to present the product and not mislead the customer? Rule #1: take pictures not only of the entire product but also of its parts. Take the front and back views.

Check if the photos of the same product match each other. Make sure the horizon is straight, the scale is similar, and the lighting is adequate and without strong glares. Multiple photos of the product should have a consistent look.

2can Shop supports multiple images of a product. Use it to highlight the product features.

Example. If you are selling cardigans, take pictures of the small details like buttons, seams, and fabric: anything that conveys the actual quality of the product.

How to edit photos?

Post-processing is a big deal. Using a photo editor, you can remove the background to emphasize the product. You can also adjust the saturation and colors to get the hues right, or sharpen the image to make the texture visible. Let us consider some popular yet easy-to-use photo editors.

GIMP

GIMP is probably the best free photo editor. It offers convenient editing, cropping, and color adjustment tools, and does image enhancement. _

PhotoScape X

The list of PhotoScape X tools is almost endless. The software has thousands of filters, frames, brushes, clipping masks, and color palettes.

Canva

A photo editor for both beginners and professionals. It can also be used to create presentations and social media posts.

Try several online editors and choose the one that best fits your needs.

Key points when you edit photos

Aligning and Cropping

Use the tools to crop your photo so that the product is exactly at the center. Make sure the horizon is straight.

Shadows

Shadows can be on the product, or the product can cast a shadow. The former spoils the image and makes it hard to see the product. The latter, on the contrary, adds some realism. Follow the key rule: the shadows must fall in the same direction. This means you should fix the product and light source and not touch them as you are taking photos.

Color Reproduction

Make sure the photos convey the true color of the product. Otherwise, your customers will be greatly disappointed upon delivery, and you’d face many returns. Always convert JPEG files to the sRGB color space. See below why it is so important.

When taking pictures of multiple configurations of the same product different in colors or sizes, always try to place the product and light source in the same position to get consistent photos.

Make sure you use the 2can Shop modifiers: they help the customers choose the right configuration. With the modifiers, there is just one main product page with various options, not many pages for each new configuration.

To add a product modifier in 2can Shop, go to the product page. Make sure the product type is Including Stock. Scroll down the product page and click the New modifier link by the Modifier field. In the pop-up window enter the name of the modifier and fill in the fields. Click the Add and then the Save buttons.

Learn more about the modifiers in 2can Shop.

Сolor space

sRGB is the standard color space for all monitors, TVs, projectors, phones, and tablets. It most accurately reproduces the actual color of the product.

Photos are automatically saved in the Adobe RGB color space. However, most applications use the RGB color space with fewer colors resulting in a loss of quality.

To keep your colors bright, convert images for the website to the RGB format.

Image Format and Size

So, the photos are taken and processed. Now let’s figure out the image size and format.

For an online shop photo, a size of about 600x900 pixels is enough (2:3 aspect ratio). Other great aspect ratios are 1:1 and 4:3. Choose the most aesthetically appealing to you. Make sure all the photos have the same aspect ratio while no side should exceed 1,000 pixels.

Now you are about to make a highly important decision: which image file format to use. There are many formats with some specific features.

JPEG is the most common format. It is very easy to work with and a great choice for multicolor images. Most photo editors save images in this format by default.

PNG takes up more space than JPEG but supports a transparent background. Perfect for logos, drawings, and icons.

GIF is smaller than PNG but much inferior in quality. Pros: it supports animations.

WebP is the newest format. It is lightweight, but not supported by all browsers.

Note that Android phones take photos immediately in JPG, while iOS uses HEIC. HEIC can be viewed on Apple devices only so it is to be converted into JPEG anyway.

Image Compression

File sizes are measured in kilobytes (KB) or megabytes (MB). A smartphone photo size is about 5 MB. It is a high-quality image, but who would appreciate it if it takes a good minute to load? Try to keep your photos down to 100…500 kB. Such photos have a sufficient level of detail and are quickly loaded without taking up too much user traffic.

To compress the final image, you can use services such as JpegMini, TinyPNG and TinyJPG, ImageOptimizer, Compressjpeg, and Compresspng.

Web Site Image Optimization and indexing

How to make sure that photos are properly indexed by search engines? Try to use meaningful file names: Google uses image file names to index your photos.

Ideally, the file name should match your product shown in the photo. The name may include keywords so your product gets featured in the search results.

For example, “Image123.jpg” is not a good filename while “Blue velvet bag.jpg” is fine.

Also, add as much detail as possible in the product description in 2can Shop: this will not only encourage the customer to buy but also improve the SE indexing.

Upload the final photos to the 2can Shop catalog. Read the detailed guide on how to create the catalog.

All these tips are just the beginning: mastery comes with experience. To become a pro, practice all the time and try something new. The tips in this article will help you create high-quality photos for your online shop, and increase your average check and customer loyalty.

To learn more about editing photos for online stores wait for the next guide on aesthetic image processing.