Retouching for Accurate and Beautiful Product Images
Retouching can be a hotly debated topic. From altering the way a product is represented to making a model appear thinner—what is appropriate to present to your customer? That question may be answered differently for each brand. Your products and your values as a brand should lead to how you handle retouching your ecommerce product photos.
The Standard
Professional ecommerce product photos should, at a minimum, follow a baseline retouching standard. This would include things like cropping/sizing, color correction, and basic cleanup of the background, model, and/or product. As a brand, it’s a good idea to set brand-specific standards that are consistent and represent your product and brand well.
The cropping of your photos is more important than you may think. Without consistent cropping guides, your product listing pages will look inconsistent and degrade the overall aesthetic quality of your website. Imagine a category page of t-shirts with each shirt sized completely different from one another. Even if you have beautiful product photography the inconsistent sizing is jarring to a customer and you’ll lose a cohesive feel on your webpage.
Sizing of your product is important to maintain consistency on your site and to keep products proportionate with one another.
Ensuring your color is accurate is another important aspect when considering your baseline retouching standards. Color can be tricky on ecommerce sites since you don’t have control over the end user’s display or viewing conditions. Just because a product looks blue on your screen does not mean it may look that way on someone else’s screen. The most important thing to remember is to be consistent and follow the same process every time. Get the color as accurate as possible on-set by white balancing and then make tweaks in post production as necessary. Even if you white balance to get to a neutral starting point, some stronger colors, like reds or greens may shift cooler or warmer in camera. Use the same full-gamut display every time you edit to get consistent results.
Clean it Up!
Finally, you’ll want to do a general cleanup to show your product in the best way possible. Backgrounds and products should always be clean and free from dirt, dust, scratches, etc. Floors will often get scuffed and marked up when shooting–these should be removed since it’s quicker and less costly in post-production than to drop new paper or paint during your shoot. Typically, background color and exposure adjustments will also be necessary. This could mean clipping the background, matching a hex code, or blending to create more consistent background color or shadows.
Cleanup of the skin and product can become a gray area but start with your objective fixes. Bruises, blemishes, and scrapes on a model that would be gone in a few days should typically be removed since these aren’t a permanent part of the model. Product should be represented accurately to prevent returns. Your product should look symmetrical and straight but altering the product’s shape or silhouette or removing natural wrinkles should be avoided in post-production.
Retouching flaws and scrapes is necessary so your customer’s focus isn’t taken away from the product.
Stylistic Choices
Although these are good baseline standards for editing your ecommerce product photos, you can always go above and beyond and may have specific stylistic choices that represent your brand or products. This is where manipulation to the product or model becomes more common–from heavy wrinkle removal to smoothing skin. Be careful though–too much alteration can increase your returns if it’s too far from what the actual product looks like.
One common trend is to remove all wrinkles and movement from a garment to make it look as perfect as possible. This is a stylistic choice that has its pros and cons. It may keep your product looking nice and clean and consistent next to one another and may show off the shape well but wouldn’t be the best way to show fabric consistency or texture.
Flat lays styled and edited to have no wrinkles or movement create a clean, linear aesthetic.
Unique Needs
You may also have unique retouching needs for your ecommerce products photos. From jewelry retouching to compositing, anything is possible in post-production. Although we like to capture as much as possible in-camera we all know that’s not always possible.
In some cases, leveraging color creation or compositing may allow you to start selling sooner. Brands that struggle with sample manufacturing delays can use post-production to help create products that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to shoot in time. Again, it’s good to weigh the pros and cons. How accurately will you be able to represent the product? How natural will it look? Is this a faster and less expensive option to get this product live?
Colors of the same styles that weren’t available until after the photoshoot were created in post-production. This meant the brand could start selling without booking another shoot.
Retouching can mean many things to many people. When it comes to your ecommerce product photos set your brand-specific standards that make sense for your product. Take into account every little detail because your customer is scrutinizing them. Beautiful product photography is only a click away. Contact us today!
