White Background Photography: Lessons Learned on How to Take Product Photos for a Website

If you're building an e-commerce website, you might underestimate the learning curve and amount of effort required to take professional product photos. After all, everyone seems to have a smartphone and take photos every day. So, how hard could it be?

White background product photography is actually far more challenging than you might think, especially if you're not a seasoned product photographer. I've learned valuable lessons about crafting product images for an e-commerce site along the way, and I'm happy to share my experiences, but I can't, of course, guarantee that these tips will work for you.

Camera

I tried shooting product photography with a smartphone but found I needed a real camera with actual (not digital) zoom, a lens with manual mode, and an ability to control the various shutter and other settings. Without the ability to control the shutter settings, it's really hard to achieve an actual white background in product photos because you're stuck with the smartphone presets and have to rely entirely on lighting to achieve a white background. Newer smartphones may have access to these settings and you may have more luck than I did.

A smartphone can, however, be a good tool for quickly prototyping shots and judging how they might fit into your site prior to expending the effort to achieve a production quality photo.

Lightbox

If your goal is beautiful product photography, and you're photographing small products, you may find a lightbox useful. I certainly did. However, I also suffered a lot of aggravation by thinking I could build one myself.

My initial thought was, "It's just a box, right?" and I immediately set off to acquire whiteboard to build a white box where I could set the items I wanted to photograph. What I didn't really realize was that the lightbox is not simply just about a white surface on which to set small products, it's also about diffusing the light that's going to be interacting with the products. I found that it's important that the lightbox be built of a material that diffuses light.

Lightbox Kits

I purchased a "lightbox kit" that included both the lightbox and lights. What you may not know (because I certainly didin't) is that the lightbox kit you purchase may not actually be ideal for taking product photographs.

The kit I purchased, for instance, came with lights, but they were simple tabletop lights that are fixed. They were short and woefully inadequate to the task of lighting things from above. Having an ability to light an item from positions other than the side may be essential to your photo shoot, depending, of course, on your item.

More importantly, the lights came with "warm" colored bulbs. If you're an average person who isn't a lightbulb connoisseur, you may not even know that bulbs come in different color temperatures (as indicated by the kelvin measurement of the bulb). It just so happened that the two lights that came with the kit didn't provide enough lighting for the products I was photographing, so I acquired new height-adjustable lights that had built-in LEDs and discovered that lights can be entirely different colors. (By the way, mixing the two types of lighting is really difficult because you may end up with two distinctly different colors in your photograph).

I found that cool, blue-leaning lighting was far superior to warm, red-leaning lighting. In my experience, the cool lighting is far closer to the expected results when displayed on a monitor and it's easier to remove blue light through editing than red light.

Lightbox Alternatives

Lightboxes can make product photography with a white background easier, but they're certainly not necessary. In fact, there will probably be scenarios in which the subject of your photographs won't even fit into a lightbox.

When it wasn't possible to fit certain items in the lightbox, or to shoot an item at a particular angle (because the lightbox can be constricting), I moved to shooting on a white board. I found this more difficult, however, because it required contending with the surrounding environment and worrying about the fact that the lights were reflecting off the subjects (since the diffusing material was missing).

My solutions to these problems was to use several pieces of white board to build a partial box around the scene, to block out the environment, and to keep the lights on a low setting, at a somewhat far distance, and to compensate with settings on the camera. It seems hit or miss, and it was. Good luck.

Tripod

In my opinion, a tripod is a requirement for white background photography. In my experience, getting a white enough background required letting a lot of light into the camera, and I couldn't take stable pictures by hand with those settings.

Additionally, as a beginner, I did not realize that there are multiple types of tripods available, but one my best purchases was an overhead tripod that lets you shoot images from above an object.

Whitening a Scene

If you've ever painted a room, you know that there are a ton of different colors labeled a variant of "white". The same is true of lots of other things that exist in the world, except that they don't usually come with the benefit of being labeled something "not quite white". A technique that I found useful for whitening a scene (especially if placing a lightbox on something dark, for instance, or even if photographing on a not-quite-white white board), is to use 100 brightness paper underneath the object being photographed.

The 100 brightness is important, though, because otherwise you're shooting on an off-white that will be painful to remove in editing. You typically find the brightness number on the packaging of the ream of paper (or on the case) you're buying. Typical computer paper is 92 brightness and rather gray. You may have to do a little looking to find 100 brightness paper, and it will likely cost more than typical computer paper, but I think it's well worth it.

Daytime Lighting

At some point, you're likely to find advice telling you that photographing near a window in daytime is great because it will help you light your scene. My experience showed me that this worked for one-off photographs, but that it was too difficult to use when trying to take a series of photographs because natural light varies so drastically from day to day and often even hourly. Not to mention that on rainy or gloomy days, I was out of luck. I eventually concluded that it was much better to purchase sufficient lighting to light a scene so that I could even take photographs at night.

Shadows, Specular Highlights & Reflections

It's really hard to see shadows, specular highlights and reflections. I really needed to pay attention and maintain a mental checklist of these three items when setting up a scene. Look at each object in your scene carefully and check to see how the objects are casting shadows on one another, check for spots on your objects that are too bright, and check to see whether items are reflecting in ways you don't want. It's far easier to get these things right during the photoshoot (for instance, by adjusting lighting) than to try to edit them after the fact in a photo editing program.

Acquisition of Props

You might want to consider how much time and effort it's going to require for you to stage a scene. If you're simply photographing a product and already have the product, no problem. If you want to add interest to your photographs by staging a scene, you may find that acquiring the right props takes a tremendous amount of effort and time that you may need to factor into your timeline.

Layout of a Scene

If you're going to set up an entire scene, it's easier to arrange the scene multiple ways and shoot those variations in a single photo shoot than it is to break down the scene, then set it up again later. Common sense, but a time saver. You might benefit from taking quick photos with your smartphone to see if you're happy with your scene composition prior to taking final photographs.

Quality of Items

The quality of your input matters. A lot. Again, this might seem like common sense, but I find that common sense can easily get lost in the process of "just trying to take some photos". Don't try to take your production quality photographs with prototype quality items. You might think you can just clean it up in post-production, but unless you're the best of the best when it comes to editing, it's unlikely to work out well. Even when using production quality products, be sure to clean them, if possible, prior to shooting to ensure that things like dirt and smudges aren't present.

Continuinity of Shots

Don't forget to think about how you're going to at least try to maintain some semblance of consistency between your shots. When I think about e-commerce sites, the nicest ones are the ones where the photos are at least relatively consistent. This can be a challenge, but you should at least aim for consistency.

Get It Right During the Photoshoot

Editing photos is hard. When most people think of editing photos, they think of bumping up the saturation or slightly adjusting the color curve, then hitting save. But the kind of editing where you have to go nearly pixel-by-pixel is difficult, time-consuming, and error prone, and I find that it's really hard to judge the results of your work on your own. What looks fine to you with respect to an edited picture may look completely fake to someone else. It's really far easier to get the photo right while shooting than to try to clean it up later.

Additionally, you may find it saves a lot of time to take a few shots and then check them on a computer to make sure your photoshoot is heading in the right direction. It's highly unlikely that you'd be able to see very small gradations of gray on a camera's built-in screen, so checking your photos is essential. If you have an ultra high-end monitor, you may be able to notice small gradations. However, it's probably best if you use a color picker tool or similar to actually sample the colors at the edges of the photo to ensure that they're (255, 255, 255).

Inverse Is Your Friend

When editing your photos, inverse is your friend. This tool can help you determine if there's anything you haven't cleaned up — because it can be really difficult to determine (253, 253, 253) grays. However, once those gray photos are lined up in a grid in your website, they can become noticeable.

Additionally, many photo-editing programs open an image in its own isolated window. Having an image in isolation can make it exceedingly difficult to identify grays at the edges. A good trick for identifying grays is to place your edited photo into a canvas with additional white space (or even align your photos in a grid) to identify gray areas.

Two Is Better Than One

A photoshoot with two people is far easier than a photoshoot with one. Two people gives you an extra hand in checking scene layout and consistency, and an extra person can come in handy if you don't for instance have overhanging lights and need someone to hold a light in position. If you don't have the luxury of two people, having a consistent process for positioning your lights to shoot your items becomes very important.