Help doing my own ecommerce/product photos.

carlg

TPF Noob!
Joined
Mar 29, 2021
Messages
2
Reaction score
0
Can others edit my Photos
Photos OK to edit
Hello,

I just signed up and thought this may be a nice place to ask some questions.

I have a lot of different products that I sell on the web. I've been using my phone for a long time now for product photography. After I take the images with my phone, I use Gimp to modify them. I typically adjust the curves, color enhance, and sharpness.

I thought it's now time to move up to the next level. I bought a DSLR camera last night. It is a low end DSLR (Cannon Rebel EOS T7), but at least it's a DSLR and should be better than my phone. My only intent is to use this camera for photos of my products so I figured the low end should suffice.
I'm starting to learn the camera a little bit after a day.

My question is this:
When I'm using a higher quality camera such as a DSLR should I still need to do modifications with Gimp when they come out of the Camera? Or is the camera good enough that I can pull production ready photos directly out of the camera? With exception to cropping of course.

I guess what I am trying to do is set my expectations first. Therefore I have somewhat a goal to shoot for.

Thanks in advance!
 
Congratulations! You have stepped up from (probably) an 8mp smartphone camera to a 24mp dslr. You should be able to see a big difference in detail.

You are probably going to want to establish a standard workflow and stick to it. You'll probably want to use a viewer or Gimp to decide which photos to keep and which to throw away. Editing the ones you keep will not be much different from what you are doing with your smartphone camera images. Standard processing is adjusting white point, tone curves, dust removal and sharpening.

One thing that is going to change with a dslr is depth of field (DOF) as you have control over your aperture. You'll want to read up on aperture priority mode and DOF. You will want to shoot at your camera's base ISO for best dynamic range and tonal range. If shooting jpgs, there are bunch of in camera settings to worry about like white balance, image size, image quality / compression, ... , so read your owner's manual. You'll probably want to use a tripod and a remote release or the camera's timer to avoid camera shake. Have fun!
 
Congratulations! You have stepped up from (probably) an 8mp smartphone camera to a 24mp dslr. You should be able to see a big difference in detail.

You are probably going to want to establish a standard workflow and stick to it. You'll probably want to use a viewer or Gimp to decide which photos to keep and which to throw away. Editing the ones you keep will not be much different from what you are doing with your smartphone camera images. Standard processing is adjusting white point, tone curves, dust removal and sharpening.

One thing that is going to change with a dslr is depth of field (DOF) as you have control over your aperture. You'll want to read up on aperture priority mode and DOF. You will want to shoot at your camera's base ISO for best dynamic range and tonal range. If shooting jpgs, there are bunch of in camera settings to worry about like white balance, image size, image quality / compression, ... , so read your owner's manual. You'll probably want to use a tripod and a remote release or the camera's timer to avoid camera shake. Have fun!

Yes thanks. A standard process is what I need. I have at least 500 product photos that I will need to redo, so I need to be able to run through them quickly if I can. I'm hoping this is possible once I get a good pattern established. Once I do this, I only will need to do photos when I add new products.
 
The most important is the light.

I would also buy something better than a phone for product photography, but it's not going to make a big difference if you use them the same way.
 
I am not going to push you on this but also consider the lens, and what lighting (as mentioned) and background/soft box.
This is a bit more advanced, but the final product set you apart. If you already do not have it, get a small tripod and remote.
 
with product photo and relatively stable lighting and conditions you should be able to have set of profiles/presets for your photo manipulation program .. I suggest doing the most of the stuff in some RAW editor (like RawTherapee) that supports non-destructive editing ... I believe, that gimp is not needed unless you're some additional stuff like adding a text to photos or adding a frames or doing some local adjustments
 
If they are small items, A table top light box would help. Canon 60mm 2.8 macro would be helpful as well. You don't mention what type of product your shooting and what platform your selling them on.
 
for me, some phones also take many good pictures of products. It takes a long time to learn how to take product photography with a camera. i think.
 
Hello,

I just signed up and thought this may be a nice place to ask some questions.

I have a lot of different products that I sell on the web. I've been using my phone for a long time now for product photography. After I take the images with my phone, I use Gimp to modify them. I typically adjust the curves, color enhance, and sharpness.

I thought it's now time to move up to the next level. I bought a DSLR camera last night. It is a low end DSLR (Cannon Rebel EOS T7), but at least it's a DSLR and should be better than my phone. My only intent is to use this camera for photos of my products so I figured the low end should suffice.
I'm starting to learn the camera a little bit after a day.

My question is this:
When I'm using a higher quality camera such as a DSLR should I still need to do modifications with Gimp when they come out of the Camera? Or is the camera good enough that I can pull production ready photos directly out of the camera? With exception to cropping of course.

I guess what I am trying to do is set my expectations first. Therefore I have somewhat a goal to shoot for.

Thanks in advance!
This is an old thread, but perhaps a couple of comments may not be amiss. You have complete control of the entire process - subject placement, lighting, &c, so the only post processing needed ought to be cropping. The software that came with the camera should suffice. A big advantage of a reflex camera is that you can see the depth of field. My personal preference would be a manual focus lens with a depth of field scale.
 

Most reactions

Back
Top