Web Diner's Guide to E-Commerce for Small Businesses |
Tips for Creating Great Photos |
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A good picture can be more convincing a buyer to purchase your product than a million words of rhapsodic description. The following tips will help you create clear photos.
Take more than one picture, changing the position, focus and lighting each time so that you have a good assortment of final images to choose from. Experiment with your camera and/or scanner to find the best possible image. Take pictures of the front and back, inside and outside if it helps to give a better description of your product. Take closeups of any important details. Sometimes it's helpful to photograph the object with something else in order to show scale. You might want to put a ruler or some ordinary household object (a quarter, a pencil) next to your item to show scale. Photograph your product on a plain background that's not distracting. You can drape a piece of fabric like a plain tablecloth or sheet behind your product to mask out any distracting details. For large objects, you might want to pin a sheet or large piece of paper on a wall or fence behind the object. Unless you have a great camera and/or a good professional lighting set up, taking photos outside generally produces the best lighting results. If your product is flat, like a booklet or magazine, you can scan it directly using a flatbed scanner. It might also be worthwhile scanning small items on a flatbed scanner. Rounded objects and metallic or shiny objects may produce strange colors and artifacts, however, so experiment. Once you have some great shots scanned in or imported in from your digital camera you'll want to scale them down and save them in a format that won't take forever to download. We recommend sizing your image down to no more than 200 pixels in any direction. Photos should be saved in the JPG file format. Try saving your JPGs with low quality compression. You don't want potential buyers clicking away because your image is taking forever to download!
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