Improving Your Photographs

Almost any digital camera can get halfway decent photographs if you know a few tips about taking photos. Ideally, you would have your products photographed in a light box, which has great lighting and takes away the distracting background. An inexpensive way to get this look is to use a sheet of white posterboard and set it up outside on a sunny or bright morning.

Set it up in a shady spot with half on the seat of a chair and leaning the other half against the back of the chair. Set up your scene and photograph away. For some larger products, it may be better to have the whole posterboard laying out flat on the ground.

Many times this will make the white appear blue- this is easily fixed in Adobe Photoshop or another graphics program.In Photoshop, use Curves (Ctrl-M) to play with the adjustment. Take several photos so you can get a bunch of different angles. Taking several photos also helps ensure that you will get a useable one. Make sure you don't get your shadow in any of the photos.

When you need to take photos of, say, a storefront- something that cannot be picked up and moved- try to choose a nice sunny morning (not after 10:00a or so depending on where you are) where the light shines toward the object you are photographing. If the light is behind the object or you just can't get it to work out well, try taking the photo on a overcast day and using Curves in Photoshop (Ctrl-M) to fix the color.

When in doubt, take lots of photos and send them all to us, we can help choose the one that will best complement your site.

This article is © 2010 by Christine Leiberan-Titus of CreativelyWebbed, and is reprinted with permission. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative-Works 3.0 United States License. Only this article is included in this specific license.