Eight Photoshop Tips for Product Shots By Helen Bradley
January 8, 2008
Whether you take your own product photos or you use shots supplied by a manufacturer, chances are the photos will need tweaking before being uploaded to your e-store. Photoshop is a great tool for working with digital images and you can use it to do everything from cropping them to giving them a totally new look. Here are my best tips for using Photoshop to prepare photos for your e-commerce Web site.
Straighten the Image Many images out of the camera are anything but level, and, crooked images are distracting to your customers. To straighten an image, locate and select the Ruler tool, which shares a toolbar position with the Eyedropper tool. Drag the ruler along a line in the image, which should be perfectly horizontal or vertical. Now, choose Image > Rotate Canvas > Arbitrary - a value will already appear in the dialog - this is the rotation you set using the Ruler. Click OK and the image will be straightened automatically. Now all you need do is to crop it.
The Ruler tool helps determine the angle to rotate an image to straighten it.
Fix Muddy and Lackluster Photos If your photos are lackluster or if they look muddy, a levels adjustment is a great fix. It might look like a complicated fix — but it's easy. Choose Image > Adjustments > Levels to display the Levels dialog, which displays a chart showing the tonal range in the image. Every image looks different; what's important is the left and right ends of the chart. Drag the sliders, which appear immediately under the chart, inwards till they sit under the very ends of the chart shape. Drag the middle of the three sliders to lighten or darken the image. Click OK.
Remove Imperfections Sometimes products have dust and dirt on them or there is something unsightly in the image that needs to be removed. The Clone Stamp tool is a good correction tool for most situations. Click it to select it and then select the brush shape and size to use to paint out the problem. Do this in the tool options at the top of the screen. A circular soft edge brush is a good choice. Alt + Click on an area of the image to sample as the 'paint' you'll use and then paint out the problem area. Sample from different areas, if needed, to get a good result. It's best to click repeatedly over the problem area rather than dragging the mouse in a painting motion.
Blur Unsightly Background When you have distracting detail behind a product in a photo, blur it away. To do this, first make a selection around the image using your favorite selection tool. The magnetic lasso tool is a good one to use if the product has well defined edges. Select either the portion of the image that you want to keep as is of the portion to blur — whatever is easier to select. If you select the portion you want to retain, choose Select > Inverse to invert the selected area.
To soften the edge of the selection, if you are using Photoshop CS3, choose Select > Refine Edge and adjust the edge settings to get a softer result. For earlier versions of Photoshop CS3 choose or Select > Feather and apply a small feather (2-3 pixels), to the selection. To blur this area, choose Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and apply a small blur — use the image as a guide as to how much is enough. Click OK.
(Continue to Page 2 for more Photoshop image-editing tips.)
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