How-to do product photography

Newest triforce necklace

As with everything on this site, I've doing a lot of "learning as you go".  My Etsy store is finally up, although I don't have anything listed yet.  Before you list things you want to take good photos showing off what you made, and so far that really hasn't been the case.  The above photo of my new triforce necklace is a good example of how much more things will stand out with a good image.

What I started with:

• Decent camera (preferably something you can manually focus)
• White photo area (can be a box with a reasonably white sheet/poster-board)
• GNU image manipulation program (a.k.a. poor mans photoshop)

 Basically, don't lie to yourself and say that you can make good product photos without photoshopping them to some extent.  If you browse Etsy or any other store every image that really stands out has probably been edited to some moderate extent.  The most blaring example is the white background.  No actual photo has a "white" background, but having a clean background makes the product really stand out.  To achieve this you take the photo of the item in the white box. Do this WITHOUT THE FLASH.  A tripod really helps here because your camera will need to take the photo over a longer duration and everyone shakes a little (I don't have a tripod yet so my photos are always a little blurry still).  You need it without flash because most crafts are shiny and the flash with reflect (rendering the dice difficult to see in the case of my jewelry).  Next you take your image (which is probably somewhat dark since you didn't use a flash) and run it through an image editor.  Most of the time you can just do some kind of "auto-whiteness" adjustment on the image to get the darkness out of the image.  After that use the magic wand (I set it to a tolerance of around 80) to select the almost-white background (hold shift to add in areas that are enclosed like the areas inside the necklace).  Go to the selection menu, click feather, and do around a 5 pixel feather (softens edges around the item).  Then take the paint bucket, pick white color, set tolerance to max, and fill in everywhere selected with white.  Overall, pretty simple to get a much nicer image.  See below for the other jewelry I did this for.

~Glitterforge Phoenix
 P.S. - Around 5 days until the order comes in to continue work on the Akasha Cosplay costume