Handmade product photography: Tips!

For people who hand-make products, putting your best foot forward in product photographs can make all the difference in an potential customer’s decision.  Here’s our little guide to simple, inexpensive, and beautiful handmade product photography.

Get that perfect photo!

Handmade Product Photography:

1. Products generally stand out better if your background is not too distracting.  Simple textures on the floor (e.g. a nice wood  table, bricks, a tablecloth) work really well.  You don’t need to try and be crazy unique with your background.
   
2. Take your photos in an area with indirect natural light.  If you are outside and you look at the floor and your shadow is really faint or not there at all, it’s the perfect time.  An overcast day, just after dawn or just before dusk usually work well.
3. If your item is rather simple (like a bar of soap), think of adding a small garnish to spice it up.  For soap, use one of the ingredients—for example, we sat the Oatmeal honey soap from our February surprises down on some actual Oatmeal:
4. Take a bunch of photos, in all different locations.  Do some close-ups, straight-ons, as well as some crazy angles and further-away shots.  You may be surprised what ends up looking the nicest.
   
5.  Do a little bit of post-editing in a photo program.  This doesn’t have to involve monster Photoshopping skills.  On a Mac, open the image in Preview, go to Tools>Adjust Color.  Try increasing the exposure just a tad (to the right) and pushing the Saturation a tiny bit to the right as well.  If there are a lot of shadows in your image, try moving the Shadows bar to the right a bit.  This might not work for every photo, so play around with these settings a bit.

    

6. Be sure to crop your photo so that the product is the center of attention.  Crop out any messy background distractions.
7. Voila!

Want some help with a particular photo?  We’d love to give you pointers or make quick little edits!  Email :  info@fairivy.com for help!

Ps. We have some other lovely examples of handmade product photography over on one of our Pinterest boards: check it out here!