How To Use Your Smartphone To Capture High Quality Product Images

Make sure your lighting, focus, exposure, and position all look right. Make adjustments as needed and take test photos until you’re happy with the settings, then fire away.

Take a variety of photos of the product to show as much detail as possible. Use a telephoto or macro lens to zoom in on important features, such as texture. Take photos of the front and back, the inside and outside, the top and bottom. You can leave your tripod, background and lights in the same position and only move the product so the lighting and perspective will be consistent in all of the photos.

Editing

Once you’ve captured all the images you want, it’s time to edit. The camera apps listed earlier all have dynamic editing suites, so you can shoot and edit in the same app if you want to. Or you might like the camera controls in one app and the editing features in a different app.

Or you might not want to spend your own precious time editing images when you can get them professionally edited by Pixelz. And now if you’re using a smartphone to create more for your brand, we have mobile uploads feature that makes uploading your images and videos that much easier to the Pixelz Platform. Post-production is a great opportunity to take advantage of the efficiencies available in our interconnected, technology-driven world.

But back to mobile apps. While I use Lightroom (more on that later), Snapseed is another app worth mentioning. It’s one of the best mobile photo editing apps on the market, with advanced controls for experienced editors and plenty of easy-to-use features that just about anyone can figure out. For iOS and Android.

How to Edit:

Select the images you want to edit.

If you plan to edit in a different app than you shot in, you may need to export the photos to your camera roll first so you can import them to your editing app. I have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription and like editing in Lightroom, both for the features/ease of use, and so all of my photos sync from the cloud. For shooting, I like the Camera+ 2 interface better than Lightroom so I use one app to shoot and another to edit. It’s really personal preference. Most images need a little help to look their best. Use the app to make basic adjustments such as brightness, contrast, sharpness, highlights/shadows, and white balance. Don’t overdo it here. The goal is to make the product stand out and look as good as possible, but the image should still be an accurate representation of what the product really looks like. Artistic flare like filters, borders, tints, and over saturation should all be avoided. Once you’ve finished editing your first photo, you can save the settings you used as a ‘preset’ so you can apply the same edits to the other photos in the set. Creating a preset saves time but make sure to look at each photo individually after applying the preset in case you need to make small adjustments. Presets are great but aren’t always one-size-fits-all.

Side note: If you're interested in learning more about Lightroom features like Tethered Capture, Presets, and Batch Editing, I collaborated on this guide on how to use Adobe Lightroom for product photography. It goes well with the non-smartphone DIY guide to building your own photo studio.

Final Product Image... or is it?

You can take what you have right now, pictured below, and put it up on your e-commerce website. If you've followed the steps in this blog post and your product is fairly straightforward, it should look great!

The above image was captured and edited entirely in a smartphone. That's pretty neat! Of course, you may not always have the time, desire, or ability to capture AND edit images yourself.

If your product is more challenging (for example if it's reflective, or you're shooting white products on white backgrounds), you need additional editing (like background removal or retouching), or you simply need editing done in bulk and don't want to do it yourself—take advantage of a service like Pixelz.

It's easy, fast, and high quality. That's why Pixelz is trusted by leading brands worldwide.