Enhance Your Boutique’s Clothing Photography

clothing photography

Are you new to clothing photography? Many boutique owners may find it challenging to take stunning product images for an online clothes business. But what if we told you it’s simple and doable with the appropriate technique, tools, and a little practice? To generate appealing product images that sell, you don’t have to be a professional photographer or pay for one!

We’ll teach you how to snap clear, stunning shots of garments in this tutorial. The greatest thing is that you don’t have to be a professional photographer to accomplish it. With these simple methods and regular practice, you’ll be producing stunning images for your shop in no time. Are you ready to elevate the clothing photography in your store to the next level? Continue reading.

1. The Importance of Location

Even before you prepare your attire or accessories for clothing photography, one of the first things you should consider is where you will shoot. It’s sometimes all about location, women!

A common fallacy is that you must have a studio area to capture beautiful photographs, which is untrue! Investing in a studio is unnecessary, mainly if you are not ready to commit financially or aesthetically.

Great images are genuine and appealing; therefore, the less planned they are, the better. Shooting your pictures outside in natural daylight is often favored because of the natural state and the relatable sense people receive when they view your photos.

You have choices if you want to shoot inside but aren’t ready to invest in a typical photography studio. Look for open, natural-light-filled houses or offices and plain white or light backdrops that aren’t disturbing to the eye.

2. Outdoor Shooting

If you want to shoot outside, keep the following tips in mind! Your backdrop should be simple and modest for the items to stand out! Avoid distracting and visually confusing surroundings, such as trees, items, people, or congested walkways. Avoid using bright red brick walls so that the color casts over your model or clothing and distorts the outfit or goods you’re selling.

Glass panels or storefront windows are another kind of backdrop to avoid. These might produce undesired reflections (even your photographer’s reflection!) and distract the viewer from what you want them to concentrate on, ultimately changing the atmosphere of your shot.

Not every shot should be taken in front of the same wall or backdrop, but try to make the backdrops constant and comparable so that your images express the same vibe.

White walls, light-colored stone walls, or any area with a bright, open, and breezy backdrop are excellent choices for outdoor clothing photography. This will result in a lovely shot highlighting your primary focus: the model and your merchandise!

3. Photograph in Open Shades

When shooting outside, seek open shade rather than shooting straight into the sun. The open shade will provide the finest natural lighting for your images without making them look too bright or washed out.

Open shade is an outdoor area that is still full of natural light but cast in a large enough shadow to give equal lighting without enabling sun streaks to come through and appear in your images.

Shooting in open shade will provide the most consistent lighting in your images and enable you to concentrate on accentuating the beauty of your items to secure those sales!

4. Photo Retouching

Product photographs that are clear, bright, and polished sell well. Your editing technique should be consistent from shot to shoot. Finally, you’re developing your brand, and although items may vary, your brand’s look should typically remain consistent.

You’ll want to make sure that you’re editing your images consistently. This entails utilizing the same preset or editing technique on every shot. You may use Lightroom for this; it’s simple to use and has a lot of presets. To bulk edit, you may utilize AutoRetouch, which has all the fundamental components and bulk editing capability.

5. Purchase a Professional Camera

Don’t let picking a fantastic camera for your company overwhelm you. Purchasing a professional camera does not have to be expensive! Even a low-cost DSLR can do wonders for your brand’s appearance and deliver stunning photographs.

The advantage of using a DSLR camera is that the images will have a smoother, cleaner, and more professional finish and will eventually exhibit your items in a manner that will position them to sell.

6. Getting to Know Your Camera

You’ll need and desire a basic grasp of ISO, aperture (F-stop), and white balance to take attractive photos. Before taking beautiful images, you need to fine-tune these three camera settings.

It may seem strange initially, but we assure you it will make sense as you practice! Each camera (and even your smartphone) may be configured differently, but these three fundamental settings are universal!

7. Photograph All Angles

It’s easy to focus only on your subject’s front or primary angle while shooting it. For example, your model is wearing your future maxi dress, which will be perfect for the autumn! You have a lovely shot of her wearing the outfit and smiling at the photographer. Perfect! But you’re not done yet! Don’t forget to include several perspectives and detailed product photos! This includes side views, the back of the object, and close-ups to display the nuances of a pattern or fabric. Take a range of images so your buyers can see all the intricacies and realize how fantastic your items are!

8. Make Use of Props

Another suggestion is to include objects in your shots! This method will not only make your clothing photography more appealing, but it will also provide another degree of relatability for your buyer.

Remember, you want your photographs to reflect your business while also displaying some personality and highlighting the connection between what you’re offering and why your buyer needs it. Adding movement and props is the ideal method to do this! One example is a handheld fan blowing on a maxi dress or skirt to give it movement. Make your model carry a flower arrangement or maybe a cup of coffee. Including a real-life aspect will help you develop a speedier bond with your consumer since they will be able to see themselves performing the same thing in that same attire! One bit of advice: make sure your item contributes to the tale rather than being a distraction!

9. Model Lookup

While there is nothing wrong with photographing your apparel or things for your store using mannequins, the trend is shifting away from that technique and toward employing models to showcase your business better!

If you don’t already have a set of models you work with, a variety of services are available to help you locate the perfect fit. Contact local modeling agencies (models.com, yelp, google “model agencies near me,” modelmayhem.com) or use Instagram to identify fashion influencers that suit your brand. Working with fashion influencers is an excellent alternative since they often already have a platform with an audience that appreciates and trusts them, and they may even be less costly to work with than certain agencies. You’ll also be able to dictate the conditions of your collaborative connection!

Conclusion

Taking stunning images for your company is critical to distinguishing and selling your items successfully! But don’t be alarmed by the procedure. Learning to capture and edit stunning photos doesn’t have to be challenging if you follow our top suggestions for success! Just remember to prepare ahead of time! Spend some time getting to know your camera and experimenting with its settings! You’ll rapidly figure out what looks excellent and what doesn’t. Plus, the more quickly you are with your camera, the more confident you will be when it comes time for the big photoshoot!

Best Practices for Making Topnotch Edits for E-Commerce Catalogs

E-Commerce Catalogs

How your products look on your e-commerce site affects how well they sell, how trustworthy they seem, and how much people value your brand. And this is why editing photos has become essential to managing product catalogs. E-commerce businesses have to organize and keep track of many SKUs to ensure that their products are all of the same high quality. More than 56% of customers look into a product after seeing an image of it, which shows how important it is to edit product photos. In this blog, we’re going to talk about the best ways to edit product photos that have been tried and tested and that will improve how e-commerce catalogs look.

The Best Ways To Edit Photos For E-Commerce Catalogs

Online retail and e-commerce companies focus on their product catalogs because they are all about the visual experience. Here are a few tried-and-true tips for editing photos that will make your users happier and help you sell more products. Let’s get started on making the best version of the website’s look and feel.

Put The Picture In The Center

The product photos should be in the middle, and they should all be the same size and shape, no matter how tightly the grid functions on mobile phones are used. It is very important to leave the same portion of space between the edge of the photo and the product. Photo editing service providers need to pay attention to these things so that the site looks the same and the images are all the same size.

Use A White Backdrop.

The white background has become the standard for e-commerce product catalogs, as more than 80% of companies follow the same rules. Using a white background can prevent color spills, eliminate shadows, reduce file size, and eliminate other distractions that make the photos look different. It’s one of the most common and important ways to edit photos, and it will help standardize the images and ensure they meet the market benchmark.

Make Sure the Lighting Is Proper.

One of the best ways to edit photos to improve how your product looks is to ensure that the lighting is the same in all pictures. If you use the proper lighting, your customers will be able to compare the items and decide which ones to buy. Also, if you want to add 3D effects to your image, you should use the textures from grayscale files or bump maps. You can choose from many different types of lighting, with point, spot, and infinite being the most common.

Don’t Change the Colors Too Much.

To change the color of your products, it’s best to use color correction tools like Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop. Photo editing services use these tools to make the image brighter and get more light on it. When you increase the contrast, the lighter parts of the image get brighter. On the other hand, if you decrease the contrast, your product image will get darker. Adjusting the sharpness and clarity of a photo can make a picture of a product look very clear.

Use Drop Shadow to Get Accurate

A drop shadow is one of the best ways to edit photos to make them look like they were taken in real life. The drop shadow technique gives your products a 3D effect by giving them a sense of depth and being rooted in the world. It uses reflection shadows to make a cast shadow that looks real and makes the photos look more authentic. We recommend using drop shadows instead of cast shadows because the drop shadow gets lighter and blurrier as it gets closer to the product. Using the blend of the gradient tool and the drop shadow tool helps make an image look like it’s in 3D.

Make Sure All The Photos Are The Same

To enhance the user experience on your e-commerce site, it is very important to make sure that the images are all the same. To do that, you need to change the contrast, color, warmth, white balance, exposure, etc., so that the look, size, format, page loading, and feel of the whole product catalog are the same. We don’t recommend making the same changes and corrections over and over again because it could make the image look strange.

Resize Image as Per Web Aspects

An important part of editing photos is making sure that the product images are the right size for the web. This ensures quality and consistency. The size and quality of the images matter a lot when it comes to uploading them to the categories. Most product listing websites let users upload pictures between 500 and 700 pixels wide—one of the best things to do when uploading product catalogs are never to resize the image by hand.

Use Various Techniques for Editing Photos

You can’t put all the ways to edit photos into just a few categories. It is a unique way to edit, and you have to think about a few things to meet the standard. But photo editors can use different kinds of software and editing tools to make the product catalog perfect for the website and full of user experiences. Using different photo editing techniques can be helpful in many ways when figuring out what the business needs and what the editor can do.

Conclusion

Even if your company offers a great user experience, lousy product photos will hurt your brand image and sales. Most of the time, high-definition photos build trust in your brand, increase engagement, improve conversion rates, and improve your e-commerce store’s appearance. Since more than 80% of online shoppers decide whether or not to buy a product based on its pictures, it’s time to boost your sales with high-quality images of your products. Ensuring the best photo editing methods for your product catalogs might be laborious, but it is not time-consuming and costly. AutoRetouch is a well-known AI program that can edit photos for low prices for e-commerce catalogs.

Automated Clothes Editor: A Guide for the Fashion Industry

Imagine finding your dream jacket on a second-hand site. From the product photos, it looks like it could be perfect—but the more you look at it, you start to doubt the quality of the cloth and the seller. The photos have poor lighting and are shot against a messy background, so you can’t be certain of how the jacket would look in real life, and the seller’s professionalism clearly leaves something to be desired. Are you willing to hand over your dollars to a business that can’t be bothered to earn your trust? 

The same cloth presented in elegant studio lighting with a clear, crisp backdrop, multiple angles, and detail shots—now that would be enticing.

With the monumental rise of the e-commerce industry, the number of online apparel stores has multiplied many times over, with countless sellers vying for attention. Buyers aren’t likely to choose a shop with poor-quality product images when they have a dozen other options that don’t make them worry that they’re going to be ripped off. When it comes to making conversions and boosting your revenue, great images are paramount. The aesthetics of your store tell a story about the quality of your brand, so you’d better make sure it’s a good one. 

On the other hand, we get it. Great product photos are expensive, and if you’re a budget-conscious seller, you can’t afford to pay big bucks for everything from models to pro photographers to post-production. But even if you’re DIY-ing some or all of the steps in the process, you have options that can help you compete with the pros. In this article, we’ll take a look at how automated clothes photo editors like autoRetouch—an AI-powered editor with tools built especially for apparel photography—can give you the level of polish your customers are looking for.

Why Pick an Automated CLOTH Photo Editor?

Beautiful apparel photos make a tremendous difference in how your products are perceived by buyers and can boost everything from your SEO game to your conversion rate. What’s more, accurate product photos keep your buyers informed and help you avoid returns and angry customers.

However, manual editing can be a slow, exhausting endeavor, and you can expect slower turnaround times and higher costs if you’re hiring an editor to do it for you. That’s where AI-driven editors like autoRetouch can come in handy.

Here’s why we think you should give automated apparel editors a spin, including some of the most helpful and specialized tools you can use to raise the quality of your product photos.

1.    Batch editing

Automated editors let users bulk-process their images. If you’ve ever done your own editing, you know just how tedious and time-consuming it can be to edit photographs manually—your fingers might be cramping at the mere thought. Thankfully, with the batch editing features in automated editors like autoRetouch, which can edit up to 100 photos at once, you can apply the same effects and filters in bulk and cut your processing times down to minutes or even seconds. Even better, autoRetouch has a simple, friendly user interface and requires no technical experience to use.

2.    Background removal

Many fashion retailers and marketplaces feature uncluttered images against a white background, for obvious reasons—it’s better to highlight the clothes than distract your buyers with colorful backdrops. But clean, minimalist looks aren’t as easy to pull off as they look, and may require a lot of time in post-production to get rid of unwanted elements. Automated editors can dramatically reduce the time it takes to clean up your photos. The remove background component by autoRetouch cuts the backdrop from your apparel images with just a few clicks. 

You can also use this feature to repurpose your product photos across various marketing channels—it makes it simple to change the backdrop as needed. 

3.    Background customization

From a branding perspective, there are lots of reasons you might want to modify the background for your apparel photos: creating unique, flashy posts for social media, meeting the requirements of a particular marketplace, or giving large groups of photos a consistent look. The custom background component from autoRetouch allows you to switch out backdrops quickly and easily, making it a breeze to experiment with new color palettes and branding ideas.

4.    Ghost mannequin generation

Buyers like to know what they’re getting into—literally, when it comes to their clothes. Selling apparel online presents a challenge on this front. You can’t let your shoppers try on your clothes before they buy, but you still need to find ways to reduce costly returns and exchanges. Ghost mannequin photography is one way to address that. Ghost mannequin photos are blended together from several shots of the same cloth to show both the interior and exterior, as if it was posed on an invisible model. It’s a great way to showcase the shape and fit of a cloth in 3D. Unfortunately, generating ghost mannequins manually is an advanced editing technique, and it’s too time-consuming to be cost-effective for most businesses. However, autoRetouch’s ghost mannequin generator makes this visual technique accessible to anyone. All you have to do is upload your photos and the algorithm will blend them together seamlessly.

5.    Fabric swatch creation

Another simple, powerful way to increase consumer trust is by showing off the fine details of your clothes in your product photos. autoRetouch’s fabric swatch extractor automatically identifies a suitable fabric sample from your photos and generates a swatch that can be used as a close-up. The algorithm is even smart enough to identify a swatch in an area free from creases, buttons, and accessories and output a representative color sample. If you have clothes available in multiple fabrics or colors, you can use the extracted swatches as previews of the color variations when customers are navigating your shop.

6.    Skin retouching

If you use models in your product photos, you’ll need to invest in skin retouching at some point. A smooth, natural look is standard for model photos but can be difficult to achieve as a novice editor, and time-consuming even for an experienced one. Fortunately, this is another problem that can be quickly solved with AI tools: autoRetouch has a skin retouching component with an algorithm designed to remove skin imperfections based on skin color, body part, and ethnicity. The tool has a light touch, ensuring that your models won’t look overdone or excessively airbrushed, which can pull the focus from your clothes and make the photos appear fake.

In Conclusion…

E-commerce shopping is all about user experience, and the success of a business depends on its ability to replicate a bit of the magic of shopping in person. If you really want your shoppers to start spending, you need to showcase your products in a way that increases your credibility and their trust and excitement. The great news is, you don’t need a massive budget to nail it. Using an AI photo editor lets you show off the best of your apparel at a low price point, so you can take home larger profits and give your customers a shopping experience that will bring them back again and again.

Photo Retouching: Cost-Cutting Solutions for Product Photography

Product photography can be a costly proposition. From getting the right lighting to capturing the images, it requires a significant investment even before it comes time to edit the photos and get them gallery-ready. You might be tempted to cut costs by doing the retouching yourself—but professional photo editing is challenging to master, to say the least, and you might lose just as much money in the long run if you spend hours tearing your hair out in Photoshop. 

What’s a cost-minded business owner to do? In this post, we’ll take a look at photo retouching services that can provide big value to your business—without cutting into your profits.

But first, let’s take a quick look at the average cost of professional product photography in 2022.

Product Photography Costs Per Day

If the shoot requires a studio, it will cost around $400-$1000. Depending on the studio, the price may be lower or higher, but be careful—you get what you pay for. If additional equipment or props are required, the costs might be even higher.

Product Photography Costs Per Item

Per-product pricing is great for bulk photography since the cost per product decreases as the number of products increases. Depending on the photographer and the number of items, it might cost $20-$100. If you need multiple angles for each product, the costs will be higher.

Product Photography Costs Per Image

Per-image pricing is often the most affordable option for professional projects. Depending on the total number of photos, the price per image could vary between $1 and $50. If you’re in need of a large number of images, it can be an economical choice.

No matter which option you choose, the product photography isn’t cheap! Then comes post-production, and you might expect to have to DIY this critical step or else shell out for a professional editor. But in this next section, we’ll take a look at how photo retouching services can help your budget stay slim without sacrificing quality.

Is Photo Retouching Cost-Effective?

In short—yes! Here’s how the right photo retouching services can be both cost and time-efficient for product photography.

1. Efficient and Practical Styling for Studios:

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/_H2AAl60p1TZBVASvCvt3-CSjtPbM1P7fLHyWsN1Fd8HoMhjY5NrlDZj0DqQEYzrT0iz5D-Ukew9MtoaJ7Vnlk-_uKcqK8cU7a0jzgmjpiFebDcfvjTVdPYzx6K3kA

The cost of product photography styling varies from studio to studio. Whether it’s photographing interiors, products, or architecture, styling is essential. However, styling can increase your budget—even your post-prod budget. The more complex the styling, the more likely it is to introduce issues that need to be fixed in post: unwanted shadows, creases in the garments, elements that need to be removed, etc. With retouching services, you can fix these issues in seconds and get perfectly styled photos without needing to spend big on editing later.

2. Lower return rates

Unlike in physical stores, e-commerce buyers only have product photos to rely on to make their purchasing decisions, so product photos must look as accurate as possible. According to Shopify, over 20% of online purchases are returned, whereas physical retailers have return rates of about 9%. This can majorly impact your bottom line.

Photo retouching services reduce return rates by making sure that your photos look as much like the physical products as possible. That might seem counterintuitive—after all, wouldn’t an undoctored image represent the product best? Not necessarily. Photography isn’t a perfect representation of reality. Due to the lighting, styling, or camera settings, your product photos might turn out looking subtly or dramatically different than the products look in person. Retouching can help restore a realistic appearance. If you’re in the apparel business, you can even use photo retouching services to create ghost mannequin photos, which accurately represent the 3D dimensions of your products without the expense of hiring models. In the e-commerce world, accuracy and transparency are key to satisfying and retaining customers.

3. Brand yourself as a professional

Even subtle adjustments to product photos may significantly impact how attractive they are to customers. Retouching services can make a variety of small but efficient changes like eliminating smudges on your backdrop or smoothing a model’s flyaway hairs, leaving the images cleaner and more polished. Don’t let your brand be damaged by minor flaws when it’s easy and cost-effective to showcase your products at their very best.

But it goes beyond simply fixing flaws. Retouching services can help you quickly brand your photos by making it easy to remove and replace backgrounds, adjust colors, and more. Make your photos pop and customize them for different marketplaces and sales channels with just a few clicks.

All these edits can be done on a small budget. For example, with autoRetouch, the price for fixing one image ranges from $0.13 to $0.65. With the bulk edit feature, costs can be even lower. Compared to hiring professionals, leveraging retouching services offers you more freedom and flexibility at a low cost.

Bottom Line

No matter how you choose to go about retouching your product photos, it’s best to make an informed decision by studying all the available services and avenues. Not every company has the power to hire in-house experts, but that’s okay—you can still build an impressive brand by doing it yourself. Photo retouching services offer an excellent middle ground for small businesses, allowing them to go toe to toe with big retailers in the busy world of e-commerce.

Fall Fashion Photo Retouching Services

fashion photo editor

An experienced Fall fashion photo retouching service provider can transform standard fashion images into high quality, eye-catching visuals that will spark inspiration – and engagement – with your online community. The Fall fashion season is a time of renewal. Designers, shop owners and fashion mavens alike relish in the energy that transitioning from Summer to Fall fashion brings. Consumers are inspired by this inspirational and pivotal moment and take the opportunity to update their personal aesthetic and their homes. Fall fashion photo retouching services online can capitalize on this seasonal moment with the appropriate image enhancing workflows in place. When considering tapping a photo clothes editor online,  two key image enhancement techniques come to mind.  The two Fall fashion photo editing workflows  that we recommend are Light Adjustments and Color Adjustments. Using these techniques to enhance fashion product imagery helps create the necessary tone needed to convey the ‘Fall Fashion’ look and feel. Afterall, fashion is a very seasonal business, and the content should reflect that. In this piece, we explore how to tap a fashion clothes editor online like autoRetouch to bring the best out of your product shots. That way, you are empowered to create an inspirational customer experience across your website and social channels through beautifully optimized seasonal product imagery.

Fall Fashion Product Images Using Light Adjustments

Light adjustments are key to brighten and enhance Fall fashion product imagery so that the focal point of the photo can stand out. By heightening the exposure and the contrast slightly, you can enhance the richness in the colors to make them pop. Fall fashion typically mirrors the robust colors of the harvest season. The harvest color themes and textures can be enhanced further using contrasting techniques with a photo clothes editor online app like autoRetouch. Furthermore, decreasing the shadows allows for the Fall fashion product image to have a bolder look and feel. When doing this, be sure to adjust the black color in the product image to avoid any harshness.

Fall Fashion Product Images Using Color Adjustments 

For Autumn images, adjusting the yellows, oranges, greens and reds in product photography contributes to achieving a Fall seasonal look in the clothes and accessories. Adjusting the hue, saturation and luminance of each color enables you to create the Autumn Fashion tone reflective of the harvest color theme. Fashion photo retouching services online can complete this editing using artificial intelligence for bulk image enhancements.

Fashion Photo Editor With Bulk Editing Features

autoRetouch’s artificial intelligence SaaS platform has the ability to optimize hundreds of images in bulk only needing seconds to complete using these workflows:

1. Add Padding & Align Subject

Create a buffer between your images and other content. That way, the product image is not so close to other website content such as text copy. No need to use the HTML editor for updating padding on autoRetouch.

2. Retouch Skin

Remove skin discolorations and inconsistencies while ensuring that product photography models look ‘human’ and not overly ‘photoshopped’. The retouch skin option enables you to smooth skin and discoloration, remove moles or other unsightly skin inconsistencies like acne. Hence, creating a model void of distractions while maintaining a natural look.

3. Vector Paths

The beauty of vector paths is that they are scalable and unlike pixels, can be enlarged with no loss of quality. A path is a line that appears when you ‘draw’, usually in Illustrator. It’s made up of a series of points which are known as anchor points. At each end of the path, the anchor point has control handles which allow you to control the direction of the path. autoRetouch’s AI-enhanced SaaS platform for image enhancement, enables vector paths to be optimized in bulk. Therefore, allowing for hundreds of product images to be updated almost instantaneously.

Fashion is a seasonal business reliant on trends, culture and art. Optimizing your Autumn fashion product images has the ability to enhance the customer experience and increase sales for your ecommerce storefront. Tapping autoRetouch’s AI powered bulk image enhancing tools will save you time and money. The platform employs a pay-as-you-go model and not expensive subscription pricing like many other options. 

Try autoRetouch for free today.