Hands on: Selling an image

How to take studio-quality photos to help sell items on Ebay

I’ve just put my old wireless router on Ebay. It’s less than a year old, but when I upgraded my BT broadband package they gave me a new one, so I figured I’d sell the old one while it was still worth something.

Don’t worry, you haven’t taken a wrong turning and lost yourself in the networking section. It’s just that every time I sell something on Ebay, I need to take a picture of it. And to differentiate my router from all the others and make my offering more professional-looking, desirable and saleable, I like it to be well photographed and on a nice clean white backdrop.

It’s not just Ebay; photography is more and more a part of everything we do these days. And whether you’re auctioning old kit on Ebay, producing images for your business website or taking photos of yourself for a passport or driving licence application, you want them to look as good as they possibly can.

I’m going to show you how to take studio-quality product shots without a studio. There are two aspects to this – what you can do when shooting (you’d be surprised how far a sheet of white paper and a window can get you) and what you can do after the event using a photo-editing application.

Shooting small objects
‘Product shots’ could really mean anything, but here I’ll confine it to small objects such as my wireless router. The only thing the viewer is interested in is the subject itself, so the aim is to show it as clearly as possible without any distractions.

Here’s where your sheet of white paper comes in. I find you can fit most things on a sheet of A3 paper. If you don’t have A3, use two overlapping sheets of A4; and don’t worry about the join, we’ll deal with easy removal of backgrounds a little later. If you don’t have white, any bright colour will do and some items, such as jewellery, look better on black.

Lighting
The next thing to consider is lighting. I very rarely use a flash because a single camera-mounted flash unit produces very harsh directional lighting with hard shadows. If you have to use a flash, a plastic diffuser or a piece of tracing paper over the front can soften the lighting a little – or, if the head angle can be adjusted, or you can remove it from the camera, bounce it off the ceiling or a wall.

I find that ordinary daylight provides much better results though. So prop your object on its paper close to a large window, or venture outdoors. Bright, cloudy weather is better than full-on sunshine. If it’s too bright use a net curtain or sheet as a diffuser (see ‘Light tents’ in the kit boxout on the opposite page). If one side of your object is in shadow, another piece of white paper or card can be positioned opposite the window to reflect light back.

Use a tripod
There can be a lot of fiddling about, getting the subject in the right place at the right angle and adjusting reflectors. Placing the camera on a tripod will make things a lot easier. Another thing that can be useful is Plasticine or Blu-Tack – use it to prop objects at an angle to make for more dynamic shots and to show more of an object to the camera.

Or a scanner
With some smaller objects you can save yourself the effort of worrying about lighting, backgrounds, angles and the rest by scanning them.

Books are an obvious candidate for scanning, but jewellery, coins and medals, mobiles, handhelds and other small gadgets all scan well. As long as the object to be scanned is no bigger than the scanner and no deeper than an inch, you should get good results. A scanner has surprisingly good depth of field and even detail that’s a few millimetres above the glass will be in reasonably sharp focus.

A scanner already has a plain white backdrop, though for some things, in particular light and reflective objects, you might want to place a sheet of black paper behind the object.

Computer screens
If you want to sell your notebook PC on Ebay, you’ll need at least one good photo to show exactly what bidders are getting and what kind of condition it’s in. LCD screens don’t reproduce all that well in photos, so you have two options – either show your notebook with the screen switched off, which looks dull, or paste in a screengrab. If you do this you should mention that the screen image is simulated. You could always include a smaller photo showing the actual screen to prove your machine is in working order.

If it’s not possible to take a screengrab, for example with handheld devices, try and arrange the lighting so that it doesn’t fall directly on the screen and attempt to match ambient light levels to the screen brightness so that your exposure setting will capture both the screen detail and the device. If that’s not possible make two exposures – one for the screen and one for the device – and cut and paste.

Ethical issues
Manipulating photos to improve the way they look raises some ethical and legal issues that you should be aware of. If you’re simply removing distracting background detail, or making tonal adjustments to improve image detail, that’s not a problem.

However, if you use retouching tools to, for example, remove scratches and other damage from an item, the buyer could legitimately complain that you misrepresented their condition. By restricting your photo manipulation to image enhancement and mentioning any retouching that could be misinterpreted, you can avoid such problems.

Digital manipulation
One of the simplest ways to improve a product shot is to cut out the background. Make it easy for yourself by photographing the object on the plainest background you can find. It doesn’t have to be white or flawless – as long as it’s relatively plain it will make the job of selecting it with a magic wand or colour selection tool much easier.

The key to getting the job done quickly is to select the background, rather than the object. Unless the background is very plain, set your magic wand or other selection tool to a lowish tolerance and Shift-click to select the background in clumps. While it can be satisfying, there are no prizes for getting it all in one go. If your editing application has a colour selection tool this might yield better results than a magic wand tool.

With the background removed, objects can look a bit stark on plain white. To add a natural-looking drop shadow duplicate the cut-out object layer and use a levels adjustment to make it black – drag the slider on the left side of the histogram as far to the right as necessary. Apply a Gaussian blur filter to the layer to soften the edges. The Radius amount will depend on the image size, but for a high-resolution image somewhere between 20 and 40 should work well. If your shadow layer is in front of the object you will, of course, need to drag it behind and offset it a short distance – try to position the shadow where it would fall naturally, given the lighting conditions.

Finally, reduce the layer opacity to around 30 or 40 per cent to make the shadow grey. For added realism add a small amount of noise.

Replacing screens
The first step to producing a good screen image on a monitor or notebook photo is to do a screengrab. Press the Prt Scr button on your keyboard, or use a screen capture utility such as the free Irfanview.

Launch your photo-editing application – I’ll describe how to do it in Paint Shop Pro Photo X2, but any program with a distort or perspective tool will do. Paste the screengrab into a new layer above the original image and select the Pick tool.

Grab a corner handle and, holding down the Shift key, drag it to one corner of the screen. Shift-drag the remaining three corner handles to the other three corners of the screen and you’re done.

Kit for taking it to the next level
Ring flash – As we’ve seen, you can take perfectly good product shots with the most basic equipment. But if you need a lot of product shots, for example for a catalogue, then there are some bits of photo gear that can make life a lot easier.

A ring flash is a special flash unit designed for macro photography. The flash element surrounds the lens like a ring, hence the name.

The light source hits the subject straight on, so shadows are virtually eliminated, though you do get a very light shadow-halo effect around the subject. Short Images makes a ring flash adapter to fit Canon Speedlight 580EX and Nikon SB-800 flashes.

Light tents – If you don’t have a studio with big diffuse artificial lighting, a light tent provides an inexpensive alternative that can be used with either natural daylight or artificial light.

Light tents are really little more than a sheet ­ they let the light pass through, but diffuse it to provide soft shadowless lighting.

Some light tents form a cube when assembled so that you can easily place the product inside. Light tents aren’t all that expensive and if you do a lot of product photography it’ll soon pay for itself.

If you can’t justify the cost it’s not difficult to make your own and there are lots of tutorials on the web ­ just search for ‘DIY light tent’ in your preferred search engine.