How to Take Product Photographs with a Mobile Phone
Can you get decent product photos without the expense of hiring a product photographer?
Maybe you run a business that’s had to shift its sales online due to coronavirus; perhaps you’re selling happily from your website anyway, but want to freshen up your product images; or maybe you’re just trying to use some of your time under lockdown conditions to list a few items on Ebay?
Whatever your situation, I hope you’ll find the following information helpful.
Can I use a phone for product photography?
The short answer to this is, Yes, you can. But the key to success is in understanding what the camera on your phone is doing, and how to make it do what you actually need. I’m going to look at a very basic, “catalogue” image with an individual product on a white background. This is an essential image for e-commerce photography - it lets the customer see what the item looks like, without any distractions.
Obviously there are more advanced scenes, detail views of particular features, or “lifestyle” shots with more true-to-life backgrounds, but it’s a good idea to start with the basics.
Where is the best place to take a product photo?
If you have no photographic equipment other than your phone, it’s best to use natural light if possible. Artificial lights usually have either a blue or yellow hue that human eyes (or more accurately, our brains) adjust to automatically. However, cameras can struggle with this unwanted colour variation, resulting in discoloured images. So whenever you can, use daylight. Counterintuitively, this might not mean finding the brightest spot in the house. Direct sunlight coming through a window will throw a good splash of light onto your product, but it will also introduce harsh shadows that might not look good.
If at all possible, avoid using the built-in flash on your phone. Mobile flashes tend to produce a harsh, very localised light. Also, mobile flashes are usually right next to the lens and this means they fire directly at the thing you’re photographing. Nearly everything looks better if the light comes from the side or the back, as the shadows will look more natural and give a better idea of the three-dimensional shape of the object.
Outside or indoors next to a window on a bright, overcast day is best as the clouds diffuse the light, meaning everything is softly illuminated and the shadows are much less intense. I had a sunny afternoon to work with for this example shoot, so I did the next best thing and set everything up on the shady side of my house. Excuse the state of the decking!
Take a table, a sheet of white paper, and a mobile phone, and there you have it - a temporary product photography studio!
Once you’ve chosen a location, the first thing to do is put your product in position and check how it looks. You’re likely to need to take pictures from multiple angles to show customers what the item looks like from the side, behind, underneath, etc. But there will be one main image that will show up in search listing and be the equivalent of the headline on a news article - the most enticing image you can get to draw people in. This is often called the “hero” image, and it’s a good idea to establish what that image will be early on in the process.
A Good Clean
Even if your product is brand new, it’s worth taking the time to give it a thorough clean and make sure it’s looking its best. Snip off any stray threads, polish away any fingerprints (it may be worth handling the item using a cloth or non-marking gloves if it has a shiny or reflective surface), and get rid of any dust. It’s amazing how something barely noticeable on the product itself can become strikingly obvious in a photograph.
The same goes for the background - whether you’re using a white paper sheet, or a bedsheet, or just a white tabletop, it’s a good idea to make sure that’s as spotless as possible. Any marks, crumbs, or other bits and pieces can show up in the background and either spoil the look of your product photographs, or take ages to remove digitally afterwards.
It’s also worth making sure your camera lens is free from dust and fingerprints - give it a wipe with a soft cloth to get the front of the lens gleaming.
Should I use manual or auto mode to take my photos?
Don’t trust the tech! Any camera on Auto mode will base the image it captures on a number of assumptions. It will generally try to even out the brightness levels across the frame so that nothing is too dark or too bright, and to find a white balance (a measure of the colour temperature - how cool (blue) or warm (yellow) the image looks) that makes sense to it. Imaging algorithms are increasingly sophisticated, but we’re not yet at a stage where your phone can be relied upon to understand what you’re photographing and how you intend it to look.
Here’s the shot I took with my phone’s standard “Auto” mode:
Letting the camera decide what the image should be is not always the best solution, especially for product photography
It’s okay, but it’s not really doing poor old Lewis the Lion justice. He looks drab and the background is a dull blueish-grey.
My mobile phone’s definitely not cutting-edge, but its built-in camera app does offer some manual control over the photographs it takes. If you haven’t already, it’s worth digging into the features your phone camera app gives you to adjust the various settings involved in taking the photo.
So the best thing to do is take control of a few of the basic ingredients of the image. I switched to manual mode (every phone is different, so check how to do this for yours), and made the following adjustments:
Using the manual settings on your camera app allows you more control over how the final image looks
To correct the colour, I set the white balance (WB) to the Shade setting (the little cloud icon). Outdoor shade tends to have a blue hue and using this setting compensates for this by “warming up” the image - shifting its colours towards yellow instead. As I was shooting handheld, I increased the shutter speed (SS) to 1/1000 of a second to ensure a sharp image (this is probably faster than necessary, but I was working quickly and so didn’t bother taking test shots to see whether 1/250th or 1/500th would have been enough). Finally, to compensate for the darkening effect of using a fast shutter, I used exposure compensation (the EV value) to boost the brightness.
This resulted in the following shot:
Taking control of the camera app settings produced a much brighter image with more realistic colours.
This is far closer to what I was looking for. The colours are true, the background is nice and bright, and overall the image just looks more appealing. This provides a great base to edit the picture, to further refine and improve the photo.
How to edit a product photograph on a mobile phone
I use Snapseed on my Android mobile. It’s a free and relatively straightforward app that has both pre-defined ‘filters’ and a suite of adjustment tools to control various aspects of the way the image looks. There is a multitude of different editing apps available, many of them free or free to try, so test a few out and see which suits you best.
I cropped the image (pulling in the outer borders to remove the edges of the paper background), then used the slider controls within the Tune Image function to increase the brightness and contrast. These have the effect of making the lion look more a little more three-dimensional. Then I increased the saturation and added a little more structure and sharpening to emphasise the detail in the fur. With all of these controls, it’s best to adopt a “less is more” approach; particularly with saturation and sharpening. It’s easy to overdo it and end up with a very fake looking image. For purely artistic projects, this may be allowable or even desirable, but for product photography the aim must be to create something that represents as closely as possible how the customer will perceive the item they’ll receive.
Finishing touches complete - a boost to the brightness and contrast, a little more saturation, and just a tweak of sharpening.
The final image isn’t perfect - for a start, there’s a ripple in the white paper that means the background has an odd shadow halfway up, which I could have sorted with a couple of extra bits of tape - but I hope it serves as an illustration of how a little effort and minimal equipment can create a decent image for a product.
Limitations of mobile phones for product photography
Mobile phones aren’t generally designed for taking product photographs. Most have a wide-angle lens - intended for capturing landscapes and fitting several people into selfies - and tend to distort images to some extent to fit as much as possible into the frame. Lewis the Lion has large feet anyway, but the lens on my mobile phone has exaggerated this further. At the same time, his body and tail, in the middle of the shot, look smaller and further away. Whether this is a problem depends on the type of product you are photographing and the exact characteristics of your phone’s camera lens. Try it out and see before making a decision.
Higher-end phones may have a dedicated “portrait” or telephoto lens. If yours does, it will be worth using that function as any distortion should be minimised.
The most significant difference between phone cameras and dedicated cameras is the size of the sensor - the light-sensitive panel sitting behind the shutter that captures the image. Phone sensors are tiny compared to even an entry-level cameras, and this means the amount of information they can harvest per pixel is greatly reduced too. It can be hard to capture fine detail, like Lewis the Lion’s fur, the texture of things like leather or material, or anything with a distinct pattern like carbon fibre. The small sensors in mobile phones can also produce “mushy” colours, or odd artefacts caused by the phone’s processors attempting to fill in some of the gaps in the image’s data.
What can a professional product photographer offer instead?
A mobile phone can be a great tool to get images when the priority is to get your store up and running. But if you are selling small, detailed, or high-end products, you’re likely to find that the images achievable with a mobile lack that extra ‘pop’ needed to really showcase your products. There are two main reasons for this - Firstly, the way light hits the product and, secondly, the level of detail that can be captured by the camera taking the photograph.
Product photography requires control over light, and a professional will have a bank of equipment that allows light to be shaped, bounced, diffused, reflected, and coloured to provide the ideal conditions for each individual product. And with a dedicated professional-level camera, high-resolution images with rich, realistic colours and pin-sharp detail will help show off your product in all its glory.
If I can help with your product photography needs, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
