How to shoot and process a product photo

Shooting a product photo and removing its background for use on a website is easy with simple equipment and software. We can easily set up a small photo studio in the corner of a room. Here's what we'll need:

Equipment

• photo tent
• two 5000K compact fluorescent lights, one on each side of the tent
• digital camera
• tripod for the camera

Software

• Adobe Photoshop Elements
  This is the compact, user-friendly version of Photoshop. It is low cost but more than powerful enough for our purpose here.
• GIMP
  A powerful, free image manipulation program for Unix, Windows, and Mac OS X. Download from http://www.gimp.org/downloads/

Camera settings
The white background of the photo tent causes the digital camera to adjust its exposure, which will make our photo look darker. So, we want to tell the digital camera to increase its exposure value to +1.3. We set the focus to spot AF to keep things easy, and use the self timer so the camera can be completely still when it takes the photo. We don't want flash because soft lighting looks better. In summary regarding the camera:

• EV: +1.3
• Focus: spot AF
• Self Timer: on
• Flash: off

Shots to take
To increase customers' interest and confidence in a product, we want to take sufficient photos to represent the product completely. The recommended shots are:

• main photo that represents the product well
• photos from alternate angles
• close-up photos of special features, or of details
  
• package contents
  
• product packaging