How to Edit Clothing Product Photos to Boost E-Commerce Sales
When it comes to marketing your clothing products, image quality is paramount. You’ve probably encountered common issues like dull garment colors on the screen, despite the clothing looking fantastic during the photoshoot, or perhaps you’ve spotted unexpected fabric wrinkles that weren’t apparent before. The good news is that these imperfections can be easily remedied through the magic of post-processing, often utilizing software like Photoshop.
Whether you require background removal, object removal, color adjustments, or other enhancements, image retouching can work wonders in transforming your photos into flawless and compelling visuals that are sure to captivate potential customers. If you’re looking for professional assistance with your image editing, consider exploring ecommerce product photo editing services .
Whether you choose to handle the photo editing yourself or opt for professional editing services, we’re here to guide you on what to focus on to ensure your clothing shots are ready for the world of e-commerce. For a deeper dive into this topic, you can start by exploring the “Best Clothing Photography Ideas to Boost E-Commerce Sales.“
Why Editing Matters in Clothing Photography?
Even when garments are perfectly styled and photographed with the best lighting, post-processing remains crucial. Raw photos straight from the camera often fall short of showcasing products effectively. By making subtle editing adjustments, you can significantly enhance the appeal of your products for online shoppers. Providing a true-to-life representation of the clothing allows customers to make informed choices, ensuring they find items that not only look great but also fit perfectly.
Show True Colors: Ensure the clothing colors in the pictures match how they look in real life.
Consistency: Keep all your photos looking similar for a professional and organized online store.
Remove Imperfections: Get rid of wrinkles and minor flaws to make clothes look perfect.
Highlight Details: Make the fabric’s texture and design more visible.
Clean Backgrounds: Create clean, professional backgrounds for your product.
Emphasize Features: Make specific clothing features stand out.
Look More Attractive: Enhance the overall appearance of your products.
E-Commerce Ready: Make sure your product images look great for online shoppers.
Match Your Brand: Ensure your photos fit your brand’s style.
Stand Out: Gain an edge over competitors with more appealing images.
Top Editing Ideas to Improve eCommerce Sales in Clothing Photography
Remove background
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For e-commerce sellers, white backdrops are crucial due to platform regulations like Amazon and eBay. But their benefits go beyond compliance. A pristine white backdrop enhances the appeal of garments, whether on models or solo. Removing the background opens up creative possibilities. You can add transparent, colorful, branded, or lifestyle backgrounds to infuse character into visuals. After extraction, you can keep the white canvas or create an alternate version with a transparent backdrop. Garments with transparent backgrounds seamlessly fit into websites with custom color schemes, ensuring a cohesive look. This flexibility sets your e-commerce business apart, leaving a lasting impression.
Add shadows
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Enhancing your product images with a subtle shadow can enhance their visual appeal, giving them a natural and polished appearance that aligns seamlessly with e-commerce marketplace requirements. Adding a shadow during post-production grants you unparalleled flexibility, enabling you to control its direction and characteristics regardless of the initial shoot’s varying lighting conditions.
By separating the tasks of garment composition and lighting finesse during the photoshoot from shadow manipulation in post-production, you maintain your focus on achieving the ideal product aesthetics. This approach ensures the garment’s presentation is immaculate during the shoot, preserving the ability to artfully introduce a shadow later. The result is a meticulously crafted image that not only meets e-commerce standards but also entices potential buyers with its professional and captivating visual presence.
Smooth wrinkles
Eliminating wrinkles in clothing photos is essential to maintain a professional image for your online store. Despite rigorous steaming and ironing, persistent creases can mar your product presentation. To ensure wrinkle-free photos, Photoshop offers two effective post-processing methods:
Spot Healing Brush: Zoom in on the wrinkles and use the Spot Healing Brush tool to paint over them. This tool seamlessly replaces wrinkles with nearby pixel data, resulting in a smooth, wrinkle-free garment appearance.
Clone Stamp Tool: For stubborn wrinkles, employ the Clone Stamp tool. Select a wrinkle-free area with matching color and lighting, hold ALT (OPTION on Mac) to copy it, and then “paint” it over the wrinkles. This technique transfers the smooth texture to problematic spots, leaving the garment flawlessly smooth.
By diligently addressing fabric wrinkles in post-processing, your clothing photos achieve a level of professionalism that resonates with potential customers and enhances your online store’s product image quality and appeal.
Fix imperfections
Clothing imperfections like stains, dust, or stray hairs can be unavoidable, and while some may add authenticity, they often deter customers. To rectify this, you have options like the Spot Healing Brush or Clone Stamp tool, tailored to the size and nature of the imperfection.
For larger or more textured imperfections, consider the Patch Tool. It provides precise control, making it ideal for seamlessly correcting blemishes and preserving the garment’s original texture or pattern. These post-processing methods help ensure your clothing photos remain flawless and appealing, enhancing the overall quality of your product images and customer appeal.
Adjust colors
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Natural light can cause variations in how your studio setup and clothing appear in photos compared to reality, as the camera may capture subtle colors imperceptible to the naked eye. To address this in Adobe Lightroom, follow these steps:
Adjust Brightness: Ensure your photo is adequately bright using the Exposure slider to attain suitable brightness.
Correct Color Balance: To neutralize color discrepancies, use one of the following methods:
Pre-built White Balance Presets: Choose a White Balance profile that matches your shooting conditions. For instance, select Daylight, Cloudy, or Shade for natural light shots. Lightroom will auto-adjust temperature and tint.
White Balance Selector: Click on the pipette icon and then on a neutral-color area in your image (white, gray, or black). This will automatically adjust temperature and tint to achieve a natural balance. Repeat if needed.
Temperature and Tint Sliders: For precise control, manually adjust both sliders to align with the clothing’s actual colors.
These steps ensure your clothing photos accurately represent their true colors, enhancing the overall color quality and appeal of your images.
Create a lifestyle image
Elevating your product images with a touch of lifestyle context can enhance their appeal, but traditional photoshoots with models and locations can be costly when you only require a few shots. Enter the solution: lifestyle composites.
Lifestyle composites involve isolating a product or subject from its background in a photo, allowing you to either select a suitable stock image or take a new background photo. This approach offers a quicker and more budget-friendly way to create lifestyle photos, sparing you the expenses and logistics of a full photoshoot. While the editing demands some advanced skills, outsourcing is an option.
For a seamless result, harmonize the colors in both images since the lighting conditions differ. This ensures your composite appears natural, rather than a conspicuous cutout. The beauty of composites lies in their versatility, enabling you to repurpose a single product shot with various backgrounds, catering to your diverse needs efficiently.
Edit brand tags
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While using tagged images on social media can boost brand visibility, when it comes to online store listings, a different approach is often preferred. To present your clothing items effectively, removing both the background and brand tag is essential. This allows customers to focus on the fabric’s color and texture without distractions from the label.
To eliminate the brand tag, employ techniques similar to those used for wrinkle and spot removal. The objective is to seamlessly replace the tag area with a portion of the garment that appears realistic. By doing so, your online store listings not only showcase the product more prominently but also create a clean and professional visual presentation that enhances customer engagement and product appeal.
Eliminate hangers
No need to stress if you lack the setup to hang your clothing items for a photoshoot. You can capture them while holding the pieces and later eliminate any visible hangers and hands. Start by addressing the larger areas to remove the hanger and hands.
For those lingering hanger remnants around the garment, like those near a jacket’s neckline, precision is key. Zoom in for detailed work and employ the same tools used for blemish and wrinkle removal. This approach ensures your clothing photos maintain a professional and uncluttered appearance, enhancing the overall quality and appeal of your product images.
Create a mannequin look
For a more dynamic and appealing presentation of clothing, consider creating ghost mannequin shots. This technique lends garments a lifelike appearance, making them seem as if they’re worn by an invisible model or mannequin while preserving their shape. This approach surpasses images of clothing on hangers, offering a more realistic and engaging visual experience for customers.
To achieve this effect, you’ll need to re-shoot your garments, but only a few photos are typically required, and anyone who fits your clothing can model them. It’s worth noting that invisible mannequin shots require careful planning, involving photographs both with and without a mannequin or model. This consideration is crucial as you capture your apparel photos, ensuring a seamless and professional outcome that elevates the quality and appeal of your product images.
Change clothing colors
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Don’t fret about starting a new photoshoot every time you introduce a new color variation to your collection. If you’ve already photographed the garment, you can modify its color in post-production to align with the in-stock options. This approach not only saves you the time and effort of organizing additional shoots but also grants you the flexibility to effortlessly update your shop listings whenever new colors become available. This efficient and cost-effective method ensures your product images remain current and synchronized with your inventory, providing a seamless shopping experience for your customers while streamlining your e-commerce operations.
Arrange images for online store
Achieving uniformity in model photos, especially with diverse talent, can be challenging. To create an appealing and coherent e-commerce store, a simple strategy is to align or crop your main listing photos. This way, when customers browse your shop, they’ll encounter products of similar types presented consistently. This approach accommodates varying model poses while maintaining a cohesive visual identity throughout your product listings.
Given that not all models share the same body type or proportions, focus on maintaining even spacing at the image’s top and positioning the model centrally. This thoughtful framing technique ensures a unified look, making your online store appear polished and professional, while allowing for the diversity and individuality of the models to shine through.
Crop images to fill the frame
In addition to your primary listing photos, providing customers with the option to examine your garments up close is crucial. When conducting a photoshoot, ensure you capture both full-body and close-up shots to offer a diverse selection of images. These close-up shots can be further refined during post-production for maximum impact.
Zoomed-in crops allow customers to scrutinize the intricate details of your garments, from the stitching and fabric quality to buttons and zippers. This level of detail mimics the in-person shopping experience where you’d naturally inspect a jacket’s pockets, lining, and cuffs in addition to its overall fit and appearance. By offering these comprehensive views, you empower potential buyers to make informed decisions and foster confidence in your products, ultimately enhancing their shopping experience.
