When it comes to online shopping, you only get one chance to make a first impression, and having high-quality product photography can go a long way in making sure it’s great. How you style your product, the lighting and backdrops in your studio, your camera setup, your shooting angle, and your post-production processing will affect whether your product images convert visitors into customers.
Footwear photography comes with a series of do’s and don’ts. So, start your next photography session right with these tips.
Style your footwear for product photography
Give your footwear shape and help it stand up—you don’t want it to droop. Limp and lifeless footwear is unattractive and conveys little information to customers. Instead of trying to create a new setting that no one has ever seen, make it easy for shoppers to visualize wearing your shoes. The idea is similar to using a ghost mannequin for clothing photography.
Position your footwear so that it looks like they are being worn.
Make sure each footwear looks its best by creating the illusion that the shoes are being worn. It shows the true shape of the item and allows your customers to imagine themselves wearing it. You can communicate shape by filling it with crumpled paper or tying dental floss to shoelaces to hold it in the frame.
The dental floss lifts the strap and is easy to remove after production.
ILYSM sells unique vegan split-toe shoes that resemble a cross between sneakers, sandals, and socks. Due to their materials and designs, footwear tends to not have a shape of its own. But as you can see in the product photos, the brand has taken steps to fill the shoe and photograph what it would look like if someone were actually wearing it.
Choose the right background for footwear photography
In most types of product photography, a cluttered background is strictly prohibited. A busy background distracts your customers from what you really want them to see—your product.
Bold backgrounds draw attention away from your products.
Instead, choose a plain white background. Keep everything on your frame simple and clean to draw maximum attention to your footwear. It is always best and most convenient to shoot each product alone, with a pure white background behind. You can choose pure white, which third-party marketplaces like Amazon require, or gray or off-white to create a different look and feel.
A plain white background keeps the focus on your product.
Not all shoe photos need a plain background—there’s a time and place for backgrounds too. Lifestyle or contextual photography will showcase your shoes on models or in the real world. Isleñas showcased his shoes against a white background and in context so shoppers could get a feel for how the shoes would look when paired with clothes.
Perfect your footwear photography lighting
Lighting is one, if not the most, important part of product photography. Your footwear photography requires proper lighting or your shoes will not look appealing. Loud direct lighting that produces deep shadows is the worst type of lighting for product photography.
The wrong type of lighting can accentuate imperfections and warp colors.
Natural light is one of the best and cheapest options available. If possible, take your photo inside next to a large window, spreading the sun out with a piece of cloth if it’s too strong. For more control and longer hours, rent a studio softbox setup for soft artificial light. If you need to take photos outside, look for a shaded area to get the most even light. Try shooting in the morning or evening—always avoid taking photos outdoors in the middle of the day.
Take photos that put your product in the right lighting.
Adjust and re-adjust your frame
Get the right focus
Blur and soft focus can be artistic in many types of photography, but they are distracting to customers in product photography. The more out-of-focus your images are, the less your customers will see your product.
Soft focus makes it difficult to see details in photos.
Be sure to use a higher aperture like f/11 on your DSLR camera to focus every aspect of your footwear. It will also help to use a tripod, as it minimizes camera shake to give your images maximum crispness.
Show every detail in full focus.
Focusing your footwear is also important for the zoom view. Many customers want to be able to zoom in on photos of your products so they can get a closer look at the fine details. With the shot out of focus, the details won’t be as obvious. See how sharp the details are in this zoomed-in view Vessi sneakers?
Set your shadow
Instead of removing shadows in post-production, try to get them right when you shoot. It is standard best practice in ecommerce to place products on a clean white background in post-production. However, if you remove the entire background including the shadows, you often get a final image that lacks depth, like this:
Removing the shadow creates what we call the “fridge magnet effect.”
Footwear images in particular benefit greatly from a bit of natural shading. Maintaining natural shadows in post-production keeps items within the frame and creates a much more professional result.
Combine with bottom alignment for maximum effect.
It is not always possible to get a natural shade. In some cases, you will need to add a drop shadow in post-production. This technique is common for white background photos in particular.
Product pictures below from CARUMA appears as if they could have a drop shadow added in the post. Notice how the shadows help the white sneakers stand out against the white background while giving the frame dimension.
Shoot the right angle
One of the biggest mistakes in product photography is showing very few angles of the product on the listing. Customers want to see every facet and face of a product when they decide whether to invest in it or not.
Limited angles give customers a limited view of your product.
Capture as many corners as possible. Take a straight side shot, a front shot, a back shot, a top view, an angled side shot, a detail shot, and all kinds of variations of those suggestions—as long as the angle is good. twisted even showing the bottoms of some of his footwear products. While you might not be doing this for your footwear, the bottom of the shoe is stylish and attractive to Lilith’s customers.
Crop and edit your footwear photography
Inconsistent cropping is one of the easiest mistakes to make in product photography. The images on your website are side by side, and inconsistencies attract attention. Your customers will see if some images of your footwear are zoomed in more than others, and they will see if products the same distance from the camera are higher or lower than each other. They will notice differences in lighting, differences in focus, and so on. All such inconsistencies distract from the product.
Don’t let inconsistent cropping cause misalignment.
Develop a cutting template with strict guidelines to keep your image consistent from frame to frame. Adhering to the template will speed up your image capture and post-production workflow and enhance the professional look of your website.
Many online channels require certain web standards for cropping and sizing, so pay attention to the drawing guidelines and incorporate them into your template.
Use the software to consistently crop and align your images.
Notice how the shop page for INEZ showing her footwear with the same crop and background. This makes for a clean and approachable shopping experience that allows customers to quickly compare different products at a glance.
Follow our tips and find do-it-yourself success
Don’t be afraid to experiment. Follow our lead, so you can avoid painful and time-consuming mistakes. Think about how you style your footwear, what you choose for your backdrop and lighting, and the post-production techniques you use. You will give your product the best chance of being purchased.
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About the Author
Thomas Kragelund is CEO and founder of Pixelz, a leading product image solutions partner for internet retailers, bloggers, designers, photographers and webmasters around the world. He has been working in e-commerce for the last 15 years. Sign up today and get 3 edited product images for free.