{"course":{"slug":"ai-for-small-business","title":"AI for a Small Business","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/ai-for-small-business","level":"beginner","track":"work"},"lesson":{"slug":"product-photos-honestly","title":"Editing a product photo, and where editing becomes a lie","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/ai-for-small-business/product-photos-honestly","position":41,"of":88,"minutes":9,"answer":"Retouching toward what the object actually looks like is fine and retouching toward something else is a misleading advertisement, and the test is whether the customer opening the parcel would call the photograph accurate.","keyIdea":"Retouching toward what the object actually looks like is fine and retouching toward something else is a misleading advertisement, and the test is whether the customer opening the parcel would call the photograph accurate, with colour the place honest businesses most often cross the line."},"body":{"format":"markdown","text":"## What actually sells\n\nBefore any tool: the photograph that sells a product is well lit, in focus, shows the thing at a useful size, and shows it accurately. A phone by a window on an overcast day beats a studio setup in a badly lit room, and it beats an elaborate generated scene, because a customer is trying to decide whether this is the thing they want.\n\nThe editing worth doing is therefore narrow and dull. Straighten. Crop. Correct the colour so it matches the object. Remove the background if the platform wants white. Nothing else moves the needle much.\n\n## The free path is complete here\n\nYou do not need Photoshop, and job ads naming it are about design roles rather than about photographing your stock.\n\n- **Background removal.** `rembg`, free and open source, runs on your own machine and processes hundreds of images from a folder. Photopea does it in a browser for nothing. GIMP does it manually with more control.\n- **Colour, crop, straighten.** GIMP, Krita, Photopea, or the editor already on your phone. Darktable and RawTherapee if you shoot raw.\n- **Upscaling.** Real-ESRGAN and similar tools, free, for the old catalogue photograph that is 600 pixels wide. Results are good on texture and unreliable on text and faces.\n- **Batch processing.** ImageMagick, free, resizes and converts a folder of two hundred images in one command.\n\n```bash\n# resize a whole folder to 1600px wide, convert to webp\nmagick mogrify -resize 1600x -format webp *.jpg\n```\n\nThat command is most of what a product catalogue needs, and it costs nothing.\n\n## The line\n\nRetouching that makes the photograph represent the object more accurately is fine. Retouching that makes it represent something else is not, and the distinction is not aesthetic: it is the difference between an advertisement and a misleading one.\n\n**Fine:** straightening, cropping, dust removal, colour correction toward the real colour, consistent white backgrounds, removing your own reflection.\n\n**Not fine:** changing the colour to one you do not stock, removing a defect the item actually has, generating a scene implying features it does not have, showing an accessory that is not included, making a small item look large by manipulating scale.\n\n**The reliable test:** would the customer receiving the parcel feel the photograph was accurate? If not, you are looking at a return, a chargeback, a bad review, and in most jurisdictions a consumer protection issue.\n\n> Figure: Where editing stops representing the object. Toward what it looks like: Straightening and cropping; Dust and your own reflection removed; Colour corrected toward the real colour; A consistent white background; Upscaling an old catalogue photograph. Toward something else: A colour you do not stock; A defect the item actually has, removed; An accessory that is not included; Scale that makes a small item look large; A scene implying features it lacks. The reliable test is whether the customer opening the parcel would call the photograph accurate. Colour is where honest businesses cross the line, because an image edited to please rather than to match produces returns at your cost.\n\nColour is where honest businesses get caught. Screens differ, and a photograph edited to look attractive rather than accurate produces returns at your cost. Photograph against a neutral background in daylight and correct toward reality, not toward pleasing.\n\n## Generated backgrounds and staged scenes\n\nTools that place your product in a generated setting (a marble worktop, a sunlit café table) are widely available and mostly harmless, with three cautions.\n\nShadows and reflections frequently do not match the scene, which reads as fake even to people who cannot say why. Scale often goes wrong, and a mug the size of a bucket is worse than a plain background. And if the scene implies something untrue (that a food product is served in a restaurant that does not stock it, that a garment is a different weight than it is) you are back over the line.\n\nFor most small businesses a clean white background and one photograph in real use, taken on a phone, outperforms generated staging. The real one has details nothing invents: the actual grain, the actual wear, the actual light of the place you work.\n\n## Keep the originals\n\nUnedited files, in a folder, backed up. You will need them when a platform changes its size requirements, when a customer disputes the colour, and when you rebuild the site in three years.\n\nName them so they can be found: `oak-chair-46cm-front.jpg` rather than `IMG_4471.jpg`. It takes the same amount of typing and saves an hour every time you look for something.\n\n## A repeatable set-up costs nothing\n\nConsistency across a catalogue reads as competence, and it is achieved by boring repetition rather than by editing.\n\nPick one spot near a window that gets indirect light. Mark where the item goes and where the phone goes: tape on the floor works. Use the same background: a sheet of white card is enough. Shoot at the same time of day where you can.\n\nNow every photograph starts from the same place, the same edit applies to all of them, and a customer comparing four items is comparing the items rather than four lighting conditions. This is worth more than any tool in the lesson and takes twenty minutes to set up once.\n\n## Alt text, which is not optional\n\nEvery image on your site should carry a short description in its alt text. It is what a screen reader announces to a blind customer, what appears when the image fails to load, and what search engines read.\n\nDrafting these is a good use of AI: describe the photograph, ask for eight to twelve words, plain and factual. \"Oak dining chair, front view, showing the stacking notch\" rather than \"beautiful handcrafted chair\". Two hundred of them in an afternoon, and it is the accessibility fix with the best ratio of effort to effect."},"check":{"question":"A shop photographs a navy jumper. On screen it looks slightly washed out, so the owner deepens the blue until it looks appealing. What is the substantive problem?","options":[{"text":"Deepening a colour is destructive editing, and the original file should have been preserved before any adjustment was applied.","correct":false,"tempting":"Names good practice about originals rather than the harm; keeping the raw file changes nothing about what the customer is shown."},{"text":"Different screens render colour differently, so the adjustment will look wrong to some customers regardless of what the owner intended.","correct":false,"tempting":"True of all screens and all photographs, which means it argues equally against accurate colour correction and does not identify what makes this edit different."},{"text":"The photograph now shows a colour the shop does not sell, which produces returns at the shop's cost and misrepresents the goods.","correct":true},{"text":"Colour adjustments applied by eye are unreliable, so a colour checker card should be used to calibrate the image against a known reference before publishing it.","correct":false,"tempting":"Prescribes a more rigorous method for a step whose direction was the problem; calibrating and then deepening the blue anyway produces the same misleading result."}]},"prev":{"slug":"marketing-that-sounds-like-you","title":"Posts That Do Not Sound Generated","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/ai-for-small-business/marketing-that-sounds-like-you"},"next":{"slug":"generated-images-and-copyright","title":"Generated images: what is unsettled, and the three rules that are not","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/ai-for-small-business/generated-images-and-copyright"},"authorship":"Founder and series editor: Dr Mustafa Mun. Written by AI models to a written standard. Exam keys checked blind by a second model: 3,665 of 3,666 agreed. Academic review invited.","review":{"status":"Draft, open for academic review"},"cite":"Addaly (2026) 'Editing a product photo, and where editing becomes a lie', in AI for a Small Business. Edited by M. Mun. Addaly. Available at: https://addaly.com/learn/ai-for-small-business/product-photos-honestly (Accessed: 13 October 2026).","licence":{"name":"CC BY-NC-SA 4.0","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/"},"reader":{"schema":1,"title":"Editing a product photo, and where editing becomes a lie","courseTitle":"AI for a Small Business","module":{"index":5,"slug":"selling-and-being-found","title":"Selling: listings, images, marketing and price"},"answer":null,"keyIdea":"Retouching toward what the object actually looks like is fine and retouching toward something else is a misleading advertisement, and the test is whether the customer opening the parcel would call the photograph accurate, with colour the place honest businesses most often cross the line.","hero":{"kind":"figure","figure":{"t":"figure","label":"Figure","figure":{"left":{"title":"Toward what it looks like","items":["Straightening and cropping","Dust and your own reflection removed","Colour corrected toward the real colour","A consistent white background","Upscaling an old catalogue photograph"]},"type":"compare","right":{"title":"Toward something else","items":["A colour you do not stock","A defect the item actually has, removed","An accessory that is not included","Scale that makes a small item look large","A scene implying features it lacks"]},"title":"Where editing stops representing the object","caption":"The reliable test is whether the customer opening the parcel would call the photograph accurate. Colour is where honest businesses cross the line, because an image edited to please rather than to match produces returns at your cost."},"alt":"Figure: Where editing stops representing the object. Toward what it looks like: Straightening and cropping; Dust and your own reflection removed; Colour corrected toward the real colour; A consistent white background; Upscaling an old catalogue photograph. Toward something else: A colour you do not stock; A defect the item actually has, removed; An accessory that is not included; Scale that makes a small item look large; A scene implying features it lacks. The reliable test is whether the customer opening the parcel would call the photograph accurate. Colour is where honest businesses cross the line, because an image edited to please rather than to match produces returns at your cost."}},"blocks":[{"t":"h2","id":"what-actually-sells","runs":[{"text":"What actually sells"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Before any tool: the photograph that sells a product is well lit, in focus, shows the thing at a useful size, and shows it accurately. A phone by a window on an overcast day beats a studio setup in a badly lit room, and it beats an elaborate generated scene, because a customer is trying to decide whether this is the thing they want."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"The editing worth doing is therefore narrow and dull. Straighten. Crop. Correct the colour so it matches the object. Remove the background if the platform wants white. Nothing else moves the needle much."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"the-free-path-is-complete-here","runs":[{"text":"The free path is complete here"}],"role":"free"},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"You do not need Photoshop, and job ads naming it are about design roles rather than about photographing your stock."}]},{"t":"ul","items":[[{"text":"Background removal.","b":true},{"text":" "},{"text":"rembg","code":true},{"text":", free and open source, runs on your own machine and processes hundreds of images from a folder. Photopea does it in a browser for nothing. GIMP does it manually with more control."}],[{"text":"Colour, crop, straighten.","b":true},{"text":" GIMP, Krita, Photopea, or the editor already on your phone. Darktable and RawTherapee if you shoot raw."}],[{"text":"Upscaling.","b":true},{"text":" Real-ESRGAN and similar tools, free, for the old catalogue photograph that is 600 pixels wide. Results are good on texture and unreliable on text and faces."}],[{"text":"Batch processing.","b":true},{"text":" ImageMagick, free, resizes and converts a folder of two hundred images in one command."}]]},{"t":"code","lang":"bash","label":"Bash","text":"# resize a whole folder to 1600px wide, convert to webp\nmagick mogrify -resize 1600x -format webp *.jpg"},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"That command is most of what a product catalogue needs, and it costs nothing."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"the-line","runs":[{"text":"The line"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Retouching that makes the photograph represent the object more accurately is fine. Retouching that makes it represent something else is not, and the distinction is not aesthetic: it is the difference between an advertisement and a misleading one."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Fine:","b":true},{"text":" straightening, cropping, dust removal, colour correction toward the real colour, consistent white backgrounds, removing your own reflection."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Not fine:","b":true},{"text":" changing the colour to one you do not stock, removing a defect the item actually has, generating a scene implying features it does not have, showing an accessory that is not included, making a small item look large by manipulating scale."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"The reliable test:","b":true},{"text":" would the customer receiving the parcel feel the photograph was accurate? If not, you are looking at a return, a chargeback, a bad review, and in most jurisdictions a consumer protection issue."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Colour is where honest businesses get caught. Screens differ, and a photograph edited to look attractive rather than accurate produces returns at your cost. Photograph against a neutral background in daylight and correct toward reality, not toward pleasing."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"generated-backgrounds-and-staged-scenes","runs":[{"text":"Generated backgrounds and staged scenes"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Tools that place your product in a generated setting (a marble worktop, a sunlit café table) are widely available and mostly harmless, with three cautions."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Shadows and reflections frequently do not match the scene, which reads as fake even to people who cannot say why. Scale often goes wrong, and a mug the size of a bucket is worse than a plain background. And if the scene implies something untrue (that a food product is served in a restaurant that does not stock it, that a garment is a different weight than it is) you are back over the line."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"For most small businesses a clean white background and one photograph in real use, taken on a phone, outperforms generated staging. The real one has details nothing invents: the actual grain, the actual wear, the actual light of the place you work."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"keep-the-originals","runs":[{"text":"Keep the originals"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Unedited files, in a folder, backed up. You will need them when a platform changes its size requirements, when a customer disputes the colour, and when you rebuild the site in three years."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Name them so they can be found: "},{"text":"oak-chair-46cm-front.jpg","code":true},{"text":" rather than "},{"text":"IMG_4471.jpg","code":true},{"text":". It takes the same amount of typing and saves an hour every time you look for something."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"a-repeatable-set-up-costs-nothing","runs":[{"text":"A repeatable set-up costs nothing"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Consistency across a catalogue reads as competence, and it is achieved by boring repetition rather than by editing."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Pick one spot near a window that gets indirect light. Mark where the item goes and where the phone goes: tape on the floor works. Use the same background: a sheet of white card is enough. Shoot at the same time of day where you can."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Now every photograph starts from the same place, the same edit applies to all of them, and a customer comparing four items is comparing the items rather than four lighting conditions. This is worth more than any tool in the lesson and takes twenty minutes to set up once."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"alt-text-which-is-not-optional","runs":[{"text":"Alt text, which is not optional"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Every image on your site should carry a short description in its alt text. It is what a screen reader announces to a blind customer, what appears when the image fails to load, and what search engines read."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Drafting these is a good use of AI: describe the photograph, ask for eight to twelve words, plain and factual. “Oak dining chair, front view, showing the stacking notch” rather than “beautiful handcrafted chair”. Two hundred of them in an afternoon, and it is the accessibility fix with the best ratio of effort to effect."}]}],"check":{"question":[{"text":"A shop photographs a navy jumper. On screen it looks slightly washed out, so the owner deepens the blue until it looks appealing. What is the substantive problem?"}],"options":[{"text":[{"text":"Deepening a colour is destructive editing, and the original file should have been preserved before any adjustment was applied."}],"correct":false,"tempting":[{"text":"Names good practice about originals rather than the harm; keeping the raw file changes nothing about what the customer is shown."}]},{"text":[{"text":"Different screens render colour differently, so the adjustment will look wrong to some customers regardless of what the owner intended."}],"correct":false,"tempting":[{"text":"True of all screens and all photographs, which means it argues equally against accurate colour correction and does not identify what makes this edit different."}]},{"text":[{"text":"The photograph now shows a colour the shop does not sell, which produces returns at the shop’s cost and misrepresents the goods."}],"correct":true,"tempting":null},{"text":[{"text":"Colour adjustments applied by eye are unreliable, so a colour checker card should be used to calibrate the image against a known reference before publishing it."}],"correct":false,"tempting":[{"text":"Prescribes a more rigorous method for a step whose direction was the problem; calibrating and then deepening the blue anyway produces the same misleading result."}]}],"order":[0,1,3,2],"why":null},"prev":{"slug":"marketing-that-sounds-like-you","title":"Posts That Do Not Sound Generated","minutes":7},"next":{"slug":"generated-images-and-copyright","title":"Generated images: what is unsettled, and the three rules that are not","minutes":10}}}