Editing a product photo, and where editing becomes a lie

What actually sells

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.

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.

The free path is complete here

You do not need Photoshop, and job ads naming it are about design roles rather than about photographing your stock.

• 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.
• Colour, crop, straighten. GIMP, Krita, Photopea, or the editor already on your phone. Darktable and RawTherapee if you shoot raw.
• 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.
• Batch processing. ImageMagick, free, resizes and converts a folder of two hundred images in one command.

# resize a whole folder to 1600px wide, convert to webp
magick mogrify -resize 1600x -format webp *.jpg

That command is most of what a product catalogue needs, and it costs nothing.

The line

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.

Fine: straightening, cropping, dust removal, colour correction toward the real colour, consistent white backgrounds, removing your own reflection.

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.

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.

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.

Generated backgrounds and staged scenes

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.

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.

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.

Keep the originals

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.

Name 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.

A repeatable set-up costs nothing

Consistency across a catalogue reads as competence, and it is achieved by boring repetition rather than by editing.

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.

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.

Alt text, which is not optional

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.

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.