The product has to be the product

A different set of rules from portraits

With a person, the question is what is temporary. With a product, the question is simpler and stricter: does the buyer receive what they saw?

Everything that follows from that:

• Dust, fingerprints, packing marks on the sample: remove. The buyer’s unit will not have them.
• A scratch on the product itself: leave, unless the sample is damaged and the production unit is not. Then say so in the delivery note.
• A dent in the box: remove if the box is a sample, keep if it is the product.
• The colour: this is the one that generates returns, and it gets its own section.
• Proportions: never. A bag that looks larger than it is arrives as a disappointment and a refund.

This is not only ethics. In most jurisdictions, showing goods that materially differ from what is supplied is a consumer protection matter, and marketplace platforms remove listings over it independently of any law.

Rebuilding a straight edge

The commonest product repair. A box edge is dinged, a bottle’s shoulder has a nick, a phone’s chamfer has a scratch.

Cloning freehand along a straight edge always wobbles. The method that does not:

1. Draw a path along where the edge should be, using the pen tool. Two anchors for a straight run.
2. Make a selection from it with a one-pixel feather, covering the damaged side.
3. Clone or heal inside that selection. The selection acts as a stencil, so your brushwork cannot cross the line, and the resulting edge is mathematically straight.

The same approach with a rectangular marquee handles most box work: select the region, then clone within it, and the boundary stays clean.

For a repeating pattern (a knurled grip, a label’s repeated motif, a woven strap) do not clone. Select one clean repeat, copy it to a new layer, and move it into place. Repeat, offsetting slightly each time so the eye does not find the cycle.

Symmetry: the fastest product repair there is

Most products are symmetrical. A bottle, a jar, a shoe from the front, a piece of electronics.

Select the good half, duplicate it, flip horizontally, and slide it into place over the damaged half. Mask the join with a soft brush down the centre line. In thirty seconds you have a perfect object.

Two cautions. The lighting is usually not symmetrical (a key light from the left means the left side is brighter) so the mirrored half needs a tonal correction to match, typically a curve masked to it. And the label text is now mirrored, so the join has to fall outside any text.

This is legitimate: it produces an image of the product’s real shape. It becomes illegitimate the moment it hides an asymmetry the product actually has.

Labels, and getting them flat

A label on a curved bottle is distorted by the curve and often by the camera angle. Two fixes:

Perspective warp on the whole product to correct a camera-angle error. Photoshop’s Edit > Perspective Warp, GIMP’s Tools > Transform > Perspective.

Replacing the label entirely, which is what is usually done for a catalogue. Take the flat artwork from the client, place it as a smart object, and use Edit > Transform > Warp with a cylindrical preset to bend it round the bottle. Set it to Multiply or use a luminosity-based mask so the bottle’s real shading shows through. The result is a legible label with the real product’s light on it.

That second technique also solves the common problem of a client whose only photograph was shot before the packaging was redesigned.

Colour, and why it is the expensive one

The returns line on a shop’s accounts says “colour not as pictured” more than anything else.

The method:

1. Put a colour checker in the first frame of each setup, and white balance from it.
2. Hold the real product next to the screen in daylight and compare. This is the only test that matters, and it takes ten seconds.
3. Correct with a Hue/Saturation layer targeted at the relevant colour band, masked to the product, rather than a global move.
4. Soft proof if the image is going to print.
5. Check on a phone, because that is where it will be bought.

The one to be wary of is a saturation boost applied to make a product look appealing. A teal that is two shades brighter than the real fabric is the definition of the problem.

Background, shadow and the set

• White for marketplaces that require it, at exactly 255 across the background; several platforms check automatically and reject files that are not.
• Around 248 to 250 on your own site, so the product’s own white highlights read as highlights rather than dissolving.
• Keep the contact shadow. An object with a clean edge and nothing beneath it floats, and everybody sees it without knowing why. If the real shadow is unusable, build one: a soft ellipse on a layer set to Multiply at 20 to 25 per cent, slightly narrower than the base of the object, darker where the object meets the surface and fading outwards.
• Same treatment across the set. Shadows on all or on none.

The free path, and the honest limit

Everything here works in GIMP, Krita and Photopea. The pen tool, clone stamp, transform tools, blend modes and masks are all present. Photopea additionally handles PSD mockup templates, which is where most e-commerce work starts.

The limit is upstream of all of it. A product photographed under one bare bulb against a crumpled sheet cannot be retouched into a catalogue image, because the light is wrong and light is what makes a product look like an object rather than a cut-out. Ten minutes rearranging a window, a white card and a sheet of paper improves the result more than two hours of retouching, and that is the trade to make every time.