One bottle, one window, twelve minutes

The job, and the light it needs

Someone sells 500 ml jars of honey and needs a listing photograph. No studio, no lights, no Photoshop subscription. A phone, a window, and a laptop that struggles with anything heavy.

The whole job, in order, with the actual numbers. Every tool named has a free path. Ten minutes on the shoot saves an hour of editing.

• A table beside a window, not in direct sun. An overcast day is the best free light there is.
• A white bedsheet or A2 card behind and under the jar, curving up the wall so there is no corner line.
• A second sheet of white card on the shadow side, about 40 cm away, bouncing light back. That is the difference between a product shot and a snapshot.
• Wipe the lens. Then wipe the jar.
• Shoot from the height of the product, not from above. Standing over it makes it look small.
• Use the phone's Pro mode and shoot DNG if it offers one. Most mid-range Android phones do; iPhone Pro models shoot ProRAW. Raw gives 12 or 14 bits per channel instead of 8, which is what lets you fix white balance later without banding.
• Tap to focus on the label, then drag the exposure down a third of a stop. Blown highlights on glass are unrecoverable; slightly dark is fixable.
• Take twenty frames. Storage is free.

From raw file to working file

Open the DNG in RawTherapee or darktable — both free, both fine on a modest laptop — or Lightroom mobile's free tier on the phone itself.

• White balance: take the eyedropper and click the white sheet — not the brightest highlight, which is probably clipped and useless as a reference. The window's colour cast disappears in one click.
• Exposure: nudge until the histogram's right edge stops just short of the wall.
• Lens correction: on. Phone wide lenses barrel noticeably.
• Export a 16-bit TIFF, not a JPEG. You are about to stretch this file.

Then in Photopea, GIMP or Photoshop: straighten on the table's horizontal — a jar leaning two degrees reads as amateur before anyone can say why — and crop square at 2000 by 2000, above the 1600-pixel minimum several marketplaces set.

Save the layered file now, as honey-500ml_front_v1.psd, before any edit. That is the habit from lesson two, and the one people skip.

Cut it out, then clean it

Hard manufactured edges are the pen tool's job.

• Trace the silhouette with the pen tool. Ten to fifteen anchor points, not fifty. Sit it half a pixel *inside* the edge so no rim of grey background survives.
• Convert it to a selection, feather 0.5 px, and click Add Layer Mask. A mask, not Delete.
• Put a solid white layer underneath. Several marketplaces require the main image on pure white, 255/255/255; on your own site use about 250 grey, so the jar's highlights do not dissolve into it.
• Keep the contact shadow. Paint the dark pool where the jar meets the surface back in, on the mask, with a soft black brush at 20 per cent. Without it the jar floats and the picture looks fake to people who cannot say why. If the real shadow is unusable, paint a soft ellipse on a new layer set to Multiply at 20 to 25 per cent. That is fabricating light, not the product.

Then dust. Zoom to 100 per cent and walk the whole jar, top to bottom. Add a new empty layer, tick Sample All Layers, and heal onto that layer — every repair sits above the photograph and any one can be erased. Where a mark sits on the rim or the edge of the label, switch to the Clone Stamp and sample along the same side of that edge.

Do not remove a scratch that is actually on the product. That is the product.

Tone, colour, and out

• Curves adjustment layer. Black point where the histogram's data begins, then a very gentle S — upper quarter up two or three pixels of drag, lower quarter down the same.
• Check the label's white with the eyedropper. Around 240 to 248, not 255. A clipped label has lost its printing.
• Is the honey the right amber? Hold the actual jar beside the screen in daylight. That is the only test that matters, and it is what "colour not as pictured" on a return means. If it is off, a Hue/Saturation layer targeted at Yellows, masked to the honey alone.

Only now, and in this order:

1. 1Flatten a copy. Keep the layered master.
2. 2Resize to 2000 by 2000.
3. 3Sharpen at this size: Unsharp Mask, amount 70, radius 0.6 px, threshold 2. Or High Pass at 1 px on a duplicate set to Overlay, which can be masked off the background.
4. 4Convert to Profile > sRGB.
5. 5Export JPEG at quality 82. It should land between 250 and 500 KB. If it is 2 MB, the slider was at 100.
6. 6Strip the metadata — None in the export dialogue, or exiftool -all= honey-front.jpg. The GPS tag in a photo taken at home points at your house.
7. 7Name it for a human: honey-500ml_front.jpg.

What this is not

This gets you a clean, honest, sellable product photograph from a phone and a free editor. It does not get you a magazine cover, which needs controlled lights, a macro lens and years of practice.

The boundary is where lesson six put it. Straightening, dust, light and background are fair. Generating a lid that is not the lid, smoothing out a dent the buyer will receive, or making the honey a colour it is not — those change the claim, and the returns will say so anyway.

Today: do it once, on anything on your desk. Twelve minutes, and you have used every lesson in this course.