You can tell an Apple ad from a mile away and recognize a Zara product from its iconic wacky-angle product photographs.
Think of Aesop or Glossier and their almost cult following on Instagram, and you realize a significant part of their success lies in their aesthetic, shown cleverly through their product shots.
Social commerce runs on visual currency. Images, specifically high-quality, engaging pictures, are significant in influencing purchase decisions and building trust.
They are the first touchpoint between your brand and potential customers, impact conversion rates, and are integral in building a well-recognized brand.
However, if a brand plans to scale quickly and launch new items consistently, creating and maintaining a consistent library of professional product shots is time-consuming and costly.
This is where AI product photography comes in, offering brands of all sizes an efficient, quick, and reliable way to produce stunning images that have customers shopping away happily.
In this blog post, we’re going to deep dive into the world of AI Product Photography and set you up with a simple and actionable guide to making the most of it for your brand.
Product photography is the art of capturing images of products from a brand’s catalog to use in marketing, advertising, and other sales activities.
Such images are featured on websites, shopping apps, social media platforms, and eCommerce marketplaces, as users trust them the most to see a product’s features and benefits.
Here’s why it’s critical to prioritize:
Traditional product photography has been the only way to get excellent product shots for a long time.
However, it also comes with several obstacles, which AI-based solutions address.
Let’s take a closer look at the challenges:
Any photographer (or even a social media marketer with an iPhone) will tell you that proper lighting is necessary to capture a product’s true colors and details.
When the lighting is inconsistent, you end up with unwanted shadows, reflections, or incorrect color rendering, all of which lead to poor-quality shots.
For example, a jewelry brand that often has to work with reflective surfaces like glass or metal will require precise and professional lighting setups that can be difficult to get or plan, not to mention more expensive.
Branding depends on customers recognizing a pattern or a common theme throughout their visual media.
But getting and maintaining such uniformity across large product catalogs is difficult.
To achieve it, you need to ensure the same angles, lighting, and backgrounds for each item.
Even minor inconsistencies can jar the consumer out of familiarizing with your brand’s overall aesthetic and brand perception.
In eCommerce, products with intricate details (for example, textiles, artisanal wares, rugs) need to have a gallery of sharp close-up shots to clearly showcase their features.
Since shoppers cannot feel or touch the item, they need more reassurance, which they find through your product photos.
However, traditional close-up photography uses advanced techniques to bring focus across all areas of the product.
A minor mistake can result in images with blurry sections or flat, unappealing visuals, all of which reduce its appeal and increase doubt in an already wary, skeptical average shopper.
Visual tension can be appealing, arresting, and helpful to make an infinite doom-scroller pause and take in your product.
You can achieve this by using the right background, one that enhances your product shots without drawing attention away from the item.
But finding that balance, especially across different product categories, quickly becomes tricky.
Remember, consumers don’t just want plain backgrounds, even if they are the go-to choice for eCommerce photos because they are clean and neutral, ensuring the product remains the central focus.
But some products are more appealing with creative or contextual backgrounds to showcase their features or how well they fit in with the consumer's lifestyle.
Getting this consistency across a large product catalog is difficult, especially through traditional photography.
Post-processing is a critical stage in product photography. Here, raw images are edited and optimized to meet brand standards.
Traditional photography doesn’t deliver results the day you shoot.
Even when you capture high-quality photos, the final images usually need modifications like background clean-up, exposure and color adjustments, etc., to make them look polished, consistent, and appropriate for different eCommerce platforms.
But these techniques need an expert hand, and while you can invest in in-house design teams or outsource it, they will drain your time and budget.
Lastly, if multiple photographers or editors are involved, maintaining consistency in visual tone post-edit can become increasingly complex.
In each challenge mentioned before, you will notice a direct impact on both time and cost.
Traditional photography—each stage of it, from planning, shooting, editing, to finalizing the photos—demands extensive resources, skilled professionals, and often specialized camera equipment.
First, you’ll need to create the perfect environment for the product by selecting lighting, background, and props. Setting this up and adjusting it can take hours, especially when dealing with products with intricate details.
Shooting can be labor-intensive, as each product may need multiple shots from different angles.
For a rapidly scaling brand, or a big brand with large product catalogs or frequently changing inventory, both the time and cost involved can quickly spiral out of control.
Consider marketplaces like Amazon or Etsy, social media channels like Instagram, and the ads you spot on Google.
In today’s eCommerce landscape, your brand must be ready to showcase your catalog across multiple platforms.
However, each of them has its own requirements for image formats, dimensions, quality, and file sizes.
When you factor in scaling and optimizing product images consistently across multiple channels, maintaining high-quality visuals and brand uniformity quickly becomes a challenge.
With traditional photography’s workflow, your team can waste hours cropping and resizing, which isn’t free from human errors either.
Here, you use artificial intelligence to automate and build your image-creation process.
From generating images through AI models to editing, optimizing, and standardizing them to match brand aesthetics, you can bring efficiency and scalability to product photography.
AI tools will analyze existing images for lighting, angles, and colors and will then suggest or automatically apply adjustments to improve consistency and overall image quality for all future batches of pictures too.
Advanced algorithms and machine learning models analyze, generate, and modify product images.
It includes:
1. Data Training: AI models are trained on huge datasets of images, which teaches them to identify different elements like products, backgrounds, and lighting conditions.
2. Algorithmic Processing: Once trained, the algorithm can create or enhance product images based on its observations. For example, you need to remove a background. Your AI photography tool will detect the product’s edges and make it stand apart from the background with unparalleled precision.
3. Real-Time Modification: AI can make changes on the fly. This allows immediate feedback and adjustments, reducing manual retakes.
4. Batch Processing: AI photography tools can process multiple images in one go, ensuring the edit remains consistent across large numbers of photos quickly.
Dabbling with AI-enhanced product photos can be straightforward with the right tool.
Here’s a step-by-step guide on how you can do it by using Dresma’s AI-powered solutions:
1. Choose Your Product Photography Tool: With Dresma’s DoMyShoot app, you can capture, create, edit, and process professional-quality product images with minimal effort.
2. Upload Your Product Images: This trains our algorithm to recognize your brand tone, visual style, and color palette.
3. Apply AI-Powered Editing: Dresma’s AI algorithm will analyze your images, automatically suggest lighting and background fixes, and finally polish them to make your images stand out.
4. Optimize for Multiple Platforms: Once the images are ready, you can simply select your size, platform, and format preferences, and our tool will produce the same.
AI-powered product photography offers numerous advantages:
When you can automate creating, editing, and optimizing product photography with AI, your brand can reduce or avoid expensive studio shoots and professional edits.
While traditional product photography involves lengthy setups and multiple shots, as we explored in the challenges section above, AI-powered product photography will drastically speed up your workflow.
As a result, you are left with high-quality product images in a fraction of the time it would take using human photographers and manual methods.
Whether it's updating a previous set of product shots or launching new products, AI photography tools can handle large volumes of images while maintaining consistency across extensive product catalogs.
Not to mention, reduces the chances of human errors, which a scaling brand will increasingly find.
Social media marketing, including paid advertising, requires marketers to quickly respond to consumer trends.
Often, brands will get a few hours or a day or two to usher in eyeballs by sharing their own spin on something viral.
To achieve this agility in product options and to reduce time to market, you need automated workflows that AI photography tools provide.
Automated workflows significantly reduce the time needed to produce and publish product images.
Let's take an example of a flat-lay shoot of a product.
It’s taken hours to design, set up, and shoot. A set number of images and angles has been pre-decided, and props arranged accordingly.
This workflow reduces opportunities to be innovative and creative on the fly.
Meanwhile, AI tools can generate new backgrounds, lighting conditions, and angles to your heart's content, giving you more creative control over your images.
They also often come with customizable templates that allow you to add your unique style and branding to the images.
AI product photography has revolutionized product photography for a diverse range of industries.
Here are a few impactful use cases:
Product images can make or break a sale.
With AI-powered photography, online retailers like you can quickly create polished, professional images that are consistent with brand tone and ready for upload for listing on your brand's marketplaces.
Be it clothing, electronics, beauty products, or home goods, you can ensure that every product is pictured with lighting, details, and backgrounds that have been known to convert for its category, leading to a boost in sales and lesser returns.
If your brand is running marketing campaigns across various platforms like Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest, you know the complexity involved by having to produce image variations for each of them.
Meanwhile, an AI photography tool will automatically generate platform-specific images that come pre-optimized for marketplaces like Amazon, Shopify, and eBay.
As a result, you can launch a campaign faster and more efficiently, without compromising on visual quality.
Fashion brands, and retailers with extensive catalogs often struggle to achieve consistency in style, lighting, and branding.
Since AI automates the process, brands of all sizes can quickly capture, edit, and standardize image output to create stunning shots.
For example, a clothing brand can use AI to create a cohesive image series of the same product with different colors or styles, without needing separate photoshoots for each variation.
Many brands sell across the world and have to bring in localization strategies to ensure their visual content is tailored to different cultural preferences.
AI tools can automate this and create localized images by adjusting colors, backgrounds, and styles to match regional tastes or trends.
For example, a product being sold in Europe might sell more when shot with a minimalist background, while the same product for an Asian market might be better with a more vibrant setting.
As a result, brands can connect to a diverse audience without separate photoshoots for each market.
A big part of eCommerce sales belongs to social commerce, of which influencer marketing is a key strategy.
Influencers and content creators usually do not or dislike sharing brand collateral as is, because the tone and aesthetic may not match their audience.
Instead, you can use an AI tool, and produce lifestyle shots featuring the sponsored product, with a customization unique to the creator.
AI product photography is transforming the way eCommerce brands approach visual content by automating mundane and time-consuming tasks.
It has become a highly popular, cost-effective solution for getting professional-quality images for businesses of any size.
We’ve worked with more than 5000 brands to enhance their product photoshoots and help them redirect more of their marketing budget to where it's really needed.
If you’re also eager to scale your operations and share stunning, CRO-focused product shots, explore Dresma’s AI-based photography solutions.
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