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Amazon’s new AI tool could be the end of product photography

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Any e-commerce and low-end product photographers out there may want to start thinking about diversifying. Amazon has released a beta version of a tool that replaces boring white backgrounds with more interesting scenes. And, of course, it’s all done with generative AI.

Amazon says that they have released the tool in a bid to move away from uninspiring white backgrounds or bad Photoshop. It promises that the new feature requires no skills. Great news for small businesses, perhaps, less good for the average jobbing product photographer.

How to create beautiful shots of wine bottles with one light

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Product photography is a staple of many photographers’ income. Some products, however, are more difficult to shoot than others. Let’s take wine, for example. It’s not a straightforward subject from a technical point of view, and there are some expectations from the wine producers that usually need to be adhered to.

But, of course, this sort of thing can be learnt. In this video, commercial photographer Daniel Norton shows us exactly how to photograph wine bottles the right way. If you can shoot it correctly, you’ll save a lot of time in post-production as well.

Product photography with the Zhiyun Molus G60 and X100 LED lights

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At NAB 2023, Zhiyun announced two new LED lights; the Molus G60 (buy here) and X100 (buy here). While not the company’s first LED lights, it is a new market for Zhiyun, and on in which they’ll face some tough competition. To see what the new LED lights could do and have a look at some practical applications for them, we went back to the Zhiyun stand to speak with product photographer Oleksii Hurinenko.

Small LED lights like the Zhiyun Molus G60 are often a product photographer’s best friend. Quite regularly, you need lights that are fairly small, as the products are typically quite small themselves – at least compared to what you’d need for portrait photography. But while the Molus G60 and X100 are small, they are also powerful with 60W and 100W outputs.

PhotoRoom uses AI to turn your lousy snapshots into decent product photos

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Text-to-image generators like DALL-E have been available to the public for a while now, and so has DALL-E’s API. While it’s amusing to create surreal images with them, these tools come in handy in the real world, and PhotoRoom is one example of this usability.

This photo editing tool now offers an AI-powered feature that turns your crappy phone snapshots into decent, or even great product shots. Just snap your photo, describe the context as you would with DALL-E or Midjourney, and watch the magic happen.

The psychology behind the 10:10 in watch advertising photos

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There are plenty of tips and tricks for making the best out of product photography. Other than gear, lighting, composition, and other photography-related strategies, there are also a lot of psychological tricks involved in taking a photo that will sell the product.

One of these strategies is typical of advertising photos of watches. If you’ve ever noticed that they’re usually set to 10:10 in photos, there’s a good reason behind it. It’s all about psychology, and in this article, we’ll tell you more about it.

How to – and how definitely not to – photograph mirrors

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What’s the most difficult thing you’ve ever had to photograph? A bicycle? A French horn? Silverware maybe? What those things all have in common is that they are all highly reflective objects, and often present some issues when photographing them.

But what would be even more challenging than a shiny object? Have you ever had to photograph a mirror? That surely would be the ultimate in product photography challenges, and the internet of course has a hilarious collection of people trying and failing to photograph mirrors for sale. But what is the correct way to photograph a mirror? DIYP spoke to South African commercial photographer Carla McMahon to find out the best way to do it.

Learn to shoot wine bottles with this brilliant lighting breakdown

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How many times have you been browsing an online wine catalogue or a magazine and stopped to really appreciate the photographs of the bottles? A lot of work goes into designing wine labels and the photography of the bottles, even just the boring old e-commerce shots on white, are actually quite technical.

UK based commercial photographer Del Vincent came up with a very clever way to show exactly how he photographs wine bottles, and what each light and reflector card does on each part of the bottle.

Hard light vs soft light and how it applies to still life, food and product photography

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The concept of hard vs soft light comes up all the time, particularly on YouTube, but it’s typically in relation to portraits and other photographs of people. It’s rarely given much air time when it comes to other genres where you have control over the light, like food and product photography or still life.

But in this video from V-Flat World, commercial product and food photographer Hudi Greenberger walks us through the principles of hard and soft light, how we can apply them to our small scale scenes and the overall effect that different relative sizes of light source will have on your shot.

This simple product photography walkthrough offers everything you need to know to get started in product photography

Product photography can be such a fun genre of photography to explore, even if you don’t want to do it for a living. Perhaps you just want great pictures of your own products to sell in your Etsy store or maybe you just want to show off your new toys in an effective way to your Instagram followers. Whatever the ultimate use, it’s still product photography and if you want to do it well, then you’ll want to watch this video.

Coming from Lucy Martin, this product photography walkthrough goes through what she considers to be the essentials of what you might need but also explains why you might need them. Everybody’s needs are different and Lucy goes through several different options that are useful for the budget-minded photographer as well as how you can expand it in the future to produce the best product shots possible.

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