Product Photo Retouching: A Complete Guide for Beginners

If you are involved with ecommerce business or product photography, you are quite familiar with the term product photo retouching. In fact, without product photo retouching, you can’t nail your online business or product photography job.

Imagine you have kicked off an online business in order to sell apparel. Naturally, you have to display the dresses available for sale to your target audience. But how are you gonna do that online? The only medium that you have to showcase your products is photography.

That means your shop visitors will basically view product photos and based on that, they have to decide. So, do you think only product photography is sufficient? Absolutely, not! Once a product photographer shoots products of any type, his/her photography won’t be flawless.

That doesn’t mean you should leverage flawed product images in your online store. Then, what’s the solution? Yeah, it’s product photo retouching otherwise known as product photo touch-up. To enhance your ecommerce product photography look, you have to retouch them.

And the good thing for you is that this write-up will be entirely based on product photo retouching. We will be touching each and every facet of product photo retouching throughout the entire blog.

Let’s get cracking….

Product Photo Retouching

Simply put, product photo retouching is basically making changes to a product photo with a view to improving its appearance. In other words, it involves applying a set of actions to a particular product image to add charm to it visually.

Some of the basic product photo retouching actions include color correction, resizing, shape adjustment, defect removal, shadow addition, etc. Tons of online and offline photo retouching tools are available at your disposal to retouch or enhance product photography.

Photoshop, GIMP, Luminar, Affinity Photo, etc. are some of the popular photo editing programs that always catch our attention. But Photoshop tops the list in terms of popularity, functionality, and quality. Plenty of pro companies are there that offer product photo retouching services and you can take services from them.

Why Avail of Product Photo Retouching

If you have gone through the upper portion of the write-up, you have already perceived the importance of product photo retouching more or less. But as it’s a comprehensive blog, we would cover ins and outs of product photo retouching here.

Let’s check out why you should make use of product photo retouching-

1. Improve Visual Appearance

When a customer visits an online store to buy a particular product, they focus on several aspects of the product, right? One of the characteristics that a customer tends to focus on is the look of the product. That means how good it appears before their eyes.

Your primary aim as an online store owner is to sell products. Just by labeling cheap prices on the products, you aren’t gonna get sales due to high competition. You have to find something unique to sell your products.

This is where product photo retouching will come into play. If you retouch your products before putting them on display, they will have extra appeal. This extra charm will also catch the attention of the shoppers.

2. Showcase different Parts of a Product

When product photographers shoot products for online shops, not necessarily they can highlight all the key details of the products in their photography. But that doesn’t mean you as an ecommerce business owner upload this product imagery with this appearance.

It’s very crucial that you make a perfect presentation of your products. What I mean is you have to display every nook and corner of your products with top-notch photos. Here also product photo retouching will come to rescue.

With product photo retouching, you will have an array of ways to highlight different parts of your products. No matter if a portion of a product is dark or bright, hidden or spotted; you can perfect it with photo retouching.

3. Boost the Chances of Sales

If retouched product photos grab the attention of buyers, it means you are one step away from making sales of your products. You may be wondering if you can make sales only based on enhancing product photography!

In no way, we are claiming that only by uploading touched-up product photos, you can generate sales. You have to be perfect in terms of other traits of your products like price, quality, features, etc.

But when you emphasize product photo retouching, you are setting yourself apart from your competitors. This no doubt attracts potential buyers and increases the chances of sales.

Why Take Professional Product Photo Retouching Services

You have already understood the importance of product photo enhancement. However, you can touch up your product photos yourself with online image retouching tools or you can approach professional product photo retouching service providers.

But we would always emphasize the latter over the former. There is a world of difference between the quality of image editing online tools and pro image retouching service providers. And you have to prioritize quality, right?

Let me list out some core reasons why you should approach pro product photo retouching service providers-

1. Create Brand Awareness

As an ecommerce business owner, you would stress on brand awareness naturally besides making sales. Professional photo retouching services can help in this cause immensely. Wondering how? Let me shed a bit of light on it–

One of the key factors to create brand awareness is coming up with something unique. With professional photo retouching services, you can create that uniqueness in your product photography. But online tools or newbie product photo enhancers can’t craft that.

Professional image manipulators can have the knack to style your product photography as you wish. For example, they can take advantage of color and light to add a unique and mind-blowing look to your product photography that will create a lasting impact on the minds of customers.

2. Improve Business Credibility

One of the important goals of any kind of business is generating sales but that’s not the only goal. You must keep many other points at the back of your mind to run any business, including an ecommerce business. And one of them is business trust and credibility.

Your target audience, customers, and buyers, all of them highly value the matter of credibility. And you have to earn their trust staying authentic and upright. One of the ways y;ou can stay upright is by utilizing genuine images in your store. But many times, original images may lose their luster due to flaws or lack of professionalism.

As we talk about professionalism, you can take advantage of pro image retouching service providers to refine them. Raw photos, poorly edited photos, or even photos that may be original but look like stock photos can be processed to impress clients and earn their credibility.

3. Better Efficiency

A product photographer of beginner level doesn’t have the craft to expedite photo retouching services. They will always be sluggish in their approach which may not be fruitful for you all the time.

But when you take professional image processing services, you get the job done with high efficiency. They have the knack to process similar types of images in a single click with reduced effort. That means you will get your job done in a short time but with optimum quality.

4. Social Media Engagement

Once you start your ecommerce business, you won’t become a top seller in one shot. You have to run scores of activities to promote your products and generate sales. One of the effective media in the current era is notching up social media engagement.

As per the stats of Website Planet, visuals increase the desire of the audience to engage by 80%. That means if you post top-grade product images on social media, the chances that your target audience would engage with these images is 80%.

With professional image retouching services, you can rest assured of getting top-notch product photography that will make an impression on your clients’ minds. This will also push them to go forward in the sales funnel.

5. Customized Look of Product Photos

At the initial stage of your online business, you need to run marketing campaigns on multiple platforms. You have to utilize product photography for these platforms to have an impact. But you can’t use some type of image for all these platforms.

You have to make use of custom photos for different platforms like social media, billboards, flyers, brochures, etc. With the help of professional product photo retouching companies, you get this special and crucial service.

Basic Steps of Product Photo Retouching

If you are an ecommerce business owner, it’s important that you know the fundamental steps of retouching product photography. Let’s have a quick look at the basic steps of product photo retouching-

• Raw image correction
• Spot retouching
• Color correction
• Exposure adjustment
• Shadow addition
• Compositing
• Saving the final image

Thoughts on Product Photo Retouching

In this write-up, we have highlighted product photo retouching guide for ecommerce products. But you can take advantage of this mesmerizing service for any kind of product. Be it your home décor or personal belongings, photo retouching can spice up them.

So, are you up to taking advantage of the product photo retouching service? When you are getting so many benefits from post-production service, it’s worth considering it! Another key point that I must mention is the price and turnaround time.

If you can get in touch with the right post-processing company, you can rest assured about getting a competitive price for the services. And that’s also with a quick turnaround time! So, what are you waiting for? Hurry up and make use of professional product photo retouching services.