Services / Product imagery
A catalogue is a system of images, not a collection of good photographs.
The value is in the consistency, not the individual frame. Forty products photographed beautifully but inconsistently produce a grid that looks disordered; forty photographed to one specification produce a grid that looks like a brand, even if no single frame would win anything.
The canon
The principles this rests on, named.
Each with who established it, so the claim can be checked rather than taken on our word.
Light describes form; the direction of the key light is the whole decision.
Classical studio lighting; codified in Hunter, Biver and Fuqua, Light: Science and Magic
The family of angles concept explains what most product lighting gets wrong: the shape of the reflection is set by the size and position of the source, not the power of it.
Specular, diffuse and shadow tell the eye what a surface is made of.
Same source; surface physics
Whether a product reads as glass, matte plastic or brushed steel is decided entirely by how its highlights behave. This is the difference between a photo of an object and a photo that conveys its material.
Set the grid specification before the first shot.
Catalogue production practice
Fill ratio, crop, angle, shadow style, and background value, all fixed in advance. Deciding per product is how a grid ends up ragged.
Colour management end to end, or the colour is a guess.
ICC workflow; sRGB as the web delivery space
A colour chart in the first frame, a calibrated display, and a defined output profile. Without them, returns for 'colour not as shown' are self-inflicted.
Weight is a design constraint.
Core Web Vitals; Largest Contentful Paint is usually an image
Responsive sources, modern formats, and correct dimensions. A beautiful 2MB hero that delays LCP past 2.5s costs more than it earns.
Retouching removes distraction, not truth.
Advertising standards practice, and plain commercial sense
Dust, a stray thread, a sensor spot: remove. Changing the actual colour or proportions of what will arrive in the box: that is a return waiting to be filed.
Method
What actually happens, in order.
Every product, every angle, with fill ratio and crop stated. The list is approved before the studio is booked.
One setup, tested on the hardest product in the range, then not touched. Consistency comes from not relighting per item.
A chart in the first frame of each setup, tethered capture so framing is checked at full size rather than on a camera screen.
One path quality, one shadow treatment, one background value, applied identically across the range.
Website, marketplace, ad and social each have different aspect and pixel requirements. All derived from one graded master, never re-edited separately.
The final review is the catalogue page at real size. Individual images that look fine can still produce a grid that reads as inconsistent.
What goes wrong
The failure modes nobody advertises.
Products photographed at different sizes within the frame make a grid where items appear to be different scales. It is the most visible catalogue defect and the easiest to prevent.
Different shadow direction between adjacent grid items. The eye reads it immediately as amateur even when it cannot name the cause.
The garment that arrives a different shade. It generates returns, refunds and a review that outlives the photograph.
A square marketplace crop used as a website hero, or a website hero squashed into a story. Each channel needs its own crop from the master.
Uncompressed exports that make the product page slow. The photography then hurts the conversion it was bought to help.
What we refuse
A studio is defined as much by this list.
- We do not retouch a product into something the customer will not receive.
- We do not shoot without a colour reference frame.
- We do not deliver a single export and let the channels crop it themselves.
- We do not add a shadow in post that contradicts the lighting in the frame.
Measured, not felt
How anyone can tell whether it worked.
Fill ratio variance across the catalogue, measured, not eyeballed.
Delta-E between the photographed colour and the physical product.
Largest Contentful Paint on the product page with the real images in place.
Return rate for reasons citing appearance or colour.