Product photos with a phone that do not look like phone photos

A phone camera is better than the camera most listing photos were shot on five years ago. What makes a photo look cheap is almost never the camera — it is a ceiling light, a busy background, and a picture taken from wherever the person happened to be standing.

Light: one window, no ceiling

1. 1Turn the ceiling light off. Mixing daylight and a warm bulb is what makes colours look wrong in a way no editing fixes.
2. 2Put the product beside a window, not in front of it. Side light shows texture; back light makes a silhouette.
3. 3Bounce the shadow side back with anything white — a sheet of A4, a folded pillowcase, the back of a cereal box.
4. 4Shoot on an overcast day if you can choose. Direct sun is the hardest light there is, and it is the one people reach for first.

The two settings nobody touches

Tap the screen where the product is, then drag the little sun icon down until the picture looks slightly darker than it did. Phones overexpose almost everything, and pulling back a third of a stop is the difference between white and washed out.

Second: turn the grid on and use the 2× lens rather than the wide one. The wide lens bends edges and makes a mug look like a bucket. Step back and zoom with your feet plus the second lens; everything looks like itself again.

The five shots a listing needs

• The plain one: whole product, clean background, straight on. This is the thumbnail, and it decides the click.
• In use, or in a room. Nobody can judge size from a white background.
• The detail: stitching, grain, the corner where the quality shows.
• Scale: beside a hand, a mug, a book — something everyone owns.
• What arrives: everything in the order laid out together, including packaging.

For a digital product the same five hold with one swap: the plain shot becomes the cover, and "what arrives" becomes a picture of every page or file laid out in a grid, because the fear you are answering is that they will pay and get one thin PDF.

Editing, in ninety seconds

Crop straight. Lift the exposure a little, drop the highlights, raise the shadows slightly. Set white balance so a white thing in the photo is actually white. Stop there — saturation sliders are what make a photo look like a listing from 2013, and a colour that does not match the product is the fastest route to a refund.

Shoot the whole set in one session, in the same light, so the listing reads as one shop rather than five days of weather.