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The quality of your pictures makes a difference.
A product picture that has a background that hasn’t full been removed, or is out of focus really puts a damper on sales.
I use a little collapsable photo “studio” box with two lights to take pictures, but the background isn’t completely white with those pictures. That’s where the software comes in. It can be complicated, but it doesn’t have to be.
Software for Removing Product Background
The software I use to clean up product images is Adobe Photoshop.
I sprung and bought it as one of their product suites, but you can buy it individually as well.
It really makes a difference when you use pro-software to get the job done.
I’ll use Photoshop to remove backgrounds from product images, re-size images for the web, and Photoshop compresses them really well.
Photoshop has also been helpful as I’ve purchased website themes to use for my product sites because those themes come with the regular images, but if you want to customize them, you need Photoshop to open the files.
There’s an easy way to remove the background, and there’s the more advanced.
Advanced Way to Remove background with Fine Tuning
“Easy” Steps to Remove Product Background
If you’ve already got Photoshop, great. Here’s some easy steps to removing the image.
- Use the Quick Selection tool (looks like a brush with a dotted circle next to it. It shares a menu item space with the Magic Wand)
- Select all around your image
- Use Alt + Click to remove any extra edges
- Then select “Refine Selection” up at the top
- Use the sliders to adjust Pixels and smoothness (usually a couple pixels will do)
- Be sure to select copy/cut to new layer
- Add a solid color layer (Black and White Circle next to the add layer button), and place the layer just under your newly created layer.
- Double check your image and Save as psd to come back and edit later if you need to or export to jpg if you’re all done.
You can go for the Creative Suite which is what I got, or the less expensive Elements which is a simplified version of the full Photoshop.
The Easy and Smart Way – Let Someone Else edit your Images, and Fast
If you don’t want to remove backgrounds yourself, or pay for expensive software, try out Pixelz.
Pixelz specializes in making your product images look fantastic. As of this writing, they’re offering the first three image for free.
After that, each image is about under $2 depending on what you need done. Their turn around time is 24 hours or less.
It’s pretty hard to beat especially with the free trial images.