Pictures Sell Products: How to Make Yours Great

The quality of your pictures makes a difference.

A product picture that has a background that hasn’t been fully removed, or that is out of focus, really puts a damper on sales.

I use a little collapsible 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 splurged 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 professional software to get the job done.

I use Photoshop to remove backgrounds from product images and resize images for the web, and it 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 a more advanced way.

Advanced Way to Remove the Background with Fine-Tuning

“Easy” Steps to Remove Product Background

If you’ve already got Photoshop, great. Here are some easy steps for removing the background.

1. Use the Quick Selection tool (looks like a brush with a dotted circle next to it; it shares a menu spot with the Magic Wand)
2. Select all around your image
3. Use Alt + Click to remove any extra edges
4. Then select “Refine Edge” (or “Select and Mask” in newer versions) at the top
5. Use the sliders to adjust pixels and smoothness (usually a couple of pixels will do)
6. Be sure to select copy/cut to new layer
7. Add a solid color layer (the black-and-white circle next to the Add Layer button), and place the layer just under your newly created layer.
8. Double-check your image, and save it as a PSD to come back and edit later if you need to, or export it as a 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.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 14

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 images for free.

After that, each image is about $2 or less, depending on what you need done. Their turnaround time is 24 hours or less.

It’s pretty hard to beat, especially with the free trial images.

https://www.pixelz.com/features/