How to Take Product Photos
Last Updated on September 23, 2025 by Peter Wood
As e-commerce develops, you should realize that taking product photos is important for hot sales. It is the process to display the value of your products and make your product trustworthy. Digital buyers usually make purchase decisions by searching and comparing products online. You may have many competitors. And the seller who can showcase his products with high-quality pictures could win the competition and lead to conversions. So it seems that the right way to take product photos determines your survival in the marketplace. You may be wondering whether you can take awesome photos with smartphones. The answer is yes. And the article will tell you how to take perfect product photos with a smartphone in detail.
Step One: Preparation for Taking Product Photos
Camera
High-end smartphones are usually embedded HD cameras. If the smartphone's built-in camera has a good performance, you can use it to take product photos. Otherwise, you can buy an external lens, like a fish-eye lens, zoom lens, or macro lens. Remember that when you take product photos with your smartphone, you should treat the handset as a camera but not a mobile phone.
Tripod
Another necessary hardware is a tripod. A jittery product photo cannot attract customers’ attention. On the contrary, a blurry photo shot by an unstable smartphone will make your product untrustworthy. A tripod could help you to take a clear product picture. That is the line of product showcase. Moreover, after placing your smartphone on a tripod, you can adjust the shooting angle more flexibly.
Background
If you look at product showcasing on Amazon, you will discover that the product photos with the background are most attractive. There are many ways to decorate the photo background for your products. If you want to highlight the product, you can use a white background. White background can create a clean product photo and eliminate distractions. Of course, you can decorate a unique backdrop with some props. It is a great time to use your creativity.
Step Two: How to Take the Desired Product Photos
Light
Light is essential to product photos. Although there are many options for lighting, natural window light is the easiest option. When you prepare to take product photos, you can place your product near a large window to enjoy the natural light. If you shoot pictures on a cloudy day, you’d better use a large lamp to compensate for lighting. The most important thing is not to use the flash on your smartphone when capturing product photos, whether on a sunny day or the cloudy day.
Gridlines
A product photo should put the product in the center; however, our eyes are not rulers. Smartphones have the feature to show gridlines when you take product photos. That could help you to make product photos more balanced. The methods to open gridline are a little different on iPhone and Android handsets:
iPhone: go to the Settings app and select Photos & Camera. Then turn Grid on.
Android handsets: open the camera app and locate to Settings. Find out Gridlines and enable them.
Camera settings
Besides gridlines, there are other camera settings that we can use to take product photos. Firstly, make sure that you disabled the Zoom option, which will make images blur. You can turn on Live exposure mode when taking product photos. Your smartphone can adjust exposure. And another setting is Quality. So you can set the image quality to High. Finally, you can explore other settings in the camera app when shooting product photos.
Step Three: How to Polish the Taken Product Photos
What is the best post-processing editor to touch up the product photos? Whether you need to edit the cloth photos with models, cut out the product from the background, and remove noises to enhance the photos, WidsMob AI Retoucher is such a versatile photo enhancer and editor to beautify your product photos and keep the details of product photos with AI algorithms. It can minimize photo noise, recover low light, remove haze, touch up portraits, extract products from the background, blur portraits in photos, and more.
1. Enhance product images with noise reduction, HSL enhancements, and more.
2. Polish models of the product photos via skin, blemish, eyes, shine, face, etc.
3. Hide each face with a mosaic or blur effect to avoid copyright-related problems.
4. Apply photo filters, make cartoons/paintings/sketches, and add analog films.
Step 1. Once you have installed WidsMob AI Retoucher, you can launch the program on your computer and click the Import button to upload the taken product photos. Of course, you can import multiple photos for a batch process. It supports JPG, PNG, and most RAW file formats.
Step 2. Choose the desired photo you want to touch up, you can click the Edit button in the upper-right corner to go to the editing window. Select the AI Retouch option to reduce noises, recover low light, and remove haze. As for some taken product images with models, you can use the AI Face Clean menu.
Step 3. When you need to touch up the products, you can choose the Filters menu and select the different filters to focus on the product, such as Lomo, Vivid, Soft Light, Dark Light, and more. Moreover, you can also render a series of black and white films to the photos to get some classic photos.
Step 4. To make some special pictures for the product photos, you can also turn the photos into pencil sketches, cartoons, and paintings with an AI algorithm. Just go to the AI Style Transfer menu and choose the Neno Light option to apply a special effect to the jewelry within the image.
Note: When you need to extract the product from some images, there is a new AI algorithm for background removal that will be released within a few days. It should always be the initial post-processing photo editor for product images.
Conclusion
Based on the introductions above, you might get some important tips about how to take product photos with smartphones. As you can see, it is not as complicated as you thought. When you prepare to take pictures, you should have some necessary hardware, like tripod and external lenses. When taking photos, you’d better set up your smartphone and utilize natural light. After you take product photos, you can use WidsMob AI Retoucher to enhance your photos and make the product photos attractive.