Nowadays, footwear or shoe photography is a vital part of driving your shoe sales. Footwear is one of the appealing ecommerce selling products like other fashion products including jewelry, cosmetics, clothes, bags, etc. In this competitive market environment, the shoe sellers and retailers do anything to scale up their shoe businesses. Since product photo is the soul of ecommerce business, the shoe product photo must be stunning, eye-catching, and it should capture the wow level of user experience in the first impression.

However, top-notch shoe Photography depends on many factors, including photography gear, the experience of photographers, perfect photo shooting, and shoe photography post-production, and many more.

If you want to shoot the best quality shoe photography, you should maintain some basics. You can learn something handy from the following guideline.

Table Of Content

–Shoe Photography and Editing Tools & Gear
–Shoe Photography Tips and Tricks

• Put your best shoe products forward
• Avoid capturing flat shoe’s photograph
• Avoid messing out the frame
• Leverage Day Light
• Focus Right Area of Shoe Products
• Take product photos from every angle
• Add a perfect background
• Add Reflection Shadow
• Use a Live Celebrity Model
• Create a Story
• Get 360˚ Shoe photos
• Adding Props for Branding
• Moving Shoe photography
• Find Experienced Product Photographers
• Shoe Photo Editing and Retouching tips
• Remove Shoe Image Background
• Shoe Color Enhancing
• Shoe Image Retouching and cleaning
• Cropping and Resizing
• Other Shoe retouching tips

Shoe Photography and Editing Tools & Gear

To get the best quality shoe photos or any other product images, you must have some high-quality tools and gear. When you need to know how to shoot shoe product photography, and how to edit shoe photography where you should understand about Photography and Editing Tools & Gear. Using a low-quality photography kit, you may get images, but they cannot fulfill your business expectation. Not only that, as a professional product photographer, but you should also have some advanced tools to get success. To remind you, we have made a checklist of must-need shoe photography and editing kits. Have a look-

• Use DSLR camera

If you want to boost your business to the next level, you have to buy a DSLR camera for your product photography studio. Best quality Digital SLR cameras always capture a stunning photo with quality, cutting-edge tech, more insightful features, and high performance. A single-lens quality reflex camera captures your shoe photography outstandingly.

• Use Smartphone Camera

Along with a high-end product photography camera, you should have the best quality smartphone so that you can use it for product photography. Using a smartphone camera will allow you to take quick photos for instant sharing to the customers as a sample or for product marketing.

• Tripod

Using a tripod is undoubtedly crucial for indoor product photography or any outdoor photography. It will provide you stability during taking product photos. If you want to achieve clear and focused photos without any shaking effect, you need photography stand or tripod.

• Shoe stand

Shoe photo shooting or any product photography, experienced product photographers utilize stand, doll, mannequin, clips, tape, pins, etc. for making the product standstill. These tiny things help the photographer getting a perfect shot.

• Lighting Kits

Photography is all about the game of light and shadow. The top quality product photos contain perfect lighting. For shoe photography, you need to set up some useful lighting kits like light stand, umbrella, reflector, flash, etc. to achieve the best possible light during photo shooting. In a well-capable photography studio, it is must that you should have everything to gain the ultimate quality product images.

• Lightbox

LightBox is essential for taking images of tiny products. For shoe photography, you need to have a lightbox. A lightbox will allow you to get perfect light quickly. You don’t need to light the entire home. Utilizing a lightbox or softbox, you will just get appropriate light on the product.

• Rotator or turntable

For the pro-quality product photo shooter, turntable is a crucial part of small product photography. If you want to take 3D/360˚packshot of products, you need this kit. It will help your product rotating and you can take an image from all sides.

• Computer

It is a silly thing to remind any professional about computers. But, most often we see to use a low configured computer set for image editing and retouching that results in terrible. Capturing images with even costlier photography gear, you may not get desired product images. In that case, you need perfect product image editing and retouching services for generating stunning and engaging images. And image editing without highly configured PC like Apple brand will not bring about the professional output that you desired for boosting business.

• Photo Editing Tools

Product photo editing and retouching is an essential part of getting max quality product images for eCommerce business. More or less every product image on the internet is retouched. So, you also cannot generate high-end shoe images without editing images. To edit product photos, you need the latest version of photo editing tools like Photoshop, GIMP, etc. You need Pen Tablet for editing soft edge-images.

Shoe Photography Tips and Tricks

Shoe photography is something different than other product photography. Since it is not a much bigger item, it requires appropriate lighting and photography expertise. Here we are going to give you some exclusive tips and tricks about how to shoot shoe product photographs.

Put your best shoe products forward

While you are going to take photos of multiple shoes for making collages, you should keep the best shoes in front. During choosing products, the customers view the front products first out of a collage. If you have colorful shoes, arrange those as near the frame as possible. The closer images will catch the customers’ attention effectively.

Avoid capturing flat shoe’s photograph

Even when you buy something online, think you don’t choose the products that lay limp and lifeless. If the item is captured in a flat position, the buyer cannot understand its details and the fact creates a gap between the products’ quality and the buyers’ thought. A pair of flat shoes cannot create an illusion. They fail to attract the customers buying attention. So, as a photographer, if you take flat photos of products, it will not perform well as eCommerce items and eventually, your client will suffer while trying to boost shoe sales.

Instead, try to take shoe photos upright and smart. Don’t let the items flat down, pressed, or tapped. In need, use other helping elements to keep the products standstill with its energy. Put inside the shoe papers, tissues, or soft clothes so that it looks bump and smarter. Don’t think that it is cheating, rather it is an art of photo shooting and every professional photographer or retailer does it. It is a matter of interesting fact that shoppers understand it.

Avoid messing out the frame

While taking shoe photos don’t jumble or mess out the photo frame. Try to keep the product image clear and isolate from stuffing with other appliances. Keep some blank spaces around the subject, but heed on not to leave too many negative spaces. Remove irrelevant elements. You can keep some relevant things or props for branding. However, cluttering the product photo frame with many distracting elements will ruin the business’s purpose. Such product images in online stores are not ideal to display. These product images get lost their beauty and fail to catch potential customers’ eyesight.

Leverage Day Light

Lighting is everything during product photography. An appropriate light can make your products appealing to the customers. Lighting makes a shoe product photo glossy and glamorous. At the same time, bad lighting will damage your photography purpose. However, to get the best light for product photography, place your product just next to a big window to avail the maximum light. You can use a softbox for studio photography with artificial light. But we recommend using board daylight. Taking any photos in daylight is several times perfect that taking utilizing artificial lighting.

Focus Right Area of Shoe Products

The more your product is in focus, the more your customer will get the product details. Sometimes you can take images with soft focus, but it hinders the buyers from seeing the details of items. The soft-focus may seem artistic, but keeping the matter of customers in mind, try to take images with full focus. Take images focusing on the entire product to get the best customer-oriented product photos. Use higher aperture on your camera.

Take product photos from every angle

To provide the customer details about your products, you have to take more and more images from different angles. Your customers want to see everything about what they are going to purchase. So, try to take photography of shoes from all sides such as the left side, right side, top side, from the backside, front side, etc. In the case of show product images, take photos from closely so that purchasers can understand shoe textures. You can shoot images from many other corners. Don’t relax taking a product image from just 2 or 3 sides.

Add a perfect background

If you take background removal service for product images, it is needless to say to add any background. But, if you decide not to edit the background of shoe photographs, you have to concern about taking the right photography background. Since the background is a crucial issue for product photo shooting, we recommend using solid white backdrops. Even if you change your decision to receive Photoshop background editing services, later on, you can do it easily DIY at home or from a photo manipulation company just because of using a solid background.

Add Reflection Shadow

To make your shoe photos more artistic and elegant, try to add some reflection shadows in it. You can take Photoshop shadow services, but if you want it during product photo shooting, we suggest you take the shoe photos from on top of a glassy surface. You can use a mirror or if you are a thinker out of the box, keep some water just beneath the product. Both will provide you reflection shadow effect at the time of capturing photos.

Use a Live Celebrity Model

Celebrities have millions of followers who imitate their idols. The followers always keep a keen eye on their model and his/her fashion wears. So, during product photography, use a popular celebrity model wearing the best shoes. Because of the human model for shoe photos, the sales of shoe products will get a boost. Reminder! Don’t use a cheap celebrity model. If you do so, your photography purpose may not get fulfilled. Find an experienced male model or female model who can give appropriate expression as per your shoe products.

Create a Story

When you take product photos, try to create a concept or story. Whether you are going to take sports shoe photos, walking shoe photos, gym shoe photos, or regular fashion shoe photos, etc. always try to use a celebrity model from the related field. Create a story relating to a popular incident with that model and take shoe photos or brand promoting short videos. See more and more photos or videos of existing professional photographers or videographers, have ideas out of their works, create your own story and finally, shoot accordingly. You must get your desired stunning shoe images.

Get 360˚ Shoe photos

3D or 360˚ photo is one of the latest photography trends. It is too useful for small product photos such as shoes or jewelry items. It gives shoppers detailed product views. You will not lose any blank space and your photograph will appear like video. To get a shake-free perfect 360˚ shoe photo, use a turntable during photo shooting. If you are a full-time product photographer, we recommend investing in buying some modern product photography equipment.

Adding Props for Branding

Product photography for eCommerce marketplace like Amazon, eBay, etc. will not give you props for branding opportunities, but if you do shoe photography for social media store, you can add some related items or props with your products for branding purposes. You can add logos or other brand promoting items with product keeping in the background. The photographs for your website store can take branding items. Use branding stuff carefully so that they don’t ruin the beauty of product photos.

Moving Shoe photography

Do you want to know about the magical shoe photographs? Learn how to photograph shoes in a moving position. It can be coined as floating shoe photography. Such a creative shoe photo shooting will create a charm to your photos that would be fantastic for ad purposes. Using floating or moving shoes will create an illusion and easy to catch the buyers’ attention. These types of creative images are outstanding for boosting shoe sales.

Find Experienced Product Photographers

One of our ultimate shoe photography tips is finding professional shoe photographers or product photography studios for taking your product photos. An amateur photographer may not take perfect images. Search such a photographer or studio that is well-equipped and has been working a long time with a lot of projects. Without calling a serious photographer, your shoe photo shooting motto will not be fulfilled.

To have a professional product photography studio, search locally, or find a remote freelance photographer for your project. Have a keen eye on their photography portfolio and then decide to hire a shutterbug.

Shoe Photo Editing and Retouching tips

Mere Photography is not enough in most cases for eCommerce product photos. Rather the product images need the professional touch of Photoshop or other image-enhancing tools. Due to many reasons, your images of shoe products may not be perfect and need to be fixed. However, here we are going to provide you some exclusive shoe photo fixing tips that you can leverage to beautify shoe photos for your online store.

Remove Shoe Image Background

If your shoe photos contain distracting background, apply clipping path and background removal technique in Photoshop. Highlight the shoe product in the image frame. Most of the eCommerce platforms recommend to the white background in product photos. Shoe photo with clean background performs better and increases sales multiple times. If you can remove backdrop by yourself, do it or hire a photo editing company.

Shoe Color Enhancing

Shoe images should be shiny and glossy. They must be attractive like other product photos. At the first attempt of Photo shooting, if you don’t get the attractive color of shoe images, get color correction services. It will help you tweaking color-related issues. Enhance shoe photo lighting for creating glossiness. If you need different versions of a product, take color change or matching services. Perfect shoe color can draw potential shoppers’ attention.

Shoe Image Retouching and cleaning

Sometimes product images contain specks of dust, spots, scratches, etc, that are alarming for high-end quality product photos. They need to be cleansed. If your shoe pictures have specks of dust and spots issues, Photoshop the images and achieve the best quality shoe images for e-commerce business. Hire designers or do it yourself for removing dust and spots utilizing different tools and options of Photoshop.

Cropping and Resizing

To get appropriate e-commerce size shoe photos, you cannot depend on the camera. It will give you larger or smaller size product photos than your requirement. So, you cannot but take photo cropping and resizing service in Photoshop for having perfect shoe photos for e-commerce platforms or social media product store. Just you have to know the measurement that the ecommerce sites recommend uploading.

Other Shoe retouching tips

To make your shoe image lucrative, get creative image manipulation services, and create a story. Apply Photoshop shadow services to reduce the floating effects after removing the background and give your images reality. You can take raster to vector conversion for shoe images to display shoe products artistically. Take shoe photo culling service getting the best shoe images out of hundreds of shoe photos.

In fine, for getting the best quality shoe images or any other product photos, a combination of perfect photography and photo editing services is necessary. There are many other related factors like gears, photography capability, experience, product quality, and expertise in photo editing job. If all the factors come together, perfect shoe photos can be produced. However, these shoe photography and editing & retouching tips and tricks can be useful for both- the product photographers and the product owners.

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