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Product Photography for Selling on Social Media

Um so now we're also going to talk about product photography there's a lot of debate between using white photos versus colorful backdrops and for the most part as a general suggestion when I like to say is as long as your photos are consistent in your shop that's that's the main thing I think having white photos are very important to especially when you're working with bloggers are influencers or magazines it's kind of the standard to have the white photos and I'm actually going to show you how you can take really great follows in a little bit using this really cool light box when it comes to social media sales. I've personally found that photos with colorful backdrop to do a lot better than white backdrops and I think it has to do with social media being kind of like that you know it's a spontaneous place that's candid it's like you know it's not overly professional in that way social media shows you that human element behind your brand right? So I think the colorful backdrops work in...

your favor in that regard, but again, you know for something like this I would test it out for your own shot once you actually get selling on social media, try comparing white photos and then do some products with colorful backgrounds and see which ones start to get better traction with your own customers so to take great product photography. I really recommend that you have a light box that you have on him. So if you like me, live in minneapolis, where there's like hardly any sunlight or maybe you have a full time job and the only time that you can work on taking photos is at night, when you don't have sunlight, having a light box really eliminates all of your daylight sunlight problems so you can make your own light box you, khun by your own for not very much money at all. It's definitely a great investment that I would encourage, that you invest in or buy so here's. An example of this is actually not the very first light box that I had, but this is pretty much what a what a light box is. This is one that I bought on ebay for something like fifteen dollars, and it was free shipping. It doesn't look the best, but it works really well, and so those lamps are like these constructs shin clamp lamps that I bought from home depot on dh that's. Basically the set up that I have and you can see how I kind of jimmied my I am light box here for all of you guys were doing jewelry and if you need to hang like hearings or necklace chains I have like a little hook on the top there for hanging on that necklace chain so prior to this I actually had built my own light box and all you need is a cardboard box big enough to fit your product in and then for these one two three sides where your lights shine in you want to cut kind of a square hole and then take some white kind of transparent fabric kind of like this and just tape it on or glue it on the sides and what this white fabric helps do is it diffuses the light so that um and you know like this is all really techie talk like what diffuses what does that mean but what it really helps your product is it prevents really dark harsh shadows from appearing and that makes your product stand out better um so you can make your own you can buy one really cheap and here's the thing when you use a light box and you take a photo of it it's going to come out looking like this it's going to have a great background so this was a misconception that I had when I started taking my own photos with that like I thought, you know, with the camera with the right settings with a light box is going to make something nice and perfect and and white for me, but it turns on I'll agree and here's, what? What you probably won't find a lot of information out there is that you actually have to take this and edit it using some program or some app or photo shopped, for example, so you can turn it into this, and I have a really great tutorial that you can watch where it shows you how to edit this product photo in under one minute and you can get this link at creative haif co dot com slash edit photos it's a really quick tutorial using a free editing software so if you're taking photos using your dslr or with your digital camera or even with your iphone, you khun definitely turn it into that white photo and using this tutorial it's really easy, so I'm actually going to do a live demo of how I normally take my product photos for all of my sales a week when I didn't fail a week, and I'm going to show you how it added those photos and how I kind of kind of design graphics around them like adding text overlays and borders and things like that all using my smartphone so you don't have to go out there buying a really expensive camera and I'm going to be using a light box called folio it's made by the team and orange monkey and I believe they're based in korea so if you went directly to their website shipping is going to be really expensive so you can also buy it from photo jo jo dot com and they they do domestic shipping um but let's let's bring up this fold your light box it's really cool it's really tiny and you can bring it wherever you go on dh what I really like about it is that it looks good so let me show you how to set this up it's actually really easy and all it does is it has these magnets that you just connect to each other and it comes with a battery and you don't even the nice thing about it is you don't need to have those clamp flights so this I believe was fifty dollars but it comes with the lights it's really pretty um and it works really well so you can see how I goof up setting this up but it's really easy don't mess this up magnets here magnets here here magnet here and there you go so it also comes with these phone um sheets there's a black one that it comes with two but I didn't bring that one since I think for the most part we're not really taking photos on a black backdrop and then you can kind of fit that in here and the battery can you just connect it on there and then magnetize it on there so it's just it's so smart it's so simple and that's why I really love about it so I brought one of my lollypop necklaces which the same term I'm actually doing a giveaway for on it might give away class so I've also jimmy this the same way that I did with my other light box where I kind of screwed on my pins and head pins in here jewelry head pins and I kind of make little hooks on that so I'm going to hang the necklace chain on here we'll see okay so using my iphone all right there we go I'm going to use an app called folio which is the end it's an app that the guys that made this light box they also made the kind of app that you can use with their light box so let's start taking photos with the fold you up and then I'm going to show you how to continue take that photo and post process it you know make it look better at little cue graphics to it and text sorry okay so this app is really easy to use all you're going to do okay well we're going to do here you can see how it's kind of grain and if you scroll up all I'm doing is scrolling up it increases the exposure and the greatest slowly turning white right okay so this is a little bit too much the lollipop stick is you can't really see anymore but so I'm going to lower that down a little bit maybe you'd be like this all right so now you have this photo let's take this and save it to your camera roll saved now the other app that I like to use to continue making this look better is called snap seed so I'm going to go into snap seat and open up this photo that I just took and so what you can do here is um click on this edit button and then go to I believe it's brush so all I'm doing now is I'm clicking on this paintbrush icon from the second to the left and then I'm clicking on exposure so what I can do now is kind of go through and start painting away this gray areas and if I press this I icon you can kind of see where I painted and where it's starting to look a little bit lighter and all I'm doing is just using my finger to paint to paint that out okay so that's pretty good and then once you're done, you can save the guy and what I like to do, save it as a copy so it doesn't override the original picture. So now I'm going to take that a step further, and I'm going to start giving it some edits. Um what? What is really good? Tio pay attention to is when you're doing sales on social media, when you have that product up for sale, you want to make you want to somehow make this photo different from your other posts, so ways to make it different, you can add a border to it. You could add some text to it. What what I recommend for you to do is to actually have the price off the product on the picture, and then if you want to go the extra step, you can also have text in the picture that says comments sold to buy or come insult to purchase. So that's what we're going to do now. So this is another app that I love to use it's called studio, and I'm gonna press this big plus button to upload this lollipop that I just took and I can kind of zoom in when a center it and what I love about this app is that there are so many things you can do, you can add borders, you can add textures, you can add text and shapes and little banner ribbons and or you can even at little doodles. And so because it's so simple teo use you can probably figure out how to use this really easily, but let me show you how to add a frame to it. Yes, I believe it's the frame so you can kind of see the frames are white. Now if you want to change the color, just click on this color we will right here and what's a and when do you read and you can just kind of scroll through and see all the cool borders you can have for this, and what I wouldn't recommend for you to do two is that once you found a border that you like and try, try to stick with it so that your sales photos are consistent, so that the next time we're doing a sale, people will recognize right away. O this is the sale post, you know, you want to get them to notice pretty quickly that this is not a regular post, this is actually something that they can buy, so this looks pretty cute, so let's go with this, and then I can also add text so what it's going to do is ask you which fought you want, and my problem is I can spend a long time picking out the nice font that I like so if you find a few fonts that you like using just remember what those names are, so I'm just going to use this one and it's a little bit hard to see right now, so I'm going to change the color for you first and then you can just kind of scroll it down to where you want it and I can double tap on it to edit it again and now I'm just going to put in the price twenty three dollars and then comment sold to buy so now it's going to be a little bit big, but if you pinch it down to size and make it look like that, so once you're finished looks pretty good and then you can just I think it's our I think it automatically saves it to you to your camera roll another app I want to share with you that's really cool? Um it's called word swag and word swag is I use this a lot when I was doing a sale a week, but what I've noticed the set a lot of people have also started using it and because word swag they have very specific templates for using fonts so I know it's because so many people are using it now you can almost tell when you see someone also supposed that oh, I I know she made that with words swag because they don't really come up with new formats of how to do text but let me show you actually if you haven't used works right before your camera all and let's say I'm using this one I'm gonna square crop it something like thiss so they have all of these well let me change the color so you can see it better okay? They have all of these different styles no and they're all random so if you're using this for style you can have it in different alignment um and it can have like, different line spacing you can have it randomized if you click this this dice icon over here so double tap this to change it someone enter in oops, twenty three dollars comment sold to buy save and clothes continue anyway. So this is what it's going to look like and you can just kind of play around to see kind of what kind of styling is going to give you and there are plenty to choose from its like this these are all really cute you wanted to go with ease, but basically because as I said, like all of these air templates that you can use you can kind of notice when someone's using words swag for their for their graphics not to say that you can't use it um and your customers probably won't notice that you used word swag so this is also a really great option for you like little cute stickers like that I like to use words wag when I'm creating promotional graphics that where I helped build up buzz towards the sale which we'll talk about in the next segment another app that I like to use is called font candy and this is a great one for if all you need to do is just add text to your picture because and what I like about it is because they have a huge library of different font choices so I'm going to change the color here first so you can see it and then I'm going to double tap on this and then type in twenty three dollars comment sold to buy once you have your text in there you can go through and scroll and test all of these different fonts out and what I do like about this app is that you can change the line spacing and you can kind of give it a little curve so it can look kind of cute kind of like that so those air a few options that you can use with just a simple light box you don't have to get this one if you don't want to you can definitely make your own you can get something really cheap on ebay, but you definitely need to supplement with those lights if you do, um and then your editing can all be done using your iphone with a bunch of these different aps I believe these are all free, except I think font candies thie only paid one on biff, it is paid it's only just like one or two or three dollars so it's not much at all. Um, so that is how you can make your graphics for for your social sales, and I'm going to go back to the slides, but I believe we are pretty much done here with this segment so super easy, I would love for you to kind of check out the the options that I was telling you about souls, the sprays e have to have it and see what fits your needs better. Asai mentioned sole c is a paid program, but I really loved using it when I was using it. I would love to try outs crazy for some of the future sales that I'm going to be doing and taking photos super easy and don't forget to if you're actually taking the photos and putting them into your computer, there is that video that you can check out for how to edit your falls really, really quickly. And again, for any questions and further support. If you need some extra help, you conjoined my private mastermind on facebook. It's at butley slash maker mastermind