How to Take Pictures of Clothes Without Mannequin

For e-commerce or apparel business owner product photography is so vital. It allows them to reach to their target buyers. For an established brand, they can spend as much as they want on product photography.

However, one who is trying to do business online or have a low budget, cannot spend as he wants. As a result, he has to choose budget photography- that is the photography without mannequins or models.

This style of photography is commonly known as ghost mannequin.

The biggest advantage of ghost mannequin service is, you can do clothing photography at home or you can ask some professionals to do it for you. In this article, I will be showing you, how you can take photos of your apparel without using any model or mannequin and how you can avoid some potential mistakes.

How to Take Pictures of Clothing?

The different ways of taking clothing photos without mannequin for an eCommerce store are the following.

Firstly, an online store visual marketing is restricted to what the viewers are viewing on the online retail store. Owners have to guarantee that pictures have the most enhanced and beautiful look to the site visitors- thereby site visitors hit the order now button.

This demands high quality, steady, and appealing photos of parts. There are two main methods of doing clothing picture-taking one is Flat Lay and another is Ghost Mannequin.

Flat Lay Photography

It is basically setting your clothing product on top of a table or place it in a flat layout. For some brands and retailers, this approach has become popular. As this makes the style adaptable, this product photography service is easy and more pictures can be taken in a short time. Regular flat lay clothing photography setup is done by a camera and lighting facing the clothes. The lights, diffusers, and delicate boxes are on the same camera side. Equipment is assembled, clothing is covered with a hook or a stick.

With this product photography set up, you can do clothing photography at home and can also give different styles to it. Flat clothing photography is a low-cost product photoshoot technique that any startup eCommerce store owner can do.

Conventional Flat Lay Process

A typical decision for some brands and retailers because of its flexibility in styling, generally less complex photography setup, and productivity in high volumes.

A conventional flat lay – or tabletop – photography setup will include a camera positioned parallel to the ground alongside lights and a determination of diffusers and delicate boxes.

Lay the item on the table and place all the devices - for example, sticks, tape and clasps – to shape the outline of the item.  Normally tucking the product around the underarm and use tissue paper for a natural depth seeming.

Why should you go for ghost mannequin editing services?

Flat lay photography can be done in many areas without any complex studio setup. The images can seldom have difficulties with colors and lighting and flat lay photography does not have depth. 

To add depth in the clothing photos, it requires to add shadows beneath clothes. In that case, ghost mannequin is the only solution.

Color and lighting can be a real pain in case of flat lay photography. For eye-catchy garments photos, color correction is needed after product photography. In editing production house designers make hand-drawn clipping path to do these editing smoothly.

Even if you take enough precautions the color balance of clothing photography is unmanageable. To correct the color balance before posting images online, photo editing by Photoshop can resolve the problem. Or there are professional l photo editing companies, provide natural-looking apparel photos.

In the flat lay photography setup, there are some problems in image angle and quality. Viewers always want to see images on the same angle. Therefore, the variation in angle should be corrected to increase viewers’ attention. And neck joint editing service can provide the same angle images for all clothing images.

Finally, the problem of scratches and spot on the clothing creates a distraction and lower the photo quality. Only flat-lay photography cannot reduce these defects and scratches. But photo editing services can resolve the problem. Through post-production work flaws on clothing can fully be optimized and create the perfectly styled, edited, and attractive clothing pictures.

Mistakes Made

#1: Garment Preparation

You want your products to resemble their best so that you can showcase them to consumers. Nevertheless, as you may individually know, clothing can become twisted and creased, and even start to look diminished from storage and carrier. Seldom, clothing units are even sustained in old, tattered, or even unfinished conditions! Preparing garments to be photographed is the most important starting point for shooting clothes, and yet many apparel photographers skip this step and prefer to rely on Photoshop to fix creases, smudges, and other difficulties increased while saving or carrying the product. Though, Photoshop isn’t magical; it takes time and expertise to master high-level editing procedures, and all edits that you make are “devastating” to the image, hazarding some image quality. Because of this, it’s best to rely on Photoshop only to add final touches and color improvement to your photographs and guarantee that you capture the garment as perfectly as you can in-camera.

Take care of your product and make it look its best before photographing it!

It’s vital to fully test your product from top to bottom, inside and out. Are there any tags, stickers, and other types of identifying materials that need to be removed? Do so. Have clothes become wrinkled or creased during storage? Iron or steam them. Use the means that are available to you to fix other damages and distractions that you might come across. Specifically, lint rollers and rope are great for eliminating dust and strings from fabrics. In some cases, samples are wrong upon arrival due to last-minute design changes. Make sure that you understand design changes for each garment so that you can select the sample accordingly in Photoshop or make the choice to wait to photograph the actual sample that will be sold.

#2: Not Providing Enough Representation

Opposite to widespread belief, one or two images of each product is simply not enough to give customers an accurate feel for the cost-effectiveness and quality of your product. Therefore, it’s significant to give customers as much information as possible about each product by uploading at least 6 pictures per product—and rather 10.

#3: Not Editing Product Images Properly

Many e-commerce retailers edit their product images clumsily, particularly with regards to cropping, alignment, color, and backgrounds. It’s best to keep all crops, alignments, and backgrounds alike from image to image in your catalog. To keep all images consistent in relation to one another and cut back your post-processing time, make sure to develop a standard set of designations for both shooting and editing. A photo editing service like Pixofix can help you regulate and automate post-production efficiently.