Product photos with a phone, a window and two sheets of card

The minimum setup: a window, two sheets of card and something to rest the phone on

Product photography for a shop listing needs three things: soft, even light, a background with no visible edge, and a camera that stays still. All three are available at home for the price of two sheets of white card.

The light: one window, no direct sun. Set the table side-on to a window, with the product 50 to 100 cm from the glass. What you want is indirect daylight: a north-facing window at any time, or any other window at a time of day when the sun is not coming straight through it. An overcast day is ideal. If the sun does hit the glass, tape a sheet of baking paper over the window or draw a white sheer curtain and the light turns soft. Switch off the room lights while you shoot: bulbs are warm, daylight is cool, and the phone cannot correct for both at once, so the product ends up with an orange side and a blue side.

The background: one sheet of white card, curved. Lay a sheet of matte white card on the table (A2 is enough for anything up to a shoe box; use A1 or a roll of white paper for larger items) and bend the far end up against the wall or a box behind it, taping or clipping the top. The curve is the point: it removes the hard line where table meets wall, so the product sits on a continuous white sweep with no horizon behind it. Matte, not glossy; gloss picks up reflections. Keep it clean: scuffs and fingerprints show.

The fill: a second sheet of card as a reflector. Stand the second sheet on the side of the product opposite the window, 20 to 40 cm away, propped against a book. It bounces window light back into the shadow side. Closer means softer, more open shadows; further away means more contrast. For a stronger bounce, wrap the card in kitchen foil. This one sheet is the difference between a product that looks lit and a product that looks half in the dark.

The phone: resting on something that does not move. A stack of books, a box, a cheap tripod with a phone clamp. Anything stable at roughly the height of the product, or slightly above it. Use the timer, or the volume button on a pair of wired earphones, so that pressing the shutter does not shake the frame. Between shots the phone does not move; only the product does.

No flash. The LED on a phone is tiny, frontal and flat. It wipes out texture, puts a hotspot on anything glossy and throws a hard shadow onto the card directly behind the product. Window light plus a reflector does the same job better.

One honest limit: chrome, mirror-polished metal and clear glass reflect the whole room, you and the phone included. Surround them with more white card, shoot from a slight angle rather than straight on, and expect them to take longer than a jumper or a jar of jam.

Phone settings: lock focus and exposure, then pull the exposure down a touch

The default camera app is fine. What matters is that the phone stops making decisions between one shot and the next.

1. Clean the lens. A lens wiped on a sleeve leaves a smear that shows up as haze and soft halos around bright areas, and a white background makes that very visible.
2. Use the main 1× camera. Not the ultra-wide, which stretches anything near the edges of the frame, and not digital zoom, which invents pixels. If you need to get closer, move the phone closer, and stop before the point where the image goes soft. Skip portrait mode entirely: the artificial blur eats the outline of the product, and the outline is what the cut-out step needs intact.
3. Tap the product to set focus and exposure, then lock both. On an iPhone, press and hold on the product until the AE/AF lock label appears. On most Android camera apps, a long press or a padlock icon does the same. Without the lock, the phone re-meters every time the frame changes, and the white card comes out a different shade of grey in every photo of the batch.
4. Pull the exposure down a touch. Once locked, drag the exposure slider (the sun icon next to the focus square on an iPhone; the plus/minus control on Android) down by about a third to two thirds of a stop. A frame that is mostly white pushes the phone to overexpose, and once a white label, a white cotton shirt or a highlight on a bottle goes to pure white, that detail is gone for good. A slightly dark shot keeps all of it, and brightening later is trivial.
5. Shoot at full quality. Turn off any filter or scene mode, and check that the camera is set to its highest resolution rather than a space-saving setting. HEIC or JPEG both work. HEIC is the default on recent iPhones and keeps more colour information at the same file size; there is no need to switch to JPEG for the sake of the cut-out, because Background Remover takes HEIC directly. If the shop platform later refuses HEIC, converting is a separate, quick step, covered in Convert HEIC to JPG.
6. Turn on the grid. It makes the next job, keeping every product in the same place in the frame, much easier.

Then get the files off the phone without damaging them. Do not screenshot them, and do not send them to yourself through a messaging app: both produce a smaller, recompressed copy. Use a cable, AirDrop or a cloud folder set to upload originals. A 12 megapixel file straight from the camera is far more than a listing page needs, and it is the file that gives the cleanest edge later.

Framing and repetition: same distance, same height, same crop for every product

Twenty products photographed twenty different ways look amateurish even if every single photo is good. What makes a category page look like a shop rather than a car boot sale is repetition: the same distance, the same height, the same angle and the same amount of white around each product.

Fix the positions physically. Put a strip of masking tape on the table where the product goes and another where the phone stand goes, and do not move either for the whole session. Write the lens, the exposure offset and the stand height on a sticky note. If one product is much larger or smaller than the rest, move the product spot, not the camera; the camera stays put so the perspective stays put.

Pick one angle per category and keep it. Flat items (books, packaging, textiles) work straight on or from a modest tilt; boxes and bottles usually look better from a three-quarter view, where you see the front and one side. Both are fine; mixing them on the same page is not. Shoot the main front view for every product first, in one pass, and only then go back for detail shots: a label, a texture, a fastening.

Leave air around the product. Do not fill the frame. Aim for the product to occupy roughly the middle half to two thirds of the width, with clear white card on every side, including below. Three reasons:

• Marketplaces and shop themes have their own aspect ratios, usually square, and you cannot crop to a square if the product already touches the top and bottom of a 4:3 frame.
• The cut-out needs the entire outline inside the picture, including the bits that stick out: a strap, a handle, a lid at an angle, and the soft shadow at the base if you want to keep it.
• Cropping tighter afterwards costs nothing. Adding card that was never in the frame is impossible.

Even after cropping to half its original width, a phone photo still has more pixels than a product page will display. Resolution is not the scarce resource here; consistency is.

Shoot in one session. Window light shifts in colour and strength across the day. A batch shot within a couple of hours will match; one photo taken at ten in the morning and another at five in the afternoon will not, however carefully you locked the exposure. If the batch runs over two days, come back at the same time of day with the tape marks still on the table.

Before photographing forty items, shoot three, transfer them and look at them on a laptop or tablet. A tilted horizon, a smudge on the card or a reflector too far away is a two-minute fix now and a repeat session later.

The cut-out comes last, and it is done on the original file

The order is: shoot, choose, cut out, resize, upload. The cut-out comes after choosing because there is no point in processing rejects, and before resizing because resizing first throws away the very pixels the cut-out depends on.

Always cut out the original file. The quality of a background removal is decided at the outline: the fibres of a knitted jumper, the gap inside a mug handle, a thin strap, the fuzzy edge of a soft toy. That comes down to how many pixels there are along the edge and how clean they are. A screenshot, a photo forwarded through a chat app or a downscaled copy from a web gallery is smaller and has been recompressed, and compression artefacts along an edge turn into a jagged or haloed outline once the background is gone. The original file straight off the phone, at full resolution, is the one to upload, even if the final image on the shop will be a fraction of the size. Background Remover works out the edges at the full resolution of the file, hair and fibres included, without halos, and keeps the embedded colour profile so the product colour does not shift. It accepts JPG, PNG, WebP, TIFF, HEIC and AVIF and applies the orientation stored by the phone, so a photo shot upright arrives upright.

White or transparent depends on where the image is going.

• Solid white, saved as JPEG: the safe choice for marketplace main images. Amazon asks for a pure white background on the main image, and eBay and Etsy both recommend a clean, plain background for the primary photo; check the current requirements before uploading, because they change. Choose white in the tool rather than hoping the card came out white in camera: a photographed sheet of card is a slightly uneven light grey, and replacing it with true white is exactly what the tool does.
• Transparent, saved as PNG: for your own website, banners, adverts, composites and any layout where the product sits on a colour, a pattern or a lifestyle scene. The file is larger, and some marketplaces either reject transparency or flatten it in a way you cannot control, so it is the wrong format for a main listing image and the right one for almost everything else.
• A hex colour: if your shop uses a brand background on the product grid, an off-white or a pale grey for instance, set that colour directly in the tool and every product arrives ready to place, with no extra editing step.
• Black: occasionally right for jewellery or glass on a dark theme. Use it deliberately, not by default.

A practical habit: keep the transparent PNG as the master version of each product. A transparent master can be flattened onto white, a brand colour or a scene at any time; a white JPEG cannot be made transparent again without cutting it out a second time. For the awkward cases, see how to remove the background from an image, and for the marketplace side specifically, white background product photos.

Step by step in Airpic, and what to upload to the shop

With the originals transferred, the whole batch goes through the same five steps.

1. Open Background Remover. There is no account to create and nothing to install. Drop the original HEIC or JPEG onto the page.
2. Choose the background: transparent, white, black or a hex colour. For a marketplace main image, pick white. For your own site, pick transparent or type your brand colour.
3. Process and check the preview. Processing is free, and you see the preview before deciding anything. Look at the places that usually give trouble: the inside of a handle, a strap against the card, the shadow at the base, any fluff or fibre at the edge. If a shot is wrong, it is usually the photo rather than the cut-out: a reflector so close that the product edge blends into the white, or the product touching the curve of the card. Reshoot that one rather than fighting it.
4. Download the full-resolution file. The first full download each month is free; after that, downloads use credits that never expire, with no subscription. The current prices are on the tool page.
5. Repeat with the same background choice for every product in the batch, so the set matches.

Two things worth knowing about what happens to the files: they are deleted one hour after you download the result, and within a day at most if you never do, and they are never used to train anything. Processing runs on GPUs in the European Union.

What to upload to the shop.

• Marketplace main image: JPEG on solid white, cropped square, with the product filling most of the frame. Each marketplace publishes a minimum image size for its zoom feature to work; export a little above that figure rather than the full 12 megapixels, and check the current guideline for the platform you sell on.
• Own website: transparent PNG if the theme places products on colour or pattern, JPEG on white or on the brand colour otherwise. Match the dimensions the theme actually displays at, so pages load fast.
• Before uploading anywhere: run the final files through Image Compressor, which is free to use and free to download from. It resizes to a maximum side, hits a target size in KB if the platform sets one, and strips metadata while keeping the colour profile. Stripping metadata matters more than it sounds: photos taken at home carry the phone's location data, and a product listing is not where you want your address embedded. The guide on compressing images for the web covers the format choice.

That is the whole workflow: a window, two sheets of card, a locked exposure, the same framing for every item, and the cut-out done last on the original file. Start with the first product at Background Remover.

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