Clothing photography is usually done in a photo studio with professional studio lighting and camera setting. The goal is to fully capture the detailed ornaments, fabrics, shape, and colors of a clothing piece. However, with the current situation, many clothing brands start to do clothing product photography at home. If you are trying to do clothing or apparel product photography at home for your online store or your own brand, here are four simple tips on how to set lighting that best captures your clothing items.
How to Do Clothing or Apparel Product Photography at Home
You can follow these steps to set the best lighting to capture a bunch of great apparel photos for your eCommerce store. It is easy and can be practiced by yourself. Before that, you have to make sure that your apparel product is in good condition for the photo session. Iron or steam all the clothing samples and use a lint roller to move anything that can make your products look bad. After that, let’s take a good fashion photography.
Make Sure to Get The Best Out of Natural Lighting
Unlike in a photography studio where you have to use artificial lighting, while natural lighting is very hard to get, doing clothing photography by yourself at home enables you to fully utilize the magic of sunshine, quite literally. If you have a big window in your house, set up your backdrop right in front of the window. Let the light sources, which is the sun hit the fabric and the model, creating a soft and elegant silhouette for your product images.
You can also use a reflector to really maximize the use of natural lighting, although this is not necessary. The best time to start clothing product photography at home with natural lighting is two hours after sunrise or two hours before sunset.
Use Work Light and White Curtain
What if you want to take clothing photography during the night, or during a cloudy season? It wouldn’t be possible to use natural lighting, so the best solution is to start purchasing work lights. A work light is cheaper than a professional photography lighting kit, yet it is a strong enough light source for taking your clothing product photos.
The best way to use work light to your advantage is by draping a white curtain over it. Therefore the light will hit softly on the clothing piece and the model. You should also position the work light at a 45-degree angle to really cover the whole area of the clothing piece. If you see shadows in the background, just pull the work light slightly farther away. Use a mannequins or even live models.
Invest in Softbox
For those who do a lot of clothing or apparel photography at home, it’s considerably more cost-effective to invest in a softbox for your lighting setup. It doesn’t have to be large, you can choose the mini size one since you are only using it at home with limited space.
The advantage of using a softbox is that you can mimic the appearance of natural lighting any time of the day. Therefore, you can photograph clothing more easily.
Read also: 5 Tricks Using Photoshop as A Pro
Choose White or Neutral Colored Backdrop
Obviously, you want the product image to highlight the fabric, shape, and color of the clothes that you are trying to sell. Other than using good lighting equipment, choosing a backdrop color that won’t clash with the outfits may be a good idea. The safest choice is a white background, though some people may find this to be a bit boring. Feel free to choose the backdrop based on your clothing brand’s image. Perhaps you want a softer look with a tan backdrop or a grey backdrop for a more sophisticated look for your eCommerce product. You can take it flat lay or using a mannequin, ready for your eCommerce and social media post.
We hope this information can help you taking clothing product photography at your own home. Should you need assistance with the post-production editing process, like retouching to get the best white balance, color correction, ghost mannequin, and high-quality background removal, you can partner up with Dropicts! We will deliver the best practices for your apparel eCommerce products images.
Get in touch with us and our team will help you find the best photo editing solution for your fashion eCommerce product photography.
