How To Take Pro Quality Clothing Photos For Ebay and Poshmark, Beginner's Guide

The Menswear Manifesto 5:
The 449 best men's clothing brands for Ebay and other reselling platforms
Each brand analyzed by sell-through rate, price and clothing category
Use on your phone or desktop
You decide how much you want to pay me for it

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It took me years of rage-inducing troubleshooting to arrive at this basic protocol to take photos of clothing for reselling platforms.

If you just go with auto mode on your phone's camera, like I used to, and like most people do, your photos are going to regularly suffer from color and brightness issues. When you compensate by adjusting levels, it often winds up making the pics look blown out.

The basics:
Get a white or light gray background
Use two photo lights - softboxes or ring lights. Avoid umbrella lights.
Get a phone that lets you take photos in manual mode. iPhones don't let you do this.
Take pics in 1:1 aspect ratio unless the garment is too big for it
Set white balance manually at the beginning of every session
Bump ISO down as low as it can go
Adjust the shutter speed (F-Stop) until you get the proper brightness
Hold the phone very steady
Adjust shutter speed as you adjust your distance to the garment

It will take some practice to be able to tell, based on the display when you're taking photos, when the pics are going to look proper. Once you get it dialed in, the pics are almost as effortless as when you were in auto mode. And they look much, much better.

When you use your phone in pro mode, it may create two files instead of one. The extra file is the "raw," or uncompressed, photo. You can toggle this feature off if you just want to shoot in jpeg, which is what I do.


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