For established eBay businesses, it’s appropriate to do two things now. First, take better photographs. Second, establish an efficient workflow for your photographic processing.

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to help you do a good job of photographing clothes and then expect you to be able to do a good job photographing jewelry too.

Why Good Photographs?

Wouldn’t you be embarrassed if someone bought a $300 set of chairs from you on eBay and turned around and sold them on eBay for $550? The difference is that you took one dull photograph of one of the chairs slightly out of focus, and the buyer (who subsequently sold for a profit) took a half-dozen dazzling sharp photographs, some showing close-ups of the detailing on the chairs.

There are people who buy items on eBay from sellers who have done a careless job of photography and then sell for a profit after taking careful photographs. OK, there are 22 million items for sale on eBay each week, and statistically there’s bound to be opportunities for re-photographing for profit. That explains it. Or does it?

Stop and think what you get when you visit a retail shop in your locale. You can look at a product closely and even touch it. You can readily tell whether it will suit your purposes, and you can even see whether it is in the new condition you expect it to be. If used, you can quickly assess its condition. In addition, you can talk with a retail clerk to get more information about the product, although in today’s retail environment of defunct customer service this doesn’t always work well.

You don’t need to smell it, unless it’s food. You don’t need to hear it, unless it’s music. And you probably don’t need to touch most things to make an intelligent buying decision. You rely primarily on your eyes and on product information. And that’s why good photographs are so important online. They are a substitute for being there, for seeing with your own eyes.

We have all had experiences where we read a description of something. It sounded great. We ordered it (e.g., mail order). And when it arrived, it was way out of kilter with our expectations. We are very reluctant to repeat such an experience. That’s why mail order catalogs have lots of great pictures (i.e., professional photographs).

Photographs are important! Good photographs in eBay ads bring good prices, and great photographs bring great prices. And a good tip regarding photographs is: As the price goes up, more is better. In other words, take your photographs carefully and skillfully, and for expensive items use multiple photographs in your auction ads.

Cameras

Because computer monitor resolution is so low, a two-megapixel digital camera is all you need to take good product photographs. A threemegapixel camera is a little better and gives you more room to crop your photographs and still maintain image quality. A four-megapixel is definitely overkill. With today ’s prices you can easily afford a digital camera that will get the job done for you.

Film Cameras

Film cameras are not recommended. Don’t waste your time and money. Buy a digital camera if you don’t have one already.

Many eBay business people will choose their digital cameras based on what they want and need for personal use. By all means, buy a sixmegapixel DSLR (digital single-lens reflex) camera for $900 if you want to use it for photographing sunsets or whatever. It will do a good job of photographing products too. You want to make sure that your digital camera has a macro (closeup) mode that gets you close to small items. Most do. However, if you choose a DSLR, you may have to get a special macro lens to take good closeups.

Prosumer Cameras

A good choice for high-quality personal use is one of the 7- or 8megapixel prosumer cameras. They are similar to DSLRs but use only one lens and have good macro capability without requiring a special lens. The Minolta Dimage A2 and Nikon Coolpix 8800 are good examples. They cost a little bit less than low-end DSLRs.

Better Photographs

The best lighting is a soft diffused source. Professional landscape photographers normally take their photographs at dawn or at dusk, the times when the sun provides a soft diffused light just before it comes over the eastern horizon or just after it disappears below the western horizon.

The harsh noonday sun produces shadows and glare (washout). The glare distracts and hides details, and the shadows also hide details in blackness. Indeed, professional photographers do their best outdoor work on lightly overcast days when the clouds are thick enough to diffuse sunlight but not thick enough to cause a depressing gray day. And so it is in the studio. Diffused light is your goal. Diffused light will bring out details in your products without the glare and shadows, in most cases, which obscure such details. And it’s the details that your customers want and need to make intelligent buying decisions.

Umbrellas

There are a variety of lighting devices that combine a light source with some sort of diffuser. The least expensive and most versatile are umbrella-tungsten-light sets. They are readily available at professional camera stores, in camera supply catalogs, and on the Web (e.g., eBay). They consist of an adjustable metal stand which holds a tungsten light source beaming into the underside of an umbrella. The unbrella reflects the light back highly diffused. You need two of these sets. They sell for as little as $120 each.

The umbrella sets work for large items as well as small and can be moved around easily as well as easily adjusted for height. With each new item you need to photograph , you can experiment with the umbrella lighting sets to eliminate glare and shadows. After some experience, setting up the lighting will become second nature. In fact, many similar items will require the same lighting, and you will not necessarily have to change the lighting from item to item.

A good place to start is to keep each of your lighting sources about 45 degrees off center. A third back light is also desirable in many circumstances but can be considered optional. The third light must be an identical type of light to the others (i.e., tungsten) but does not necessarily have to use an umbrella. You can place the third behind the item but aimed at the background.

Surfaces

Naturally in your effort to eliminate glare and use soft light, you will want to eliminate highly reflective surfaces (e.g., mirrors) around the area where you take your photographs, particularly surfaces that will actually appear in a photograph (e.g., background).

Background

You need to use an inconspicuous background that does not detract attention from your item. For instance, a plain white or pastel bedsheet can make a reasonable background, but a dark bedsheet or a bedsheet with a design does not make a good background. Better than a bedsheet is a roll of photographic background paper. You can get a 54-inch-wide, 12-yard-long roll of paper for about $35 from a professional photo supply source. It also comes in 107-inch widths for about $60. The rack to hold the paper costs about $140. For an inexpensive substitute, use a broom stick hung from your ceiling by a cord at each end.

The use of the paper roll is to create an unobtrusive, non-glare background that flows from the vertical (your wall) to the horizontal (your table or floor) without showing the intersection (the line where your table or floor meets your wall). Make sure you choose a light color for product photography. Professional photographers use dark background paper rolls for photographing portraits, and such rolls are not usually appropriate for product photography.

Catalogs

If you can’t find professional photography equipment and supplies (e.g., studio lights) locally, you can find them in the following photography-supply catalogs:

B&H Photo-Video-Audio, http://www.bhphotovideo.com, both online and printed catalogs

Calumet, http://www.calumetphoto.com, both online and printed catalogs

Freestyle Photographic Supplies, http://www.freestylephoto.biz, both online and printed catalogs

Porter’s Camera Store, http://porters.com, both online and printed catalogs

When you photograph small items, a matte board, which sits on a tabletop, works well. You can purchase one from Cloud Dome at http:/ /www.clouddome.com under the product name Infiniti Matte Board.

Light Boxes

For small items such as jewelry, you can use a light box. Light boxes typically contain diffused light sources that make your photography much easier than using a flash or natural light. The Cloud Dome (available at the Cloud Dome website referrenced above) is an example of an inexpensive light-box-like device that diffuses natural light for easier high-quality photography. Most light boxes are considerably more expensive than the Cloud Dome and are much larger.

For choices in light boxes try:

Coloreal eBox, http://www.ortery.com

EZCube, http://store.yahoo.com/greenbatteries-store Litestage, http://www.litestage.com

MK Digital Direct, http://www.mkddigitaldirect.com

Keep in mind that the whole point of using a light box is the use of diffused light. If you never photograph anything large, a light box can be your entire studio. For items about the size of an inkjet printer or larger, however, you will find even the larger light boxes to be inadequate. You will need umbrella lights instead.

White Balance

White balance is a setting on your digital camera that sets the camera to the temperature of the light you expect to use to take the next photograph. The temperature of light is measured in degrees Kelvin. Some examples are:

Normally, your digital camera automatically sets the white balance for each photograph. If that works well for you, fine. If not, you may have to set the white balance yourself. Follow the instructions in your camera’s user manual.

Not Brightness

Note that color temperature is not the same as brightness. Rather, it’s the relative intensity of blue to red. Thus, household lights give you a yellowish light while a sunless blue sky gives you a bluish light.

You can get weird effects by mixing two tempertures of light. For instance, if you use tungsten light, make sure that you don’t have a lot of daylight in the room. Stick with one kind of light (one temperature) and make sure the camera sets the white balance to that light.

Color Cast

Note, too, that some kinds of light (e.g ., fluorescent) have a color cast. This is not a color temperature phenonmenon, but it affects color nonetheless.

Flash

Many eBay sellers use a flash to take their photographs. This is a down and dirty way to take acceptable photographs. Inevitably, however, you get glare from the flash in your photographs, which interferes with the visual detail you need to help sell your products. It also looks a little amateurish. You can take professional-looking photographs with a flash.

If you insist on using a flash, use a diffuser. For a built-in flash you can tape a piece of white plastic garbage bag over your flash head or do something similar. (Tape the piece loosely and incompletely so that heat can dissipate.) For an external flash, you can buy a white plastic diffuser which fits over the flash head. However, you will find that even with a diffuser, a flash will still cause some glare. (Note that the point of using an umbrella is to diffuse the light and avoid the glare.)

When Do You See It?

With a flash, you don’t see what you photograph until after you’ve taken the photograph. With umbrella lights, you see what you will photograph in your LCD window before you take the photograph.

Tripod

It’s the mark of a serious photographer. It’s not expensive. It’s easy to use in a studio. It takes little expertise. And it’s one of the best ways to increase picture quality. What is it? A tripod! Don’t set up your studio without one.

Get a tripod with a good ball head. Ball heads are easier and more efficient to use than the traditional movable-plate heads. You can spend a fortune for just a ball head, but a $40 model is all you need. Some tripods in the $100-125 price range come with acceptable ball heads.

Efficient Workflow

It is difficult to take photographs that are so good that they don’t have to have digital post processing. The old way—the chemical way—the processing was done by a photofinisher. Except for custom processing, photofinishers put photographs through an automatic process which improved them after developing and before printing. Without such processing, most prints looked rather dull. Today the process is digital, and you can do it yourself. Unfortunately, processing digital photographs can take as much time as you want to spend in an attempt to achieve perfection. The goal for eBay product photography is to spend as little time as possible and get good photographs.

The Basics

Before we get into the process, let’s review the basics. Keep in mind that if you haven’t learned shooting techniques and haven’t devised a workflow for your digital photography, you may have to go to another resource (e.g., a digital photography book) to pick up that information before this article makes sense to you.

Studio

Photography is a serious business. You need to set aside some space for it. Let’s call that space your studio. If you are photographing a variety of items, the space needs to be wider than a roll of background photographic paper and as tall as from floor to ceiling. For larger items you can use the floor. For smaller items you can use a table. And for even smaller items you can use the table and a matte board. Your umbrella lights will not take much space (folded) and can be set in a corner when you’re not using them. A tripod can be folded and tucked away, if necessary. A 7-foot by 7-foot space may be all you need. Or, if all you photograph is small items, you can use a light box set on a table. You don’t even need a tripod if the light box has built-in camera brackets.

Accounting

You need to devise a system to keep track of your photographs. If you take four photographs each working day for a year, you will have 1,040 photographs archived at the end of the year. That’s a lot to keep track of. You need a file-naming system, an archiving album or storage place (software), and a means of posting the photographs to the Web. For items that you sell over and over again, you will want to make sure you reuse existing photographs rather than take new phtographs of the same items.

Software

You will need image-editing software to set up the processes covered in this article. There is so much competent image-editing software available that it would be a disservice to recommend any particular programs. However, I will mention that Adobe Photoshop Elements will be the featured software in eBay Photography the Smart Way. The reason for this is that Photoshop is the best image editor available at any price ($650 list price), and Photoshop Elements ($100 list price) has most of the functionality of Photoshop. Indeed, Elements is not only powerful software at a bargin price, but it’s easy to use too.

A popular freeware program that has a lot of image editing power is Irfanview (http://irfanview.com). This might be a good starting place for you if you’ve never done any image editing.

Cropping

You want your item to fill the frame. This will make it as large as possible on a monitor screen. An item that takes up only a small portion of the frame may not show enough detail to be useful to potential buyers and in addition may look lonely.

This process can’t be done automatically. You need to do it manually for each photograph. You can do it quickly, but it still takes time.

Brightness and Contrast

There are better, more advanced, and more efficient techniques for digital processing than adjusting brightness and contrast. You can read about them in eBay Photography the Smart Way. In the meanwhile, adjusting the brightness and contrast can brighten up your photographs considerably.

For about 80 percent of my photographs, I decrease the brightness a little and boost the contrast. It brings out the richness in the color and makes the photograph more dazzling. Unfortunately, each photograph is different, and the other 20 percent require custom treatment. This process can be automated by batch processing.

Saturation

Saturation boosts the colors in a photograph. Usually just a little boost is good enough for most photographs, but some photographs require more than others. This process can also be automated by batch processing.

Resizing

You need to resize your eBay product photographs to the size they will be in your auction ads. About 400 pixels wide is optimal. You don’t want your photographs to be so small they don’t show any detail nor so large that they take a long time to download. Again, this is a process that you can automate with batch processing.

Sharpening

Sharpening should be the last step in the process. You want to sharpen exactly those photographs you will use in your auction ads. Sharpening unprocessed photographs or versions of photographs larger than those uploaded for eBay viewing does not work as well. Make sharpening the last step in the process after resizing.

Some photographs require more sharpening than others. Nonetheless, this process can be done automatically by batch processing with reasonable results. Keep in mind that you cannot sharpen a photograph that is out of focus.

Batch Processing

When you choose an image editor, you want to make sure it has a batch processing feature. This means that you can process multiple digital photographs (files) at once. As mentioned above, this will work for about 80 percent of the photographs you take under normal amateur shooting conditions. The good news is that product photography is normally done in a narrow range of shooting conditions (i.e., in your studio), and your percentage of uniform photographs will be higher. Therefore, batch processing may be effective for as high as 95 percent of your photographs.

Saving Time

Can you take photographs that require no processing? Sure. Many of the things covered by this article will help you do so.

Cropping When you take the photograph, fill the frame. You won’t have to crop later.

Brightness and Contrast Take your photographs with soft diffused light. Experiment. As you get better at it, you won’t necessarily have to correct your photographs in processing by adjusting the brightness and contrast.

Saturation This is like brightness and contrast. You may not need to adjust saturation if you learn to take photographs with soft diffused light.

Sharpening One of the great digital processing techniques is sharpening. Almost every photograph can use some. Nevertheless, if you make sure that your item is in focus when you shoot it, you can do without sharpening. If you can set the sharpening in your camera, set it to hard or maximum. You may not need to sharpen with your image editor.

Resizing Well, there’s not much you can do about this. You will need to resize your photographs.

Alas, you can’t eliminate resizing. But if you eliminate all the other processing steps by using diffused light, you will save a lot of time and effort.

Cost-Effectiveness Review

Good digital photography takes some time and a modest amount of money. Is it worth it? You bet! Taking good photographs is well worth it. It’s important for boosting sales. It can make the difference between mediocre earnings and reasonable profitability. And it’s essential to your success as an eBay retailer. For big ticket items, it’s worth it to take great photographs. In so many words, attractive photographs are one of the most cost-effective things you can do for your eBay retail business whether via eBay auctions or eBay Stores. And Froogle also displays photographs.