Do Your Own Product Shots

At Sheepdog Print and Design Blog, Melkorka has done the research and found useful tutorials on How to take and edit your own professional product shots. I'll just add a few additional resources.

Photography: Lifestyle vs. product shots offers suggestions on when you might want to use lifestyle photography instead of straight-up shots of a product and when product shots are your best bet in catalogs. At v1beta, Lighting, on the cheap, or how to start taking product shots offers some quick, cheap studio setup tips to get you started on some simple product photo shoots. The Online Photographer has a quick post titled A Little Higher Fidelity in Those Product Shots that features a before and after image and reader comments on knowing what changes to make to create a good product shot.

Does your product shot include a computer screen, camera display, or similiar "picture in a picture" image? Fake it with this tutorial from The Graphic Reporter: Simulating Pictures, Part 1: Flat Screens. And when you want to remove the background in those product shots so you zero in on just the product, start with these tutorials on removing backgrounds and using clipping paths.