Find Out How to Create a Photography Style Guide for Your Business

How the images you include on your website are very important for your e-commerce operation to look trustworthy and increase customer loyalty. Using a photography style guide can save a lot of time, plus you can plan everything out and have it ready before you publish.

Also, it is important that with your work team they have basic photography techniques, including lighting, background and the importance of a tripod, and even know about editing and online tools, for example, to remove backgrounds or change the size of massive photos of your products.

What is a photography style guide?

Such a guide has examples and even some detailed instructions for post-processing aspects of photo shoots and images, since images are too important in a company’s branding strategies. Also, images in electronic commerce are very necessary for digital channels such as websites, social networks and email, in addition to these digital channels being the main way to communicate with your business customers.

An example, where you can see how a brand uses a photography style guide, is the sustainable clothing brand tentree, they focus on colors, lighting and other important aspects for their brand images.

What should a photography style guide include?

Let’s look at some of the components that your photography style guide should include:

Color palette:

The color palette that you decide to use in your brand will ensure that it is always recognized by your customers, plus you can always add it to the images that you publish on your website or social networks.

It is also important that the palette has complementary colors and similar tones, for example, if you use light pastel colors, you should try to have these colors in all your images, and try not to use heavy and muted tones instead.

Saturation:

Saturation helps a lot to express the emotions of your images, for example, using more saturated colors can show passion and for a younger audience, or for a more mature audience use a more muted color palette.

Focal length:

Many times the focal length can vary for photography needs, and this depends on the brands and products, since product photography is usually taken with a 50mm focal length lens. This focal length is important because it affects composition and how much of your image is in focus.

Shadows:

Images with shadows are more common on social networks to show products in a more realistic way. This component also depends a lot on the style that you want to maintain in your brand.

Lighting:

The ideal is to use natural lighting, however, in many cases this is not possible and artificial lighting must be used, therefore, it is important to know which lighting best highlights your products and images.

Composition:

This element helps your brand identity, since you can decide to use images with many products or have a slightly more minimalist style, this depends on the message you want to transmit to your audience.

Background:

You can use a background for your images in any way that you think is correct and that identifies your brand, although we have the example of Amazon that shows a white background for products in e-commerce. Still, you can check out High Horse Coffee Company, where you can find photography examples and guidelines that describe what makes an appropriate background.

Types of photograph:

To create a type of lifestyle or emotion to convey through your images, you can combine various styles of photography. In addition, the photos you post on your social networks are taken differently, for example, the images you take for your Amazon listings.

Models:

The marketing strategy and the audience your brand is targeting is very important for the images and for the people that appear in your images, also the communities and subcultures of your audience are important to take into account.

How to create a photography style guide

In creating your photography style guide, it’s important to include more technical post-production work, not just composition of images and content.

Set the stage:

Your style of photography needs to complement your brand, so it’s very important that you keep your brand in mind.

Guide how to compose photos:

You need to decide what style you want to use for your product images, as product photos with a white background are different from lifestyle photos or event photography.

Show how to edit photos:

Filters, shading, and retouching techniques should be the same across all photos so that everything you post looks cohesive and consistent with your brand.

Move forward with your brand and product photography

You can practice with your smartphone how to take the photos and what retouching or filters you can use, also create creative ways to take your photos and check if they are effective or not on your social networks. You can also create a template to organize your photos and posts, this helps you and your team to save time.