When to reshoot instead of retouch
The most expensive mistake in product photography is not a bad photograph. It is two hours spent trying to rescue a bad photograph that was never recoverable.
Some faults are arithmetic and can be undone exactly. Others destroyed information at the moment of capture, and no amount of software brings it back. Knowing which is which takes about ten seconds and saves entire afternoons.
Recoverable: things that are still in the file
Background not quite white. Almost always fixable, and the most common issue by far. A background reading 245 has all its edge information intact; taking it to 255 is straightforward.
Slightly under-exposed. A photograph a stop dark has all its detail, just shifted. RAW files take two stops of lift with almost no penalty; JPEGs take about one before shadow noise becomes visible.
Wrong colour temperature. Recoverable in RAW, mostly recoverable in JPEG. A shot that came out too warm is a slider, not a reshoot.
Wrong size or aspect ratio. Arithmetic, provided you have more pixels than you need.
Dust and small marks. Tedious but reliable. Ten seconds each with a healing brush.
Wrong file format. Nothing is lost converting between formats, provided you are not going from lossy to lossy repeatedly.
Not recoverable: things the sensor never captured
Blown highlights. If part of the product is pure white because it was over-exposed, there is no detail underneath to recover. The pixels are 255,255,255 and nothing distinguishes the highlight on a white shirt from the background behind it. This is the most common unrecoverable fault and the most commonly attempted.
Out of focus. Sharpening increases local contrast at edges. It does not add detail that was never resolved. Anything past mild softness is a reshoot.
Motion blur. Same reason, and worse, because the blur is directional and any correction produces obvious artefacts.
Missing part of the product. A handle cropped off the edge of the frame is gone. This sounds obvious and is a genuinely common cause of reshoots, because it is easy to miss on a small camera screen.
Deep shadow with no detail. Lifting a black area produces noise and colour blotching, not detail. If the shadow side of the product is at 5,5,5, there is nothing there.
Reflections of you in the product. Technically retouchable, practically not worth it. Removing your own reflection from a chrome kettle takes longer than reshooting it and rarely looks right.
The ten-second test
Open the photograph at 100% and check three things:
- Zoom to the brightest part of the product. Is there texture, or is it flat white? Flat white on the product is unrecoverable.
- Zoom to a hard edge. Is it crisp within a pixel or two? If it takes five pixels to transition, it is soft.
- Look at the darkest part. Is there any variation, or is it uniformly black?
Two failures out of three, reshoot. One failure, judge it against how long a reshoot would take.
The maths that usually settles it
Reshooting one product with the setup already up: three to five minutes. Reshooting a product when the setup has been packed away: thirty to forty minutes, mostly rebuilding.
That gap is the whole argument for marking your floor and photographing your setup. It turns "reshoot" from a dreaded word into a routine one.
Retouching a blown highlight convincingly: twenty minutes to an hour, and the result is a painted approximation of a surface, which on a product listing is arguably a misrepresentation of what the buyer receives.
Shoot the safety net at the time
The cheapest reshoot is the one you did before you left the studio.
Take one extra frame a stop under. It costs a second, and it is the frame that saves you when the first turns out to have clipped a highlight you did not notice on the camera screen. Storage is essentially free; setting the lights up again is not.
The one rule
Never upscale a soft image to meet a size minimum. It produces something that passes an automated check and loses the sale to a competitor with a sharper photograph. A tool that silently enlarges undersized images is doing you no favours; one that skips them and says which is telling you the truth.