i have been looking everywhere for a
faster way to do ebay product
photography while still getting perfect
white backgrounds for my items
well i finally found the best and
fastest way to do product photography
for ebay
and in this video i'm going to be
sharing how alright so this video is not
so much about actually taking photos
because
i feel like that's a pretty basic
concept the area in which you can really
start saving time is in the editing of
the photos once you've taken them
because of course it is important to get
as close to a white background as you
can for your ebay listings and unless
you have access to a professional grade
photo studio and expensive camera
equipment you're gonna need to do some
editing in order to get these photos
looking good
so yes this video is focused on the new
method i have found of editing pictures
but just to confirm the basics here is a
very quick guide on how to actually take
photos for your ebay listings
okay taking photos for ebay can be
broken down into three parts
first is your background second is the
camera you use and third is the lighting
in the room that you take your photos
covering your background first i like to
use a material called core flute that
you can find at any local hardware store
it's this white sheet material it has
kind of a plastic feel the great thing
about core flute is that you can
easily clean it so if i ever get some
marks or stains from the products that
i'm listing i can wipe them away with a
wet cloth without worrying about
damaging the core flute
you can also use photography paper or
one of those pre-made backdrops that you
can buy on ebay those work fine but you
do have to keep in mind that it will be
much harder to clean them so
be prepared to have to replace those
kind of backdrops if they get seriously
dirty the most simple part of ebay
product photography is the camera you
use
simply you can use your phone many large
sellers still do this
all of the later iphones and 99 of the
newer smartphones will have a good
enough camera to take ebay photos with
you definitely don't have to go out and
buy a camera to take great quality
photos for ebay
i used to use my canon g7x camera to
take my ebay photos and i realized i
wasn't even getting much better quality
out of it and it was taking me more time
to do as well as the camera not having
as much battery life as my phone does so
just use your phone especially if you're
starting out finally let's talk lighting
i've said this in the past but the most
important thing you can do to improve
the quality of your photos is to
actually take them in a well-lit room
make sure that the ceiling light in the
room that you take your photos is
described as cool and bright
as opposed to warm bulbs described as
warm emit a more kind of yellow colored
light and it's not really ideal for
taking photos
you can invest in some box lights to
create a more professional photo studio
but in my experience especially with the
editing techniques i'm about to show you
this is not necessary to get perfect
white backgrounds however if you do sell
a lot of small items i definitely
recommend investing in a ring light to
get those really detailed close-up
pictures
the bottom line is however you take your
ebay photos you probably still could
make them better by doing some editing
so now let's talk about that
all right now let's talk about editing
the photos that you'll be using on your
ebay listings and this is actually an
area where many sellers vary
a lot and there has been a lot of
contention about what software you
should use to edit your photos or
whether you need to use software at all
to do this
so i think a good place to start is to
go over what we actually want as ebay
sellers out of our photos and therefore
out of our photo editors
first of all of course we want white
backgrounds that's the main point of
editing our photos to remove any shadows
and to get that perfect white background
for our listings
second we need this to be done quickly
if we had all the time in the world we
could go into any photo editor and use
the lasso tool to manually cut out the
product we're trying to sell from its
background and then add a perfect white
background onto that but of course we
don't have time to do that for all of
our listings so there needs to be a
quicker way to do it for
photo editing to be worth our time at
all third this needs to be cost
effective surprisingly some photo
editors charge per picture to remove
backgrounds from images and
therefore give them that perfect white
background this is just not cost
effective for us as ebay sellers because
even if we're only getting charged a few
cents per photo we added many sellers
take hundreds even over a thousand
photos per day so that could really add
up to be over ten dollars for us to just
edit some photos and
that's not really sustainable so while i
think it's reasonable to pay some kind
of monthly fee to use a photo editor
paying per picture i edit is just not
something i'm prepared to do the fourth
and final requirement i was trying to
get out of a photo editor is what made
this process of finding the best one
really difficult for me and that was the
ability to automatically confirm edits
i didn't want to have to sit there and
automatically select to confirm
each time i made an edit on a photo and
there's only one effective way of doing
that that i found which is what i'll be
showing you in this video but next what
i'm going to show you is the different
options that we have for a photo editor
as ebay sellers
and then i'm going to explain the
fastest method of using some of this
software to edit our ebay photos
the first option it's important to
mention is the idea of not editing your
photos at all
of course this saves a lot of time and
hassle for you as a seller but ebay has
told us that white backgrounds are
important on our listings both directly
and indirectly
of course amazon requires listings with
perfect white backgrounds but
ebay themselves clearly promote these
listings also it has been shown that
white backgrounds do improve the
click-through rate of a listing which
will further boost the position these
listings rank in
in search now if you sell very large
unusual
rare or maybe highly sought after items
then i don't believe that you have to
edit your photos
in these rare cases you won't really
need to advertise your item because
since there's less competition for
these items you won't have to compete
with other sellers for the attention of
buyers
but most of you watching this probably
don't sell a lot of rare
unusual or incredibly large products so
just like me you have to find a way to
edit your photos
the first option is one i see a lot of
sellers using and it's what i almost
settled on and that is the photo loom
app this thing has a few key positives
being that you can remove backgrounds
completely from most of your ebay photos
and you also can resize images to the
ebay template size which
definitely is a plus but in my opinion
this application has a lot of issues and
leaves a lot to be desired
first the photo room app can only be
used on a phone meaning that if you take
your photos on a camera you'd have to
move the photos from your camera then
likely to your pc and then back onto
your phone just to be able to use them
in the photo room app now even if you do
take your photos using your smartphone
the problems don't end there
once you've taken your photos if you
want to keep them in order then you'll
have to edit
each photo that you've taken even the
ones that don't need to be edited
so let's say you took a picture of the
tag if you want to keep it in position
in your camera roll since the photo room
app saves a new copy of each photo that
you've taken
you're going to have to edit this
picture of the tag also even though you
don't need to
now of course when you go to remove the
background from this image it's going to
remove a part of the image that you
don't want it to then you have to
manually edit the photo to avert the
changes
and you'll have to do this for every
single photo that you've taken and keep
in mind if you take 500 photos and it
takes you even just three seconds to
confirm each one that's almost half an
hour of your time that will be taken up
each day
editing photos i haven't found a
workaround for this and it just seems to
be a really flawed app
on a yearly plan the cost is about five
dollars per month which i think is a
reasonable price
now i know the photo and developers have
worked with some other resellers who do
youtube videos so if you do happen to
watch this i have three ways that you
can make your app the
undisputed number one for ebay product
photography one you need to make the app
available on pc
many people use the pc to do their photo
editing and it's really important to
have that option but i understand if
that's not possible so
number two more importantly add an
option to be able to automatically
confirm edits
and free give us some way of being able
to edit only the photos we want
without mixing up the order of the
photos in our camera roll if you can do
those things
especially numbers 2 and 3 then you'll
have my full endorsement but
right now i cannot recommend the photo
room app for most sellers
the second option is what i used to use
that is the ebay photo editor the photo
editor can be pretty good
if you're editing a picture of an item
that has a lot of contrast between your
background so if you have a white
background a black item is going to
stand out really well and have a perfect
white background but let's say you're
selling a white or
light blue item it's really not going to
work very well because the ebay photo
editor doesn't have a remove background
tool
the way that you can use it to get a
white background is to turn up the
brightness and the contrast in the image
making darker items stand out
also image edits that you make often
fail to load now you can lessen the
impact of this
by saving all of your listings as drafts
and then later on editing all the photos
in bulk because then the items will have
had time to load up onto ebay servers
and that does reduce the amount of
errors that you'll get but still the
ebay photo editor is terrible for
editing items that are similar to the
background they want the next option is
remove.bg
this is a website and hands down it has
the best background remover tool that
i've found and it can actually be
automated and you can do bulk uploads
meaning that you can upload a bunch of
images
and have this software will move the
background from all of them and download
them all at once so it has that
automation box ticked
however there's one massive drawback
meaning i could never recommend
remove.bg and i barely even want to
bring it up that is the pricing
remove.bg works on a model where you pay
for each item that you edit using their
software and the pricing is absolutely
ridiculous
to remove the background of 10 000
images which is roughly what i've gone
through in some months
that would cost 1490 us dollars that
equates to 15 cents per image
clearly it adds up because that's an
insane amount of money to spend on
software like this i don't know how
anyone justifies it
maybe if you only had a few images to
edit and you could just pay for those
then i could understand it if you needed
a really good job done but in terms of a
plan that would be effective for us
ebay sellers i don't know who could
afford to pay for this so i cannot
recommend it the next option is pixlr it
has a remove background tool that can
produce some impressive results
however it fails more than half the time
i try to use it so i can only really
recommend it for one-off edits
it does have a bulk upload functionality
but i've never been able to get that to
work i'd love to know how if it's
possible but i haven't seen any
tutorials so i use it quite sparingly
now the final option i wanted to present
to you guys was photoshop
photoshop has an automatic remove
background tool that does a pretty solid
job of getting white backgrounds for
your images
no it's not as good as remove.bg's it's
not that it ever fails but
sometimes it doesn't do a perfect job
especially on items that are similar to
the colour of your background the cost
for photoshop varies between around 10
to 15 dollars per month depending on
where you are in the world and
whether you have some type of student
discount or something like that on
photoshop i can edit around 20 images
per minute and the key feature is that
it can be automated
meaning i can do other tasks while the
photoshop editor is working
i don't have to confirm each edit and
therefore i can be way more productive
and i don't need to actually spend a lot
of my time doing photo editing
on photoshop this is called a batch
process and here are some of the results
of me using this to edit the photos for
my ebay listings
it clearly works pretty well for the
most part and now i'm going to show you
how i set up photoshop to automatically
remove the backgrounds from my ebay
images this is definitely the fastest
way i've found to edit product photos so
i just had to share it with you guys
alright i'm going to show you how to set
this up on photoshop full disclosure i
am not a photoshop expert by any stretch
of the imagination
up until a few days ago when i worked
out how to do this i was using pixlr
i've never really used photoshop i
understand it to a very basic level but
i had to follow a few different
tutorials to figure out how to do this
for our product photography so i'm sorry
if there is a quicker way to do some of
the things that i'm going to show you
but i'm going to try and explain it as
best as i can
alright first of course you do need
photoshop and i'm on the kind of home
screen here and i'm just going to open
this image it doesn't matter what you
open at this stage you can open any
image
um this is just a picture of a shirt
that i have sold on ebay the first thing
you're going to want to do
is hover over the window tab and scroll
down until you can see
actions select that and then it's going
to bring up this little menu here so
basically what we're going to do
is record what we need done to each of
our ebay photos and we only need to do
this once
and then we can apply it to all of our
photos okay so in this actions menu here
the first thing you want to do is click
on the folder icon
so now we're creating a new set which is
basically like a folder that we're going
to store this new action in
and i'm just going to call this ebay
select okay and now we're going to
create the action so you want to click
this little plus symbol here
again you can call this whatever you
want and then select record
now photoshop is recording every click
we make and it's doing this so we can
then apply it to each one of our ebay
photos
first thing i'm going to do is right
click on the image layer
and then select layer from background
select ok
so then on the right in the properties
tab here select this quick actions
drop down and then from there select
remove background
so this is going to perform the
automatic remove background tool it's
just loading right now
and as you can see we've removed the
background from this image now we're not
100 done yet
next we're going to create a new layer
to get the white background for
underneath the image
so we're simply going to go up to the
top right and on the layer we're going
to select new
layer and layer 1 that's ok
we're going to move this layer so it's
under the image because we don't want
our white background
covering our image and then while we
still have this new layer selected
i'm going to go over on the left and
select this rectangle tool
and make sure the color is white here so
this primary color
is white and if it's not you can just
select it there and then i'm just gonna
make sure i'm well
outside of the um the frame and then i'm
gonna drag like that
and now i have a white layer underneath
the
image then once you've added the white
background select
file and then select save as and then
make sure to save the image as whatever
type of image that you've taken
most likely this will be a jpeg i know
that the photos that my phone takes are
jpegs and you can pretty much safely
assume that
the photos that you have are jpegs but
if you're unsure you can locate one of
your images and hover over it and it
will tell you
that as you can see here it is a jpeg so
then what you want to do is save this
edited photo
with the same name in the same place as
the original copy of the image and what
this is going to do is override it
so you select save and then it's going
to ask you to confirm and this will
basically replace the original image
select yes and select ok here if that
comes up
so now we've completed creating our
action script so select stop
basically what we've just done is
recorded everything i just did
so photoshop can now do that to a bunch
of our ebay product photos
instead of us having to do it manually
so we now have that action saved
okay now what i have here are some of
the ebay photos that i've taken
that i'm going to apply our little
action to on photoshop
so in order to do this what i need to do
is hover over file and then scroll down
until i see automate here
and then select batch this menu will
come up
and then we need to make sure that we
have our action set so we did put it
under the set of ebay and then it's
called action 2 for me
so once you've located that you need to
choose the folder that contains
only the items that you want to have
this edit made on so if you have a bunch
of different photos and you don't want
them all to be edited
like this for example this is a picture
of a tag and i don't want any edits to
be made of this one
what you do is go through all of the
pictures that you have while holding
control
and select the ones that you do want to
remove the background from
and then copy them so ctrl c and then
you want to create a new folder
call it whatever you want and then
inside this new folder
paste just the photos that you want to
be edited and see i'll do that so you
can see them
and then what we're going to do is edit
them and replace them from here and then
once the edit is completed
we can remove them from this new folder
and put them back with the rest of our
product photos
if this doesn't make sense now don't
worry it will once i complete the edit
okay so folder 4 has the photos that we
want edited so what i'm going to do here
is select
from source i'm gonna select folder
don't worry about all the rest of this
and then select choose and then you need
to find the folder
so this folder was over in b8
and it was number four click select
folder
also make sure that all these are
unchecked to be totally honest i don't
know what all of them do but
i have them unchecked and it works fine
for me then you need to choose a
destination so
a place for the edited images to be
saved in so what we're going to do is
overwrite the existing copy of the
images that we want to edit so even if
you want to edit all the photos you took
it's probably a good idea to make a new
copy of them just so you have a backup
in case something goes wrong
so again we're going to choose that same
folder which is in b8 and it's number
four
so this is going to overwrite these
images you want to select this box that
says override action save as commands
and that means that it won't ask you how
you want to save the item for
each one of the photos you edit and it
will make this thing just run without
you having to get involved at all for
this file naming section just leave it
as document name and extension because
that will make sure it directly
overwrites the image by saving it with
the exact same name and file type
and then we're pretty much ready to edit
all of these images in bulk so we're
going to select ok
and let's see how it goes all right it's
just going through here and it's editing
each image and
keep in mind guys that while it does
this you can
go about your day and really do anything
you want you don't need to get involved
with this
it will take up a lot of your kind of
computers processing usage um like your
cpu and your lamb so
don't expect to be able to do like a lot
of kind of really intensive tasks while
you're getting this done so maybe avoid
streaming while you're doing this etc
but you could certainly upload listings
while this is getting done and as you
can see
for those 10 or so images um they're
already completed
so now we can head over to that photo
where the newly edited images will be
saved and
as you can see it's removed the
background from all of them so let's see
how good a job it did
okay so for this one um the edges are a
little bit rough but overall i think
that is good enough
in my opinion um for an ebay product
photo the second one of the same image
the edit
the edges are a little bit rough again
but overall pretty solid
this one is perfect um this type of
image it works really well now there's a
little bit of shadows at the bottom but
i really don't think that matters all
that much
um this is live guys so i haven't you
know intentionally selected images that
this would look better at um this is a
really good mix
i picked some light items and some
darker ones see like this one again
a little bit down the bottom but overall
i think this is really acceptable um
like still i would consider this a white
background this image i chose
intentionally because
um it didn't do so well now the way that
you could avoid something like this is
maybe having some more lighting as i
said earlier in the video i don't
currently use box lights so
maybe if i did start using box lights i
would have a higher success rate maybe
close to a 100
success rate with photoshop but i will
show you what i do in cases such as this
because obviously i can't use this image
and probably
yeah i can't use this one either but
then going back to um even something
like this like a light brown it does
work fine you know like this is
perfectly fine
this black works great uh yeah most
images are going to turn out fine i
think that's a pretty good cross section
i will just quickly show you guys some
jeans that i did um this morning
it was just this morning it is in number
one here and you know this is james for
jeans i like to do this kind of profile
shot edited
and then also the back and the front and
basically yeah
like none of the jeans i needed to
re-edit but sometimes i do get a shirt
like i showed you before that does need
to be re-edited because the edges of the
item just aren't good enough and this is
what i do in that case
i simply head over to the pixlr website
that i have talked about in the past and
i did talk about at the start of this
video and i will go back to
just finding that image that did fail
before one second
right this is the one so i'm just going
to drag and drop it into pixlr
and it hopefully will work the first
time but as i said yeah see pixlr failed
um that's why i can't justify using it
more regularly
like see now it's done a really great
job like that's a you know really solid
lines on this better than the photoshop
one
but it just fails so regularly as you
can see down here you know this is
unedited
um sometimes it will take two or three
tries and then what i will do is like
for the back
i'll select download and download that
and make sure to give it the same name
as the
um file that it's replacing so the
images stay in the right place in order
so yeah guys pixlr does fail a lot but
i do use it when photoshop has an error
with the image and if all else fails and
even pixlr is failing then i will either
just not edit the photo because it is
not the end of the world for one or two
images but the other option is of course
going over onto pixlr or photoshop and
just using the lasso tool
and manually cutting out the background
and you can actually fine tune it here
um using either a lasso tool or you can
kind of like remove different parts of
the image like
see there that will move parts so it is
always an option but i think i've shown
you the best and fastest way to do your
ebay
product photography