Majority of e-commerce brands know that bad photography is a killer. The customer bounces when a photo is blurred or there is poor lighting. But even more dangerous to your conversion rate is the more sinister risk of insidious editing mistakes that might appear harmless at first, but weaken trust over time. You have invested in a good camera, dressed your set and spent hours in the shoot. However, when your post-processing pipeline is faulty, then your photos are quietly bleeding money.

There is no chance that these mistakes will ever make it to your storefront when you are collaborating with an elite product photo editing service. However, when you are dealing with the control of things either through freelancers or in-house, you must know the so-called silent killers in the e-commerce world. These technical failures make what would have been a terrific shot a conversion liability.

We are going to have a look at the top ten errors that are draining your bank account.

1. Over-Sharpening the Edges

Sharpening can be a misconception of professional photo editing. Although some sharpening is necessary to reveal the finer details of leather, the weave of a cloth, or the fineness of the print on electronics, it is often the most worn instrument in the set. When you go beyond the line and use excessively, you get too harsh and unnatural halos around the product figure.

This renders this piece of work to appear digitally advanced as opposed to being real. Even though a shopper may not be able to explain his/her perception of why the image seems to be off, his/her brain will interpret the image as being fake or of poor quality. Balanced approach will make the product appear crisp without appearing as a cut-out.

Pro Tip: Always  zoom to 100% when using sharpening and always make sure to not leave behind a glowing halo around the edges of the product.

2. Inconsistent White Balance Across Your Catalog

One of the basic provisions of professional photo editing is white balance. It makes the difference between whether your white background is neutral or tends to lean more towards a sickly yellow or a cold blue.

The actual loss occurs when you have inconsistent catalogs. When a customer browses through your category page and the whites change to cool in five products, it means that there is no professionalism. In sectors such as fashion or home decor where accuracy of color is a major buying impetus, this variation undermines the confidence of the buyer that he or she will get what he or she sees in the mail. Strive to achieve a uniform goal of 5500-6000K in studio set-ups to ensure a harmonious brand appearance.

3. Ignoring Color Profiles (The sRGB Trap)

This is an obstacle that is technical and embarrasses even experienced photographers. Adobe RGB or ProPhoto RGB is the default configuration of most cameras and high-end monitors since it has more color information. The internet however, is a different language.

When you export straight to the web, without converting to the sRGB colour profile, your colours will appear desaturated and muddy in most browsers. It is a silent killer as your pictures may seem very nice on your editing screen but unliving to the customer. So as to not make your vibrant reds look like dull bricks, you will always want to make sure that your export settings output sRGB on any image you intend to have in an online store.

4. Leaving in Distracting Reflections and Glare

Essentially mirrors are high-value products such as jewelry, sunglasses, and polished electronics. They collect it all in the room: your tripod, the ceiling lights and even your own image in the lens.

Having an area of glare on a watch face or a reflection of a camera lens on a pair of sunglasses shouts amateurism. There is no compromise as to the removal of such distractions using clone stamping or healing tools. When the texture of the surface is a product value claim, the shine has to be either smooth or purposeful or even eliminated so as not to discontinue that high-end touch.

5. Heavy-Handed Skin Retouching

When you are taking lifestyle pictures of your product with models, watch out of the plastic appearance. Gen Z and Millennials are very sensitive to unrealistic smoothing of skin, especially to modern consumers.

Not only does over-retouching appear dated, but it can also be harming to the authenticity of your brand. It should be aimed at eliminating the temporary blemishes, distracting shadows but leaving the natural skin texture and pores. Authenticity is a sell; perfection is out of place and appears unappealing in the modern market.

6. Wrong Image Dimensions for Each Platform

It’s no use having a beautiful picture when it is cut up by a computerized cutting program. A product photo editing service realizes that each platform is its own set of rules. Amazon, Shopify, and Instagram have varying aspects ratio and resolution minimum requirements to support the functionality of the "Zoom" feature.

The result of editing the wrong size of the canvas is that your product can be butchered in the upload phase and lose valuable context or detail.

7. Losing Shadow Detail in Dark Products

Dark products such as black leather bags, navy clothes or matte black electronics are a nightmare to edit correctly. The common attempt of many editors is to correct a dark picture by harshly moving the shadows upwards to reveal more detail.

The effect is generally a bleached appearance that has no depth and renders the product appear low-cost and grey. It is the shadows which create the depth and convey the quality of the material. Highlight and shadow recovery tools should be used sparingly so that when the product is blackened, it is not lost to the texture that a good fabric should have but is not the same as an inferior fabric.

8. Using Compression Too Aggressively

Everybody desires a quick site. Page load speed is vital for SEO and user experience, but you shouldn't sacrifice image quality to get it. Over-JPEG compression introduces artifacts, blocky patches and color banding that can be seen most clearly on gradients and fines.

Take advantage of new formats such as WebP. These are highly qualified at extremely reduced file size compared to conventional JPEGs. The rule of thumb is not to compress an already compressed file: instead, make sure to save the master export again to maintain optimal visual quality and then save it in the last moment.

9. Not Editing for "The Zoom"

The zoom feature will be used by majority of the shoppers particularly on high-ticket goods. When you have a great image as a thumbnail, but when you enlarge it, it shows lint, dust or loose threads, then you are losing the sale at the point of greatest interest.

In doing a deep edit, the product has to be cleaned at 200 percent magnification. It can be the difference between a conversion and a close tab situation to remove a single fingerprint off a chrome surface or a stray hair off a sweater. When the customer is within close proximity of observing the imperfections, he or she is within close proximity of finding an excuse to say no.

10. No Style Guide for Consistency

This is the ultimate "silent killer" for brands that are scaling. In the absence of a documented style guide, each of the editors (or even the editor on different days) will make slightly different decisions. One group may have a soft drop shadow and the other a reflection or a variation in the margin size.

These minor differences make your brand appear mishandled over a list of hundreds of products. A one-page visual brief is the best method to manage an external product photo editing service. This makes all the images, edited either now or 6 months later, appear to belong to the same family.

Final Thoughts

All these errors are not visible, until they are pointed out - but once seen, they cannot be unseen. Your customers might not be able to see the specific reason as to why they are not buying, but the unprofessional experience caused by these mistakes is usually the driving force behind the problem.

Hiring a specialized product photo editing service is not only about making things look pretty, but rather about establishing a high-trust and standardized surrounding where the product will shine without distraction. By hiring a product photo editing company such as Visuals Clipping, you can be sure that all your pictures in your catalog have been examined to eliminate these ten errors and grow your e-commerce venture with peace of mind.

Allow a product photo editing company to take care of the technical accuracy of the pixels and concentrate on the creative development of your brand.

Also Read: How to Choose an Ecommerce Image Editing Service: