Product photos that look shot, not pasted: a compositing checklist

Shoppers can't articulate why a product image feels wrong, but they can feel it, and they leave. Most of the time it comes down to physics the composite got away with ignoring.

Here's the list we run before a merged product image goes anywhere near a listing.

1. Contact shadow If the product sits on a surface, there is a dark, tight shadow where they meet. Not a drop shadow — a contact shadow, darkest at the point of contact and softening outward within a couple of centimetres. Its absence is the single biggest tell.

2. Light direction agreement Find the brightest highlight on the product. Find the brightest highlight in the scene. If they point in different directions, the eye catches it in under a second.

3. Colour temperature A cool studio pack-shot dropped into a warm kitchen keeps looking like a sticker until it picks up some of that warmth. Even five per cent of the room's colour on the product's shadow side sells it.

4. Scale against a known object People judge size by reference. A bottle next to a hand, a chair, a doorway. If nothing in frame gives scale, your product floats.

5. Label fidelity This is where generative tools historically fell over: they'd redraw your packaging into plausible nonsense. Check every word, every logo, every certification mark, at full zoom. If the text has been re-lettered, the image is unusable — regenerate with an explicit instruction to preserve label text exactly.

6. Reflections on glossy surfaces Glass, gloss plastic and polished metal must reflect this scene. A reflection of the original studio backdrop is a giveaway.

7. Edge quality Zoom to 200% on the product's outline. Look for halos, chewed corners and that faint bright fringe left by careless masking.

8. Depth of field consistency If the scene has a soft background, the product's far edge should soften slightly too. A tack-sharp product in a blurred world reads as a cut-out, because it is one.

9. Repeatability One good image is luck. Save the instruction that produced it and reuse it across the catalogue — consistency across a listing page matters more than any single hero shot.

Where to spend your time

Shoot the product properly once: clean, evenly lit, on a plain surface, at the highest resolution you have. Everything downstream gets easier. The scenes can be generated, borrowed or stock — the product itself should always be a real photograph.