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The “Add to Cart” button, in the realm of online shops, is a leap of faith. Your customer is not able to touch the fabric, smell, or view the item in 3D. They are completely dependent on the grid of pixels in order to tell them the truth. When the pixels are untrue about something, namely, color, the brand-consumer relationship is broken. This is where good quality ecommerce product photo editing can be the most significant tool in your customer retention tool box.

To get a dusty rose blouse to wear at a wedding and then when you open the box, you realize that you have a coral blouse. Or a customer orders a side table with a warm walnut finish, but it comes in with a cold dark mahogany finish. These are not production flaws, they are failure in representation. Industry data show that color discrepancy is the main cause of about 30 percent of returns that are related to fashion. Investing in an accurate workflow will help you not only to create beautiful images, but also to safeguard the bottom line.

Why Your Product Colors Look Wrong (and How to Fix It)

We must first grasp the sabotage that is taking place behind the lens before we sink into the solution. There are three primary offenders who plot to make your product look different:

• Mixed Lighting Situations: When you are shooting in a room with a window (cool blue daylight) and the overhead tungsten lights (warm yellow) your camera records a cool-warm blend of temperatures. This is natural to your eyes but the camera sensor captures a color cast and thus the white appears orange or blue.

• Uncalibrated White Balance: Although this happens in a controlled studio, unless the white balance is set to a neutral reference, then the entire group of photos will be off before the first edit has been made.

• The Monitor Trap: This is the most cunning problem. When an editor is on a blue screen, he will automatically warm the image to appear correct on his or her screen. As a result, the resulting file to be exported will appear much too orange on all other devices.

Since these variables are extremely hard to manage in-house without costly hardware, there are numerous vibrant brands that outsource to an expert online photo editing service to have the heavy lifting done. These services provide standardized environments to make sure that the "blue" you view in the studio is the same kind of blue the customer views in his/her smartphone. Finally, professional ecommerce product photo editing is not an indulgence, but a must; it transfers color out of the sphere of the guesswork to the sphere of science.

Inside a Professional Color Correction Workflow

A high quality studio will not simply look at the saturation slider. They have a strict, repeatable procedure so that what the customer sees is what he gets.

1. Hardware Calibration: It all begins with the monitor. Hardware colorimeters are a type of device that is attached physically to the screen to read the output and form a custom color profile that is used by professionals. This makes the red that the editor perceives to be the same red that is in the digital file.

2. Gray Card Reference: At the start of every photo shoot, a "gray card" or color checker card is photographed in the exact lighting environment as the product. This provides the ecommerce product photo editing team with a neutral gray point of 18% gray. They can eliminate the color casts with a single click and adjust the ideal white balance of the whole batch.

3. The Pantone Test: In those categories where color is the overall value offering of a product like paint, cosmetics or luxury textile, precision cannot be compromised. To take a physical picture of the product and a physical Pantene color chip are the gold standards. This offers an objective and universal standard that gets around the subjectivity of mint green vs. seafoam.

Color Accuracy by Industry: Where It Matters Most

The stakes for color accuracy vary depending on what you’re selling. Knowing the risk profile of your category can make you prioritize your budget in editing.

Return rates in the fashion industry are as high as 40 percent in instances of misrepresentation of colors. In the meantime, the home goods customers are highly sensitive to warm and cool grays. Even electronics need accurate ecommerce product photo editing to be able to differentiate SKUs.

How to Brief Your Online Photo Editing Service for Perfect Results

In case you are outsourcing your post-production to an online photo editing service, it is best to be clear. Do not expect the editor to know just by looking at a raw file what shade your product is. In order to achieve optimal outcome:

• Give Hex Codes or Pantone Numbers: Have a digital goal to your editors.

• Send Physical Samples: Assuming it is possible, mail a piece of fabric to the studio so they can compare the screen to the real-world object.

• Request a Proof: To verify the calibration, request a color-matched proof of one item before a batch of 500 images is processed.

In choosing a partner such as Visuals Clipping, you must enquire about their monitor calibration schedule and how they would cope with color shifts caused by lighting. The service that will save you on returns is a service that can describe their technical calibration.

The ROI of Accurate Color: Save Money, Reduce Returns

The color correction mathematics are extremely friendly to the owners of e-commerce. An example in a flash:

When you take 500 orders monthly with an average order value of 60 and 20 of your returns are due to a color problem, you are losing thousands of dollars of your shipping, restocking and lost customer confidence.

With half the returns saved with professional ecommerce product photo editing, you would save more than $600 a month in operational expenses alone. And even this does not factor in the lifetime value of the customer who remains loyal simply because he/she knows that he/she can always depend on your photos. The final point of difference in a competitive market is accuracy.

Final Thoughts

Your product imagery isn't merely to appear good--it has to be honest. Your ecommerce product photo editing process is focused on color accuracy and you establish a bridge of trust with your customer. You take the surprise element out of the door and put in its place the approval of a purchase that appears just as it should. The prettiest color in ecommerce is the one that is sold in the long run.

Also Read: 10 Product Photo Editing Mistakes That Are Silently Costing You Sales