Writing Prompts for Product Photos

Product photography is a small, strict genre: one object, a controlled surface, light shaped deliberately, and almost nothing else in the frame. That narrowness is good news for prompting, because there are only about four decisions to make and each one has an obvious right answer once you know what the shot is for. The catalogue cut-out and the moody lifestyle shot are different jobs, and mixing their instructions is the most common way these prompts go wrong.

Material Is the Prompt

Everything that makes an object look real lives in how its surface handles light, so name the material and its finish before you name anything else. Brushed aluminium, matte ceramic with a slight glaze pool, oiled walnut, frosted glass, oxidised brass, soft-touch black plastic. Each of those behaves differently: matte surfaces spread light and forgive everything, gloss and chrome show a mirror image of whatever is around them, and glass needs something bright behind it or it turns into a grey blob.

That is also why reflective products are hard. If you ask for a polished steel bottle, decide what it should be reflecting — a large white softbox reads as a clean studio shot, a window with dark surroundings gives you a long vertical highlight down the side. Leave it unsaid and you get reflections of nothing coherent, which is the tell that gives generated product images away instantly.

Light Shape, Not Light Amount

Studio product light is described by the shape and position of the source. A large softbox above and slightly behind gives a soft gradient down the front and a shadow pulled toward the camera. A strip light along one side gives a bright edge on a bottle or a phone. A bare small source gives hard, sharp-edged shadows that suit tools and hardware and ruin cosmetics.

Say what happens under the object too, since that is where believability lives. A soft contact shadow spreading out on the surface makes the thing look like it has weight. A crisp reflection beneath means glass or polished stone. Floating with no shadow at all is a cut-out, and if that is what you want for a catalogue, say “isolated on pure white, no shadow” rather than hoping.

Height, Lens and the Empty Space Around It

Camera height changes what the product is. Straight-on at the object’s own level is the honest catalogue view. A slight three-quarter from above shows top and front together and is what most e-commerce actually uses. Directly overhead flattens everything into a graphic layout and only works when the object reads from the top. Pair that with a longer lens — 50mm to 100mm keeps the edges straight, while anything wide bows the sides of a box and makes the near corner huge.

Then decide the background as its own clause: seamless paper, a raw concrete slab, linen, a wet dark surface. And leave room. Say where the negative space sits if the image is going into a layout with text, because a product cropped tight to the frame edge is useless to a designer.

The check that catches most failures: ask yourself where the light was standing and what the object could see reflected. If your prompt does not answer both, it is not finished.