Product Photography Studio Setup: A Complete Guide

Product photography is the most systematic type of studio work. Unlike portraits, where every face is different, products are predictable. Once you nail the setup for a category — jewelry, bottles, clothing, electronics — you can reproduce it across hundreds of SKUs with consistent results.

That consistency is the entire point. Brands need every product image on their site to match. Here's how to build a setup that delivers.

The Two Approaches: Tabletop vs. Full Studio

Tabletop setups handle products under 2 feet in any dimension. Jewelry, cosmetics, food, electronics, packaged goods, small home items — all tabletop. You need a sturdy table (36–48 inches wide), a shooting surface, 2–3 lights, and a camera on a tripod. Total footprint: about 6x6 feet.

Full studio setups are for larger products — furniture, appliances, mannequin-dressed clothing, bicycles, anything that needs to sit on a floor. You need a full backdrop system, more powerful lights, and significantly more shooting distance. This requires a proper studio space with at least 800 sq ft and 10+ foot ceilings.

Most product photographers start with tabletop and expand as their client base grows.

Lighting for Products

Product lighting follows different rules than portrait lighting. You're not sculpting a face — you're revealing a surface. Every material (glass, metal, fabric, matte plastic) reflects light differently and needs its own approach.

The two-light soft setup covers 80% of product work. Place a large softbox (3x4 feet or bigger) on each side of the product at 45-degree angles, slightly above. This wraps light around the product, minimizes harsh reflections, and creates gentle gradients on curved surfaces. Simple, effective, repeatable.

Add a top light for products with horizontal surfaces — the top of a box, a plate, a laptop keyboard. A strip box or small softbox mounted on a boom directly above fills in shadows that side lights miss.

Reflective products (glass, metal, chrome) require a completely different approach. Instead of pointing lights at the product, you light large white surfaces and let the product reflect those surfaces. Two large white V-flats on either side of a reflective product create clean, gradient reflections. The product becomes a mirror — control what it sees.

For pure white backgrounds (the Amazon standard), you need to light the background separately. Two lights aimed at the backdrop, 1–2 stops brighter than your product lights, blow the background to pure white without overexposing the product itself.

Background Options for Product Shots

White seamless sweep is the default for e-commerce. A curved piece of white paper or acrylic creates a background-to-surface transition with no visible seam. The curve eliminates the harsh line where table meets wall.

For tabletop work, a 24x36-inch shooting table with an integrated sweep (Fotodiox makes affordable ones) is the easiest solution. The curved surface rolls up from horizontal to vertical in a smooth arc.

Colored and textured surfaces work for lifestyle product shots. Marble-look tiles ($15–$30 at a hardware store), stained wood boards, linen fabric, and painted surfaces create context without adding clutter. Build a collection of 5–6 surfaces over time and you can match any brand's aesthetic.

No background (cutout) is increasingly common for e-commerce. Shoot on any clean background and let your retoucher cut the product out in post. This gives you maximum flexibility but adds $1–$5 per image in post-production costs.

Camera Settings and Technique

Tripod mandatory. No exceptions. Product photography demands consistent framing across dozens or hundreds of shots. Handheld introduces variation that costs you hours in post-production alignment.

Aperture: f/8 to f/16. You need everything sharp. A watch shot at f/2.8 might have the face in focus but the band blurry — unacceptable for e-commerce. f/11 is the sweet spot for most products on most lenses — sharp across the frame without diffraction softening.

Shutter speed doesn't matter (much). With studio strobes and a tripod, you can shoot at any speed up to your sync limit. If you're using continuous lights, shutter speed controls exposure — use a remote trigger to avoid camera shake at slower speeds.

Shoot tethered. Viewing each image at full size on a monitor as you shoot catches focus issues, dust, and positioning problems in real time. Fixing a slightly crooked bottle in Capture One takes 2 seconds. Discovering it after shooting 200 images costs hours.

Workflow and Consistency

Product photography is a volume game. A typical e-commerce shoot produces 50–200 images in a day. Efficiency determines your profit margin.

Create setup sheets. For each product category, document the exact light positions, power settings, camera settings, and backdrop. Take a photo of the setup with your phone. Next time that client sends a new batch of products, you recreate the setup in minutes instead of re-engineering from scratch.

Batch your shooting. Group products by size and material. Shoot all the small matte products together, then relight for reflective products, then move to larger items. Changing your lighting setup is the biggest time cost — minimize how often you do it.

Color accuracy matters. Shoot a color checker (X-Rite ColorChecker or similar) at the start of each lighting setup. This gives your retoucher — or your Lightroom batch processing — an accurate reference for white balance and color correction. A product that looks green in the photo when it's actually teal costs you a return and a bad review.

File naming conventions save hours downstream. Name files by SKU, not by camera sequence number. IMG_0001 means nothing. SKU-12345_front_white.cr3 tells you everything.

What It Costs to Set Up

A tabletop product photography setup:

• Shooting table with sweep: $100–$300
• 2-light strobe or LED kit with softboxes: $800–$2,000
• Tripod: $150–$300
• Tethering cable and software: $100–$200
• Backgrounds and surfaces: $100–$300
• Total: $1,250–$3,100

A full product studio setup (for larger items):

• Studio rental or dedicated space: $800–$2,000/month
• 3–4 light kit with modifiers: $2,000–$6,000
• Backdrop system with seamless paper: $300–$600
• V-flats for reflective products: $200–$400
• Total: $3,300–$9,000 plus ongoing rent

The tabletop setup pays for itself with one or two e-commerce clients. The full studio requires a steady pipeline of commercial work to justify the overhead — but the per-image rates you can charge are substantially higher.