Expert Guide To Professional Lifestyle Images For Furniture Brands
Furniture brands rely heavily on visual appeal to convey quality, style, and functionality. Whether you’re launching a new range, promoting your products in brochures, or building your ecommerce store, it’s essential to provide customers with the best images to encourage them to buy.
In this guide, we explore both professional studio photography and CGI renders for furniture brands. Our guide covers lifestyle images, using models, and simple white backgrounds for marketing your products.
Set Building For Lifestyle Photography
Furniture lifestyle photography is an effective way to engage customers and encourage them to buy into your brand. The style replicates interior rooms by building sets in a studio. It allows brands to create a specific style for their products, with many opting for aspirational branding. An appealing, styled interior set in the studio helps customers to envision your products in their homes.
Furniture lifestyle photography services are straight-forward to commission with an experienced studio team. For set build shoots, the environment is planned out to the specifications in your brief and then props added and arranged by a specialist stylist. You will be involved throughout the process, approving mood boards, set design, and final styling.
Often a set is built from easily sourced and affordable materials. MDF is commonly used, with textures and finishes applied to resemble a different material. A window is a great addition to a set, as it allows the lighting to resemble natural light, and adds realism with window views. Images of gardens, landscapes or cityscapes are edited into the shots in post-production.
Best Practices For Commissioning Lifestyle Photography
We help our clients through the process of creating a brief all the way through to receiving the final images. However, there's a few useful things to keep in mind to get the most from your shoot.
Styling Furniture Photography
Choose complementary décor and props that reflect your target customer’s lifestyle without taking attention away from your products. Hiring a professional stylist as part of your project will improve your chances of achieving your vision. Work with your stylist on both the look and feel of the room. Then add small touches like cushions, plants, or books as these make sets relatable and inviting. The composition should help your customers visualise the furniture’s style, scale, and use.
Lighting For Furniture Photography
Simulating natural daylight, or a cosy evening ambiance, provides a sense of time to an image. This contributes to realism by building a narrative into the image. For example, hard lighting from a window can depict a bright sunny day, or using lamps as part of the styling creates an evening feel. Making use of the different lighting from day through to night will allow you to highlight furniture textures and details in different ways. A mix of styles is effective for bedding photography. Plus, sofas, chairs, and a whole range of living room furniture can be lit beautifully with a cosy glow from lamps, candles, or a fireplace.
Versatile Studio Sets
If you would like multiple rooms for your furniture photography shoot, often sets can be quickly adapted and re-styled to showcase different arrangements with minimal reset time. Discuss this upfront with your studio to get an understanding of what's possible, and how various options affect timelines.
Using Models In Furniture Photography
In digital marketing, images with people typically perform better. Models add scale, relatability, and personality in your furniture images.
The diversity and relevance of models in relation to your core customer groups are incredibly important to plan. Brands should aim to represent a range of demographics to enhance inclusivity and appeal.
Natural poses and candid interactions such as sitting, reclining, or using props are great options for lifestyle furniture photography. A key objective is to show comfort and usability. For example, you could demonstrate product features such as pulling out a drawer or arranging pillows.
Models can be excellent at telling a brand story - let them be the face of your brand. Aim to be relatable, engaging, and likeable so customers buy into what your brand stands for as well as your products.
Include Ecommerce Furniture Photography
For ecommerce, white background photos are generally the go-to option. They focus attention on the product, ensuring clarity and consistency across catalogues and website listings.
A white backdrop prevents any visual interference, making product details and colours stand out. They can help create a clean look on websites and in product brochures. Many online marketplaces like Amazon require white backgrounds to maintain uniformity and promote polished, trustworthy brands.
However, white ecommerce images do little to build your brand, and need to be accompanied by lifestyle or creative images to draw customers in. Combining white background shots with lifestyle and CGI images will provide customers with a clear visual of the product, with the addition of a brand story and style.
Professional CGI Renders For Furniture Brands
CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) rendering has revolutionised how furniture brands showcase their products. Unlike traditional photography, CGI allows you to create photorealistic, customisable images of furniture without the constraints of physical products or studio size and location.
3D renders for furniture brands can provide photorealistic lifestyle images, engaging animations, and interactive elements. High quality CGI services provide pixel-level precision for accuracy and creativity.
Key benefits of CGI include:
Speed to market - CGI allows you to start creating visuals before physical production is complete. If you have the CAD files, you can be marketing your product before it has left the factory!
Cost-effective - CGI production for furniture eliminates the costs of location rental or set building, shipping, and photoshoot days. It may not always be the case that CGI costs less than photography upfront, but long-term investment in CGI is likely to be cost effective.
Flexible and future-proof - Easily modify colours, fabrics, and finishes without redoing photoshoots. This is perfect for creating multiple images of furniture pieces in a range of layouts, colours, and fabrics.
Consistency and scalability - Maintain a cohesive look across your entire catalogue with consistent lighting and styling for all products.
Interactive and 360° views - Let customers explore furniture from every angle on your ecommerce shop. The more a customer can see of your product, the more reassured they may be that it is right for them. You may also be able to use CGI for visualisers and augmented reality. Incorporating this technology into your product listings lets your customers see how your product looks in their home.
A Mix Of Production Styles
You may favour a particular production method for your furniture brand images, but often a combination of styles helps to create a range of content that suits various marketing uses.
By investing in diverse, high-quality visuals and aligning them with the buyer journey, furniture companies can increase engagement, reduce return rates, and encourage sales.
Prodoto offer professional photography and CGI services for furniture brands. We find the best production method for you, whether that’s building lifestyle sets in our studio, producing CGI renders, or using models alongside your products.
