How To Use CGI In Product Photography

CGI and creative retouching of product shots can breathe life into the ordinary. It can create impact, align with branding, and explain your products’ features.

Almost anything is possible in CGI, so we’ve put together some inspiration to help you understand its potential to support your brand's marketing efforts. It can be applied to a range of ecommerce products, and we encourage brands to think beyond the norm and be playful with new concepts.

CGI stills and animations can be used across multiple marketing channels, particularly those that require added impact. Think social media, outdoor advertising, hero banners on websites, and printed marketing materials.

Here’s our guide to help you get started with your product CGI project.

What's Your Concept?

Your product will be your starting point for ideas. You can show your product's technical features, materials and unique selling points. Alternatively, you could go down a creative branding route with lifestyle or artistic imagery.

When aligned with your brand, artistic concepts are fantastic at appealing to your audience. They'll help you to build a theme throughout your marketing. Your customers’ interests and sense of identity will help you generate effective ideas. For example, outdoor clothing and battling against weather elements go together well.

Selling Points To The Forefront

Focus on a feature or selling point in a creative way. You could show how refreshing your drink is, how pure your skin cream is, or how your sports trainers help your customers run faster. Visuals can tell the story rather than text – perfect for ecommerce product advertising when you need to make a quick impression!

CGI can come into its own as a tool to explain product features. Exploded views, demonstrations of attachments and fittings, as well as 360 degree rotations can explain the product far easier than any other format.

How Realistic Is CGI?

Continuous improvements in technology and the skills of those using the software has enabled CGI to look just like the real thing. Today’s technology has the ability to add detail, and realistic textures. We can also include purposeful imperfections for extra realism to images – effective for lifestyle concepts.

CGI allows the shots to be outputted at high resolutions and accurately controlled. This separates CGI from other techniques such as AI. The higher detail of CGI allows the images to be used across multiple media formats including outdoor advertising and print media.

Variations Of CGI Production

The term CGI can cover a number of techniques. We’ll discuss the main ones we use to produce engaging product imagery, namely product modelling and creative retouching.

Ecommerce Product Modelling For CGI

To model a product is to make it fully CGI. This means no "in camera" photography has taken place and the entire visual is digital. Modelling a product can make use of pre-existing CAD files to inform shapes, sizes and textures. Existing CADs allow visuals to be made before the physical product has been manufactured – handy for a head start on your marketing.

Alternatively, a product can be modelled from scratch using a physical product as a reference. A CGI artist will recreate your product digitally which will allow your images to be fully computer generated. This file can be used multiple times throughout the creation of your images - in other words, once you've got it, you have it forever!

Combining Photography And CGI

It's also possible to combine photography and CGI, to create compelling visuals. Often this technique starts with a simple ecommerce product shot on a white background. CGI is then used to add the creative effects. However, sometimes it's more effective for elements of a built set, props and styling to be captured in camera and then manipulated in post-production. In this case, it's important to plan the desired shot in advance to allow the lighting to be set up correctly for the photography. This makes any integration with CGI more effective and realistic.

The combined photography and CGI method can be more affordable, however, it can restrict the creative options available. For example, product modelling is more suitable for showing exploded views, rotations, and demonstrating features.

Getting The Most From A CGI Agency

CGI unlocks a huge amount of creative freedom when producing content to showcase your product. Animations top the list for their ability to demonstrate a product and show it from every angle. CGI is the perfect production method for conveying information to your customers quickly and in an engaging way.

An animated CGI video sequence is perfect for technical products. It can show off your product's features in rotations, exploded views, zooming in to close ups, and showing moving parts. CGI can be highly engaging when demonstrating products.

CGI Room Sets

As well as highly creative concepts, CGI can be used to recreate lifestyle settings without the need to build a photography set. Today’s technology allows the creation of high-quality renders that look like the real thing. This means that homewares, furniture, kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom brands can recreate lifestyle images in a digital environment.

This style aims to make the image look as accurate as possible. The styling is designed to be aspirational to engage customers and promote the brand. The key for this style is to ensure the lighting is realistic, shadows fall accurately, window views and reflections appear genuine, and everything is to scale. Photo real CGI is trickier to get right as there is less margin for error.

Unleash Wild Creativity

Product CGI enables extraordinary, imaginative concepts that would be impossible to create in the real world. Common themes include gigantic product renderings on city landmarks, use of weather and elements, or animated special effects. These grab attention and have the ability to go viral. Start with ideas that would appeal to your customers and let your creativity go wild.