CPG Product Photography: What Consumer Brands Need Before Their First Shoot

# CPG Product Photography: What Consumer Brands Need Before Their First Shoot

Consumer packaged goods photography is its own discipline. The requirements are different from DTC e-commerce, different from lifestyle brand photography, and different from what most generalist photographers are set up to deliver well.

If you're a food, beverage, supplement, or personal care brand getting ready for a product shoot, this guide covers what actually matters -- the requirements you need to communicate, the questions to ask, and the mistakes that cost brands real money and time.

What Makes CPG Photography Different

The fundamental difference is context multiplicity. A piece of furniture needs to look good in one or two scenarios. A CPG product needs to work across:

• Retail shelf environments (planogram context, surrounded by competitors)
• E-commerce listings (white background, Amazon compliance, multiple angles)
• Brand editorial (lifestyle, usage, campaign content)
• Distributor and buyer presentations (clinical, detail-forward)
• Social media (scroll-stopping, context-rich)
• Foodservice and wholesale catalogs (clean, informative)

No other product category requires photography that performs this well across this many distinct contexts. A shoe can use roughly the same images across most touchpoints with minor variations. A CPG product needs genuinely different photography for retail vs. DTC vs. brand content -- and a photographer who doesn't understand this distinction will deliver work that only solves one of those problems.

The Shelf Presence Problem

Retail-facing CPG photography has a requirement that doesn't exist for most other product categories: your product has to read in context, not just in isolation.

When a buyer at a grocery chain or natural foods retailer reviews your line, they're mentally placing your product on a shelf surrounded by competitors. They're asking: does this product command attention at retail? Does the packaging communicate the right things at a glance? Does the photography make the product look like it belongs in this section -- or like it was shot by someone who didn't understand where it was going to live?

This means retail-facing CPG photography needs to:

Show the product at realistic retail scale. A 12-oz beverage that photographs beautifully at a tight crop might look underwhelming when shown at the proportional size it would appear on a shelf. The photographer needs to understand this and build shots that communicate size, weight, and presence accurately.

Capture packaging hierarchy correctly. CPG packaging is designed with a deliberate visual hierarchy -- primary brand element, flavor or variant callout, key claims, legal copy. The photography needs to ensure that hierarchy reads at the sizes and distances where buyers will encounter it. This isn't complicated but it requires the photographer to actually study your packaging before the shoot rather than treating it as a prop.

Handle variant consistency across SKUs. If you make six flavors and they're all photographed slightly differently -- different crop, different angle, slightly different lighting -- that inconsistency becomes visible and damaging on shelf. SKU consistency isn't optional for CPG. It's a brand execution requirement.

E-Commerce Requirements for CPG

CPG brands selling on Amazon, Thrive Market, Whole Foods Market online, or their own DTC storefronts need to understand the specific compliance requirements of each platform.

Amazon main image requirements: White background (RGB 255,255,255 or near-white), product filling 85% of the frame, no additional text or graphics beyond what appears on the product itself, no watermarks. This is table stakes -- non-compliant images are rejected or suppressed.

Secondary image requirements: More flexible, but the most effective secondary images for CPG consistently include: a lifestyle in-use shot, a key claims callout image (pulling out 2-3 hero benefits with text overlay), an ingredients or nutrition facts panel shot (especially for food and supplement brands), and a scale reference or size comparison.

Ingredient and transparency shots: Food and supplement buyers want to see what's inside. Ingredient staging shots -- the actual ingredients laid out around or behind the product -- have become a standard image type for this category. They're not decorative. They drive trust and conversion.

Lifestyle and usage shots: For consumable products, "in use" is often the most important secondary image. A beverage poured over ice. A supplement scoop mid-pour. A skincare product in hand against clean skin. These images answer the question "what is it like to actually consume or use this product" -- a question that's critical for purchase confidence in the CPG category.

Working With Complex Packaging

CPG products often have packaging requirements that complicate photography. Common challenges:

Reflective surfaces. Cans, glass bottles, foil pouches, metallic labels -- these reflect light sources back at the camera and require careful lighting control to keep the label readable and the product looking intentional rather than overexposed. Flag lighting setups and controlled reflections are standard technique here. Photographers who haven't worked with CPG packaging regularly often struggle with this.

Multiple surfaces on one package. A glass bottle has a front label, back label, cap, and the bottle itself. The optimal lighting for the front label might create glare on the cap. A good CPG photographer knows how to balance these competing surfaces or how to composite multiple exposures to get all surfaces right simultaneously.

Wrap-around graphics. Some CPG packaging has graphics that wrap around the container. For these products, buyers often need to see the full 360-degree label -- either through a wrap-around composite image or a rollout flat shot showing the complete label design. This is a specific image type worth discussing with your photographer before the shoot.

Quantity and bundle shots. CPG brands frequently sell multipacks, subscription bundles, or variety packs. These require careful styling to show the grouping in a way that communicates value without looking chaotic. How many units should be in frame? How do they relate to each other? The staging decisions here have real impact on conversion.

Throughput Expectations for CPG Shoots

CPG photography is typically slower than DTC product photography for non-consumable goods. Here's what to realistically expect:

Realistic CPG throughput by shot type:

• White background compliance images (single SKU, multiple angles): 8-15 SKUs per day
• Styled product shots with simple props: 5-8 setups per day
• Lifestyle/usage shots with talent: 4-8 final selects per day
• Ingredient hero shots: 3-6 setups per day
• Group/variety pack shots: 2-4 complex setups per day

If you have 12 SKUs and need full Amazon compliance sets plus one lifestyle shot per SKU, plan for a 2-day shoot, not one. Photographers who quote otherwise are either rushing the post-production or haven't thought through the actual workflow.

Pre-Shoot Checklist for CPG Brands

The most expensive CPG photography mistakes happen before the shoot starts. Here's what we walk every CPG client through in the two weeks before a session:

Packaging finalization. Only shoot with your final, print-ready packaging. Shooting with prototype or pre-production packaging is almost always money wasted -- packaging details change and the photos won't be usable. If your packaging isn't final, push the shoot.

Label compliance review. Review all label claims with your compliance team before shoot day. If a regulatory issue surfaces after the photos are taken, the images may be unusable. This is especially critical for supplement and functional food brands.

SKU inventory and labeling. Bring 3-5 units of each SKU. Products in photography get handled, repositioned, and occasionally dinged. Having extras means you can select the cleanest unit for each shot rather than working around damage. Label each unit clearly so there's no confusion between variants on set.

Shot list finalization. Don't show up without a finalized shot list. For CPG specifically, the shot list should include: which image types are needed per SKU (compliance images, lifestyle, ingredients, groupings), which platforms each image type is intended for, and any specific claims or features that need dedicated shots.

Props and ingredients. If you want ingredient shots, bring the actual ingredients -- not stand-ins. Buyers in food, beverage, and supplement categories can tell the difference between real produce and prop produce. Bring more than you think you'll need. Confirm with the studio whether they provide lifestyle props or whether you're responsible for sourcing them.

Size samples of retail competitors. Bringing one or two competing products to the shoot gives the photographer real context for shelf scale and category visual conventions. It takes 60 seconds and prevents the "looks great in studio, looks undersized at retail" problem that bites brands who skip this step.

What Great CPG Photography Costs

Ranges for Austin and the broader Texas/Southwest market:

Full compliance image set (white background, multiple angles per SKU): - 1-5 SKUs: $2,500-4,500 for the set - 6-15 SKUs: $4,500-8,000 for the set - 16+ SKUs: Day rate approach, $3,500-6,000/day

Lifestyle and campaign photography: - Half-day (3-4 hero setups): $3,000-5,500 - Full day (8-12 hero setups): $5,500-10,000+

Per-image post-production: - Basic retouching and background cleanup: $30-75/image - Complex compositing (multi-exposure labels, background removal, ingredient staging): $75-200/image

The variables that move cost most: label complexity, number of SKUs, whether talent is involved, and the complexity of post-production compositing required for labels and packaging surfaces.

Where AI Compositing Changes the Math

For CPG brands with large SKU counts or frequent product line extensions, AI-assisted photography is worth understanding.

The traditional problem: if you launch a new flavor or line extension, you need to reshoot. Same setup, same styling, new product -- still a full photography day.

AI-composited variant generation lets us take a high-quality base shot of one SKU and generate accurate label and colorway variations for additional flavors, provided the underlying packaging structure is the same and the variation is primarily color or label artwork rather than packaging form factor.

This doesn't work for every situation -- packaging form changes, unusual textures, and materials with specific light behavior still need real captures. But for brands launching six flavors of the same product where the bottle shape is identical and only the label changes, it's a legitimate way to reduce shoot days without sacrificing image quality.

We've used this approach for beverage clients launching full flavor lines. Base shots were real product photography. Label and colorway variants were generated from those bases. The final set covered the full line at roughly 40% of what a traditional full-catalog shoot would have cost.

Finding the Right Photographer for CPG

CPG photography is a specialty. General product photographers are not automatically set up for it. When evaluating studios, ask:

• Can you show me CPG work specifically -- not just product photography generally?
• How do you handle label compliance and reflective packaging surfaces?
• What's your approach to SKU consistency across a large variant set?
• Who handles post-production, and what's their experience with CPG packaging compositing?
• What's your realistic throughput for a project of our size?

The answers quickly reveal whether they've done this before or whether you'd be their CPG learning experience.

The Bottom Line

CPG photography isn't complicated, but it has specific requirements that separate photographers who've done it from those who haven't. The brands that get it right the first time are the ones who communicate those requirements clearly before the shoot, arrive with organized inventory and a finalized shot list, and choose a photographer who understands that your packaging needs to work at shelf, on screen, and in a buyer presentation -- often from the same image set.

If you're planning a CPG shoot and want to talk through the right approach for your product line, [get in touch](/contact). We'll review your packaging, discuss your channel requirements, and give you a realistic plan. Or see how AI Studio handles large CPG catalogs with AI-assisted variant generation.