I will be in the process of taking pictures of models wearing my clothing line and just pictures of the clothing itself, how should i go about taking this pictures and how can I get those pictures to look professional on the website, will i need to photoshop the items, what kind of background for the clothing items?
I'm just at the beginning of my online shop, so I don't have any own experiences. But my advice is to just take a look at some other sites. If you like the way they are presenting their stuff, what did they do with their photos?
Personally I think it's good to have a clean picture of the t-shirt only with a blank background. Then on top of this, just promote certain shirts with bigger pictures in your header or somewhere with people wearing them. That's at least how I plan to do it.
Lighting is very important. Make sure that you have enough light wherever you're taking the picture. I think that having a plain background - white - is better than a color background, unless of course the shirt is white and there won't be any contrast. So, just pick a plain background color that will have a good contrast. Also, is you use a plain color, it will be easier for you to modify the image in PhotoShop should this be necessary.
You can get some really nice results from a basic digital camera and good lighting. Mixed with a bit of photoshop editing (even something as simple as a quick color correction and a nice border) you can get a professional result without paying a photographer for a day's work, and you learn some skills in the process.
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I think it also strongly depends on what kind of things you want to have on your photos. If you only wanna shoot the t-shirts, a basic digicam and some processing in photoshop can get you good results. but with persons or something different than just a white background the lightning becomes more important.
When doing images of people indoors it usually takes three light's, a primary light, fill light and a hair light. When doing other object it takes two lights normally at 45 degrees to the object at the same level of the len's of the camera.
If you go outside, the sun does all this for you. Try to find simple backgrounds.
You will still need to crop the image and maybe adjust the contrast, brightness of the image.
The best way maybe to use a 1/2 Manichean , or bust indoors to start with.
Adding photographic Images to website 
