One of the most important and often undervalued steps of selling a PC online is taking good listing photos of your build! Good photos get more attention from potential buyers leading to more sales for your business. In this guide we are going to cover how to take the best possible photos for your listings!
You can check out our video guide or continue to the written article below with photo examples!
The Hero Shot
The first photo is often the most important
The photo you should always use as your first photo when listing is the "Hero Shot". It is a photo taken from the corner where the side panel meets the front of the case. It is also distinct because you should take the photo from slightly below the PC looking up at it. You can see an example of a listing with a good Hero shot here!
It is also important to ensure that the case is fully in frame and that your photo is level.
The angle its taken from should show off the motherboard and cable management fully ensuring that you can see the cable extensions on the motherboard cable if they are present.
Lighting Your Build
Make sure they can see inside!
Glass side panels cause reflections and can darken the lighting making it harder to see the clean cable management you put so much time into!
Always try and use natural sunlight when possible, and make sure your light source is in front of the PC instead of behind it which can cause the photos to appear washed out. If you have to use artificial light make sure you light up the front and the side so you can see the important angles without shadows.
Also ensure that you are lighting the inside of the PC and the outside so you can easily see the components!
Background
Clean >
Most flagship smartphones have a portrait mode that can automatically blur the background. This keeps the focus on your build rather than on your background and also looks professional. You can also achieve this affect on a proper camera by adjusting the F-stop or aperture. This affect can also be achieved with most photo editing suites!
Make sure the background of the area you are taking your photo in is clean, the blur affect can only do so much! A cleaner background makes your listing look more professional and reputable. We also recommend that you don't have anything distracting in your background that may take away focus from your system. You can also use photo editing software to remove saturation and color from the background making your PC really stand out in the photo.
check out this build and its clean background here!
Framing The Shot
Keep the PC in the Frame!!!
Make sure you fit all the corners of the PC in the frame. It looks much cleaner when you can see the whole system without any of the corners being cut off.
When taking photos specifically for sites make sure you are using the right aspect ratio that the site uses so that you don't have your photo cropped automatically ruining your hard work.
For Jawa, thumbnails are 5:4 but on the listing page images are shown 1:1, and can be clicked on to expand into their original aspect ratio.
For posting to Instagram the most used aspect ratios are 1:1 and 3:4
Final Tips
A few small things to take your listing to the next level
Use a solid color instead of rainbow in the first photo, it looks cleaner and you can use multiple photos to show that your lighting is RGB.
Use a fake or real plant for a splash of vibrant green to bring the photo to life and make them pop!
Adding a video to your listing can show off aspects of your system that a single photo could not capture!
Tap to focus on the brightest part of the system, this will adjust the exposure so that the lighting is not overexposed.
Now you are ready to take great photos of your PC for your listings, good luck and happy selling!
