How can you get the best image results for your label or packaging printing?

It goes without saying that your photographer needs the best looking, freshest, firmest, most blemish-free items to work with, but also, they will need more product than you think.  Fresh foods, especially soft fruit, don’t much like the studio environment and can very quickly start to dry out and look less than their best. Make sure you have back up product in the fridge ready to swap out if things get too warm and ‘wilty’.  (A spray bottle filled with a glycerin/water mix can do a fair bit of refreshing but it’s not a miracle cure for shrivelled fruit!)  Beware leaves.  Sometimes the fruit will be fine but the stalks and leaves may be bruised.  Slightly underripe fruit is better than things at their peak - gives you a bit of leeway and you can boost colour in post more easily than you can remove bruises, tears and shrivelling.

Briefing the photographer is especially important for packaging because the image has to work with so many other elements. This includes pack size, brand or variant colours, window areas,  logos, copy, typefaces and so on.  Communicating your ideas is key and a mood board can be a great way to show what you’re looking for - top down/flatlay shots, or table settings or close ups etc.  While it is useful to see what other producers are doing with their packaging and photography, slavishly copying a successful competitor’s style is essentially giving them free advertising so don’t be afraid to explore new ideas and come up with something new and unique to you!

Ideally you want to be able to give the photographer an idea of where the photograph will end up and whether it needs to fill the frame or leave room around the edges.  The photographer can then create a paper template which is attached to the LCD screen on the back of the camera to block out areas where text will appear. This is a really easy way to see exactly where to set up the product in the frame so that it doesn’t interfere with the space allocated to text.  Failing that, they can ’shoot to crop’ and effectively compose the image in post editing later and allow room for other elements.  In that instance it is often helpful if they can also photograph the background they’re using in the same lighting and at the same distance in case they need to ‘add’ in background later.