What a packshot is, in one paragraph and one photograph
A packshot shows the product and nothing else: even light, a white or pale grey background, the item filling most of the frame. No hands holding it, no kitchen table underneath it, no mood. The point is information, not atmosphere. A buyer scanning a marketplace listing wants to know the size, the colour, the shape and the finish, in that order, and a packshot answers all four in one frame.
The word comes from packaging photography, and on a lot of quotes it still means exactly that: a photograph of the box or the pouch, not the contents inside it. In my Shoreditch studio, clients use “packshot” to mean the product, the packaging, or both, and rarely say which. If a range includes packaged and unpackaged versions of the same item, say so at the quoting stage, because it changes the shot count.
The words you will see on a quote, and what they mean
Quotes for product photography use a shorthand that nobody explains unless you ask. Here is what each term actually buys you, priced at London volume rates.
| Term on the quote | What it means in practice | What it costs | What to check before you agree |
|---|---|---|---|
| Packshot | Plain white or grey background, even light, no props | £15–£45 per image | Whether the background is pure white or off-white |
| Cut-out or clipping path | Background removed so the file drops onto any page | £3–£10 per image on top | Whether you get a layered file or a flattened PNG |
| Ghost mannequin | Garment shot with the mannequin retouched out, so it holds its shape | £25–£45 per image | Whether front and back need separate shots stitched together |
| Hero shot | The one styled, angled image used on the product page itself | £45–£90 | How many rounds of revisions are included |
| Flat lay | Items arranged and shot from directly above | £45–£90 | Who supplies the styling props |
| 360 spin | 36 or more frames stitched into a rotating viewer | £250–£400 per item | Whether the viewer plug-in is included or billed separately |
| On-model | Worn on a person rather than a mannequin or flat | £90–£180 per look | Whether the model’s day rate sits inside or outside the fee |
| Range or family shot | Every colourway or size lined up in one image | Priced per hour, not per item | How many variants are actually going into the frame |
| Detail crop | A close, cropped version of an existing shot, no new set-up | £8–£15 | Whether it is billed as a new image or a crop you already paid for |
Ask about licensing and file delivery before you agree anything. A quote with no mention of usage rights or file format is a quote written by someone who hasn’t thought about either.
When you need one, and when you do not
Where a packshot earns its fee
Marketplace listings need packshots because Amazon, eBay and most wholesale platforms specify a plain background before they will list a variant at all. Wholesale line sheets need them because a buyer comparing forty SKUs wants consistency, not personality. Price comparison feeds, PR image requests and packaging artwork all want the same thing: a clean, repeatable file that drops into a template without a designer having to fix it first.
Food and drink brands ask for this constantly, alongside food and drink packshots from £400 for the menu and delivery-app side of the business.
Where it is the wrong tool
A homepage does not need a packshot. Neither does an Instagram grid, a print campaign, or anything meant to make someone feel something before they think about the size and the price. Those jobs want light, a setting, sometimes a person. A skincare brand near Broadway Market once asked me to quote a packshot batch for their homepage banner; I pointed them towards branding photography from £600 instead, and I’ll say that again here rather than quote the wrong job to keep a client happy.
What makes a good packshot different from a competent one
Anyone can light one bottle well. The test is whether bottle forty still matches bottle one. Verticals need to be genuinely square, not eyeballed square, because a tilted edge is invisible on a single image and obvious the moment two hundred thumbnails sit in a grid. Product height needs to stay constant across a range too: a 200ml and a 500ml version of the same product should read as different sizes, not as the same size shot at different distances.
Colour temperature is the detail clients underestimate. A white background that drifts from cool to warm across a batch looks like a lighting fault even when every individual file is fine on its own. I check it against the previous batch on a calibrated monitor, not against memory.
On shadows: I disagree with the studios that shoot everything shadowless. A thin, soft contact shadow under the product tells the eye where the item sits and stops it looking pasted onto the page. Pure shadowless suits a strict marketplace template. For your own site, a contact shadow reads as more considered, not less clean.
How packshots are priced, and why per-item beats per-hour here
At volume, a simple white-background packshot runs £15 to £45 an image. A half day covering twenty to thirty items is £400. A full day, fifty to eighty packshots or fifteen to twenty-five styled images, runs £750 to £1,100. Retouching is quoted separately, £8 to £25 an image, because a bent label or a dust spot is a five-minute fix on one file and a slow afternoon across two hundred.
Most photography on this site is priced by the hour, in line with typical London photographer day rates. Packshots are the exception, and it’s worth knowing why. A wedding or an event is unpredictable: the hourly rate covers the risk of a slow first dance or a delayed ceremony. A rigid product on a table isn’t unpredictable. Once the lighting is set, item two costs almost nothing extra to shoot, so per-image pricing is fair to both sides.
- Simple rigid items (bottles, boxes, tins, tools): per-image pricing, fair to both sides
- Reflective, transparent or oddly shaped items: pulled back towards an hourly rate
- Garments and anything needing styling: priced per look, not per item
Getting a range to look like a range
Consistency is the actual product being sold in a packshot job, more than any single image. The method that gets there is simple and slightly tedious: one camera position locked down for the whole batch, one lighting set-up left untouched between items, every item measured and shot at matching scale so a size chart isn’t lying, and a physical sample kept on the desk throughout, checked against the screen for true colour.
I once reshot a jewellery range for a client near Hatton Garden because three pieces arrived a week after the rest, and the light in the studio had shifted enough to show. It is not dramatic; it’s a slightly different white point that nobody would spot on one image and everybody would spot on a product grid. The fix is to shoot the whole range in one sitting wherever possible, and to flag it at the quoting stage if items are going to trickle in over several weeks.
The 360 spin is the easiest £300 to save
A 360 spin costs £250 to £400 per item and, for most product categories, buys almost nothing that a good hero shot and three detail crops don’t already cover. Conversion figures quoted around the trade put the uplift from a spin at low single figures for straightforward items, against a cost five to ten times a standard packshot. For a t-shirt or a mug, that’s not a good trade.
The exceptions are real, though. Footwear and anything mechanical or jointed, where the shape only makes sense from several angles, earn the spin back because a still image genuinely leaves the buyer guessing. Everywhere else, spend the £300 on better hero shots or a second angle instead, and put the difference towards retouching.
List the items you need shot, with rough sizes and finishes for each. I’ll come back with a per-image quote within one working day.