How can I make real-looking product photos with AI?

What do you need before you start?

• One photo of your product, taken on your phone in daylight
• A computer with a background remover — the one already built into Windows Photos or Mac Preview is fine, and it's free
• A PromptWise account
• 4 credits for one generation

You get 50 credits for 7 days, and you can cancel before it ends. Use them this week — here's the order we'd shoot in: one hero shot like this one, then the same product on two other surfaces, then a close-up. Four shots, and you've got a month of feed.

A note on our bottle. Idrelle is a brand we invented, and the bottle in every photo here is AI-generated — we make our demo products so we can show you the whole process without a client's product in it. Your product is real, which is the easy version: you can photograph it. Everything below works the same either way.

How do you make it, step by step?

1. 01

   Take one photo of your product

   Daylight, product centered, plain surface. Near a window with the overhead lights off is better than any lamp you own. You're not making the final image here — you're giving the AI a clear look at what your product actually is, so shoot it straight on and in focus.

   One photo is enough. If your product has a label, make sure the label faces the camera and you can read it.

2. 02

   Remove the background, free, on your own computer

   Skip this and the AI will sometimes drag your kitchen counter into the shot along with the product. Do it and your reference is nothing but the product itself.

   You don't need Canva, a subscription, or a single credit. Your computer already does this:

   • Windows: open the photo in Photos, then Background → Remove
   • Mac: open it in Preview and use the markup tools, or right-click the image in Finder and choose Quick Actions → Remove Background

   

   Those diagonal stripes are the tool showing you what it thinks the background is. Check they cover everything except your product before you go further — if they've crept onto the product itself, the Background brush tool lets you paint the selection back.

   

   Save it as a PNG so the transparency survives.

   A white background works nearly as well if your tool won't do transparency. In Windows Photos that's Replace, with the color set to ffffff:

   

   Why this matters more than it sounds. This one file becomes the reference for every shot you make from now on — this guide, your next launch, your Black Friday set. Get it clean once and your product looks identical across all of them. That consistency is the whole difference between a shop that looks like a brand and a shop that looks like a camera roll.

3. 03

   Describe a photograph, not a product

   Why do AI product photos come out flat, and how do you fix it?

   This is the step that decides everything. Most AI product photos fail here, and they fail the same way: the prompt describes a product when it should describe a photograph.

   Here's the prompt we started with:

   PROMPT

   The perfume bottle from the reference image, unchanged, standing on the varnished teak deck of a small wooden sailboat, open sea and a soft horizon line behind it, golden-hour sun from the left, gentle deck shadow, faint sea spray texture on the wood, editorial fragrance packshot, real product photo taken with a 50mm lens, visible material texture, not a 3D render

   Not bad. It names the product, the surface, the light. But it's missing most of what a photographer decides before pressing the shutter, and what comes back is flat — a product floating in a nice place, with nothing in front of it and nothing to give the scene depth.

   What does every product prompt need?

   Eight things. Miss the middle ones and you get a catalog cut-out; include them and you get a photograph.

   What to specify	Why it matters	From our prompt
   Camera position	Decides whether the viewer is standing over the product or sitting with it	Eye-level, close to the subject, slight low angle
   Product position	Stops the AI centering everything like a passport photo	On the left third of the frame
   Foreground	The one most people skip, and the one that creates depth	Out-of-focus coiled rope, close to the lens, lower right
   Midground	Where your product lives, and what stays sharp	The bottle, sharp focus
   Background	Gives the scene a place and a story	Open sea, horizon falling away right, thin haze
   Lighting	Direction, hardness, time of day, color temperature	Hard direct midday sun, single source, camera-left, warm-neutral
   Camera and lens	Changes the whole feel — a phone and a medium-format camera see differently	Hasselblad medium format, 50mm, f4
   Intent and texture	Tells it what kind of picture this is	Editorial fragrance packshot, warm film grain, not a 3D render

   You don't need to know camera names. We don't either. Describe the feeling you want — "expensive and still", "sunlit and casual" — and ask Wise Chat inside PromptWise, or ChatGPT or Claude, which camera and lens give that. Then put its answer in your prompt.

   What does the finished prompt look like?

   PROMPT

   Eye-level, camera close to the subject, slight low angle. The Idrelle perfume bottle from the reference image, unchanged, positioned on the left third of the frame, standing on a varnished mahogany-teak boat deck with chrome bow fittings. Foreground: the out-of-focus edge of a coiled rope on the deck, close to the lens, lower right corner. Midground: the perfume bottle, sharp focus. Background: open sea and a soft horizon falling away to the right, thin haze over the water separating sky from sea, a navy-and-white striped cushion barely visible and blurred at the frame edge. Lighting: hard direct midday sun as the single source, camera-left, warm-neutral color temperature. A sharp-edged shadow falls to the right of the bottle. A thin bright specular highlight runs along the glass shoulder; the sea-glass glass transmits light and casts a faint teal-tinted glow onto the teak beneath it. The chrome bow fitting throws a hard mirror-like highlight. The teak deck has a satin sheen with visible grain. The striped cushion fabric stays soft and matte, absorbing light rather than reflecting it. The label reads "IDRELLE", with "EAU DE PARFUM" below it and "100 ml · 3.4 fl oz" near the base. Shot on a Hasselblad medium-format camera, 50mm lens, f4, the bottle and near deck sharp, the horizon and cushion falling soft. Warm film grain, editorial fragrance packshot, real product photo, visible material texture, not a 3D render.

   Swap the highlighted parts for your own product and scene. The structure stays.

   The five words that do the most work: from the reference image, unchanged. That's what tells the AI to copy your product instead of inventing one that matches your description. Leave them out and you'll get a bottle that isn't yours.

4. 04

   Generate it in PromptWise

   Open PromptWise and go to Studio in the left sidebar. Upload your background-free product photo as the reference. Then four settings:

   

   Setting	What we used	How to choose yours
   Model	Nano Banana Pro	Nano Banana Pro and ChatGPT 2.5 Sunburst are the strongest right now for product work. Older models cost less, but results differ enough between models that a cheap test isn't always a fair test
   Aspect ratio	3:4	3:4 for the Instagram feed, 9:16 for reels and stories, 1:1 for a listing
   Resolution	4K	Test at a lower one if you like, but upscaling later costs more than generating big once. If there's a person in the shot, always go highest
   Number of images	1	Generate 2 or more. The first image is hardly ever the winner, and comparing two teaches you more than staring at one. We generated one here because we only wanted to test the lighting

   That run cost 4 credits.

Try this prompt yourself (opens in a new tab)

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Which model should you use?

We ran the same prompt twice with the same settings — 3:4, 4K, one image — and changed only the model.

Neither one won. One got our product right and our text wrong. The other got our text right and our product wrong.

That's the lesson worth taking: there's no best model, only different failure modes. Pick one, learn what it tends to get wrong, and check that thing every single time. If your product has a distinctive shape, check the shape. If it has a label, read the label. If it has a color you chose deliberately, hold it against the reference.

What we'd do with both: generate in whichever model holds your product's shape, then fix the text separately using the label edit below. Shape is hard to repair; text is easy.

And there's a third way, which is how the shot at the top of this page was actually made. Both of the images above were built from a written description of the bottle, which is why they disagree about what the bottle is. For the final one we trained the bottle as a reusable seed in PromptWise — a handful of photos, trained once, free — so it stops being a description and starts being a photograph. If your product has a distinctive shape, a specific color, or printed text, that does more for you than switching models ever will. It's the subject of our next guide.

What if your product isn't a perfume bottle?

The structure holds for anything. You change the scene clauses and leave the rest alone.

Skincare or beauty — swap the deck for a wet stone at a shoreline, or crumpled linen with palm shadows across it. Keep the single hard light source; it's what makes glass and cream look expensive.

Jewelry — dark surfaces, low raking light, deep shadows. Trade "hard direct midday sun" for "low directional light from the right", and "warm film grain" for "deep soft shadows, glinting highlights". Small products want a closer lens and a tighter frame.

Clothing and soft goods — flat, matte, daylight. These don't reward drama, they reward clarity. Move the camera up, shoot closer to top-down, keep the light soft and even.

Food and drink — keep the foreground but make it edible: crumbs, a linen edge, a second glass out of focus.

Which three clauses are worth changing on their own?

Each of these changes the whole picture, one at a time, so you learn what each one actually does:

• The surface. Teak, travertine, wet sand, dark marble, crumpled linen. This does more than any other single word.
• The light direction. "Camera-left" to "from behind" turns a product photo into a silhouette with a glow. "Hard" to "soft, diffused through a sheer curtain" turns midday into morning.
• The foreground. Change what's blurred in front and the mood changes without the product moving at all.

What about a different platform?

Same prompt, different aspect ratio. Generate the 3:4 for the feed, then regenerate at 9:16 for reels rather than cropping — cropping a 3:4 to 9:16 cuts your composition in half and puts the product somewhere you didn't choose.

Why does your AI product photo look wrong?

What should you make next?

• 

  How can I make AI people that look real?

  A real-looking AI portrait in two generations