Many of you operate a small business that sells some sort of product. More and more of those products are listed in some form of online store so that buyers can do their shopping on the Internet. Today I wanted to give a brief overview how to get the right sized image prepared.

There are a wide variety of shopping carts available so I’ll be using Amazon’s specifications as an example when I go through these steps. You are certainly welcome to substitute a different set of requirements for the site where your products will be sold.

What does Amazon require? Product photos are suggested to be at least 1000 pixels square and must have a white background. Let’s go over some of the starting points.

First, you need a photo of your products. If you need to shoot pictures, you may want to read Should You Do Some of Your Own Photography? as well as Five Reasons Even Laser Engravers Need to Use Color in CorelDRAW. For those who have virtual products, read Easily Create 3D Boxshots of Physical and Virtual Products.

OK, so now you have some sort of photo, whether a true photograph or a rendering. The next step may be to remove the background until it is truly a solid white. The key here is masking and there are links to several tutorials in Removing the Darned White Box.

For my example, I’m going to use a DVD rendering for one of our Textures Unleashed products. It is rendered without a background so I don’t have to worry about removing the background. I select Image | Paper Size in Corel PHOTO-PAINT (Photoshop has an identical command) and I get the dialog box at right. You’ll see the size in pixels is 803 x 977.

We need those numbers to be exact so the image is square as Amazon requires. Since it is close to 1000, I change both to 1000. I also make sure to select White as the background color. Then I click OK.

The last step is to select Object | Combine | Combine All Objects With Background. Since I already selected a white background, that’s exactly what I get when combining with the background. I now have a photo all ready to use for my product at Amazon and likely elsewhere. If you want to see this DVD rendering in action, go to the Seamless Textures Unleashed store. Click on any of the DVDs to get to the product page. Now hover over the thumbnail and you’ll see the full 1000×1000 pixel image in a pop-up box. A very similar effect is in play at Amazon. Now that you have the basic procedure, you’ll just need to modify it to meet your store’s needs.