product-photography

Use this skill when

Shooting or generating photography of a physical product: packshots, hero frames, still lifes, launch and campaign imagery, PDP and marketplace crops, social and paid-social stills, editorial product features, gifting and bundle shots. Covers beauty, skincare, fragrance, haircare, body care, supplements, beverage, food, homeware, accessories, small hardware. Also covers restyling, reshooting, or re-lighting a product the user supplies as a reference image.

Do not use this skill for: typographic posters and ad layouts (poster-design, static-ads), packaging artwork and label design itself (product-packaging-design), garments worn on bodies (fashion-photography), or non-product abstract imagery (abstract-photography).

Core direction

This is a photography brief, not a graphic-design system. The output is a photograph of a real, specific, credibly designed object sitting in real light on a real surface. Everything below exists to keep the frame physical, chromatic, and dramatically lit.

The user's request always outranks this skill's defaults. Before naming any decision below, check what the user already said — a color, a mood word ("moody", "playful", "clinical", "cozy", "summery"), a season, a material, a specific setting (kitchen counter, gym bag, bathroom shelf, a reference image, a competitor's ad), a brand's existing palette, or an aspect ratio. Anything the user names is a constraint this skill must satisfy, not a preference it can override because a different choice fits the doctrine better:

• A named or implied color or mood selects the palette strategy and the actual hue — translate it into the closest entry in Color rather than substituting whichever hue reads best on its own (e.g. "moody and dark" → Drained warm film or Chiaroscuro shaft, not a bright saturated field; "playful and summery" → Deep sky cobalt or Lavender under Open-sky contre-jour, not Oxblood).
• A named setting or environment selects or overrides the staging mode — a real place the user describes outranks a default studio field.
• A reference image or described shot should be matched as closely as this skill's vocabulary allows — its light, palette, and staging, not the nearest worked example below.
• Only fall back to this skill's own defaults for any axis (lighting register, palette, staging, props) the user left unspecified. Never silently drop a user-specified detail to fit a cleaner recipe.