Are You Suspicious of Really Good Product Photos?

At least once a month, someone will see one of our trumpets for sale - in our online store, or on platforms like Google, eBay, Reverb, TrumpetHerald, or FB Marketplace - and ask something like:

"Will you send me some photos of that horn with no special effects?"

Sometimes we try to assure people that there are no special effects or heavy editing in the photos we take of our trumpets. For some this assurance is enough to ease their fears. But for a few, only poorly-lit, slightly out-of-focus, uncropped photos of the trumpet will give them comfort. And while we are more than happy to take additional photos and videos of every trumpet we offer, we thought we'd take you behind the scenes of how we photograph trumpets and show how little editing we do to our photos before we post them.

The "Studio"

The Camera

We currently use an iPhone 15 Pro to take and edit all our photos and videos. Everything we have posted in the last year was taken with an iPhone. We have a wide array of professional cameras for still photos and videos. But we've found that for trumpet photos the trusty old iPhone produces acceptable results and we don't feel the need to add the extra steps and complexity that using other cameras brings. In fact, the iPhone does such a good job that some people are suspicious that they have been "Photoshopped" - which has become a blanket term for virtually any editing or post-production.

The Photo Editing

Most of our photos and videos are taken, edited, and posted directly from an iPhone and have been edited using the following 3 simple steps:

1. Straighten - Open the photo in the Photos app > click Adjust > click Crop > use the slider to adjust the photo. Just make it straight. Find the horizon, or the primary horizontal line, and straighten the photo. This should take less than 10 seconds per photo.
2. Crop - After you've straightened the photo, click the Crop icon, choose Square (most compatible with social media and ecommerce sites) or Freeform (needed in some instances to focus the viewer on the instrument and remove distractions).  Crop the photo to ensure the instrument is the primary focus and that any other visual distractions are cropped out. The Photos app has a grid that divides the photo into thirds horizontally and vertically. Use that grid to align the photo. There isn't a whole lot of expertise needed here. Just try to make sure the instrument - or main part of the instrument that specific photo intends to feature - is aligned horizontally and vertically as best as you can.
3. Adjust - The majority of our photos are on black or other solid backgrounds. For photos on a solid black background, the only adjustments we make are to brightness, contrast, and black point. All of these settings are available in the set of scrolling icons that appear below the photo after you click Adjust. For photos on gray, white, or other backgrounds we generally only use Apple's built-in Magic Wand adjustments. We find the AI built into this feature gets it right - or certainly "good enough" - most of the time.

That's it.

We don't magically erase any dents or dings. We don't Photoshop any silver into places it doesn't exist. We don't edit out any poor solder work done by a repair tech 30 years ago. Our goal is to show the true condition of these vintage and unique instruments in the best light possible (pun intended). In fact, if you browse through the site you'll find listings where used the 3 steps described above to actually highlight a dent or other imperfection. 

The Before & After images below show the raw, unedited photo taken with an iPhone followed by the final image we used online that has been lightly edited using the steps described above.

The Videos

Recently we have started creating short videos for some of our listings. The "algorithms" on Facebook Marketplace and other platforms give priority to video in some instances. Generally we take the same photos we previously created and load them into an app that has the latest templates for creating TikTok videos and Instagram Reels. This is the only place you might see any "special effects" on our listings. The purpose is simply to catch a viewer's eye and give the algorithm a reason to prioritize our listings. These video apps come and go. If you have an aptitude for technology you can learn the new "flavor-of-the-month" app in a couple of hours. The app we are using at the time of this writing is simply called VIDS. 

The Final Product

The photos and videos of our products are high quality. They aren't perfect. They aren't even the best. There are sellers and instrument manufacturers who do some amazing photography and creative videos. We think ours are at least above average. Here's a YouTube playlist of some of our recent videos.