/generating-product-photos

name: generating-product-photos
description: |
  ALWAYS read this skill before generating a product photography — before writing any prompt or calling image_generate. Turns a product photo or URL into commercial photography - packshots, lifestyle and campaign frames, on-model, macro detail, flat lays, seasonal staging, infographics, concepts and floating shots. Reads the real product first and holds it identical across every frame. Triggers: "product photo", "packshot", "shoot my product", "studio shot", "lifestyle shot", "hero image", "on a model", "flat lay", "product infographic", "floating product".
license: Apache-2.0
metadata:
  version: "0.2.0"
  category: creative
  summary: "Directs a commercial photoshoot around your product, automatically applying the correct lighting, framing, camera angles and props to deliver studio-quality product shots across 10+ formats."

Product Photography

Turn a product into commercial imagery via the `image_generate` tool. Marketplace listing galleries are out of scope, and a finished advertisement — one built on a headline, an offer, a call to action, or a promotional before/after or comparison — belongs to `generating-image-ads`, not here. Anything whose subject isn't a product should not be created with this skill.

Workflow

Step 1: Read what you have

• **A product image or URL is available** → hand it to `analyzing-products`, and take four things

back: what the product is; **how a person physically uses it** — sprayed, pumped, worn, etc.; which parts open or move, and in what order; and the details that have to stay identical wherever it appears.

• **Look at the image before you describe it.** Take the product only from what the image shows —

not the brief, not the filename, not the product name. Run `image_analysis` and ask it for everything this shoot needs that the product facts leave out — how the surfaces take light, and whatever else the frame you end up building will have to describe.

• **Product not supplied** → don't guess at the product. It becomes the first thing Step 2 asks for.

Step 2: Interview

**Skip this entirely when the brief already makes the shot obvious** — a clear subject, a clear use, and nothing load-bearing missing. The interview exists to close real gaps, not to confirm what you were already told.

Otherwise ask once, bundled into a single message, **at most four questions**. Always leave a free-text way out so the user can answer off-menu. Anything this skill already settles is not a question.

**Do ask, when the answer is genuinely missing:**

| Ask | When | | --- | --- | | **The product** — what it is, and whatever else identifies it: packaging, colour, distinguishing features | No image and no URL. Offer to wait for an upload first; a photographed product beats a described one. | | **Brand guidelines, if they have any** — the color palette, the art direction they shoot to, anything they never put in frame, the typeface where text is drawn, and the register they want the frame to read at | The brief mentions none and the packaging doesn't imply them. Treat as optional: plenty of brands have none, so take what they give and move on. | | **Who the buyer is** | The frame has to speak to a particular buyer — like which features an infographic calls out, whose home a lifestyle scene is set in, who gets cast on-model, etc. | | **How many frames**, and where they run | The brief doesn't say, and the destination changes the crop. |

**When the user waives questions** and the product is already in hand, go straight to generating. Take **studio**, since that is where an unrouted request lands anyway; take the tool's default ratio. Say in a sentence which settings you took, then keep going. It is a statement, not a checkpoint.

A missing product image is the one thing still worth raising.

Step 3: Select the mode and read the corresponding reference file

| The ask is about… | Mode | Reference | | --- | --- | --- | | The product on its own against a clean, controlled background | **studio** | `references/mode-studio.md` | | The product somewhere real, being used or lived with | **lifestyle** | `references/mode-lifestyle.md` | | One polished frame leading a campaign — the product made to look desirable | **hero** | `references/mode-hero.md` | | Worn, held, or applied to skin | **on-model** | `references/mode-on-model.md` | | Texture, material, craft, a tight crop on the thing itself | **close-up** | `references/mode-close-up.md` | | Arranged on a surface, shot from directly above | **flat-lay** | `references/mode-flat-lay.md` | | Tied to a holiday, season or buying moment | **seasonal** | `references/mode-seasonal.md` | | Feature labels, callouts, specs or dimensions drawn onto the image — an informational before-and-after or comparison | **infographic** | `references/mode-infographic.md` | | Breaking the pattern to stop a scroll — unexpected, impossible, or unlike how this product is normally shown | **creative** | `references/mode-creative.md` | | Suspended mid-air, defying gravity | **floating** | `references/mode-floating.md` |

Route on what the image is *for*, not on a matched word.

**Where two rows both fit, these win:**

• **A person in frame** → **on-model**, whatever the setting or the crop would otherwise say.
• **Text drawn onto the image** → **infographic**, whatever else is in frame.
• **One plane, shot from overhead** → **flat-lay**
• **One property at close range** → **close-up**, even inside a setting.
• **The occasion is the sell** → **seasonal**
• **The brief asks for something unexpected, surprising or scroll-stopping** → **creative**, even when

it also names a placement.

Step 4: Write the product description

You read the mode guide in Step 3, so you know what this shot has to show. Write one description of the product, and reuse it unchanged in every prompt you send.

**How much to write depends on whether a photo is going with the call.** With a reference at