How To Create a Photography Style Guide for Your Brand in 2025

Create a photography style guide that ensures brand consistency across all channels. Learn expert techniques and see examples from successful brands.

A photography style guide ensures every image—across your website, social media, and email—reinforces your brand. 

Images help convey your brand’s personality, highlight what sets your product apart, and dominate key digital real estate across your website, social media, and ads. That’s why top brands focus on consistency in color, framing, and visual mood. 

But consistency is more than just a preference—studies have shown that brand consistency can increase revenue by up to 20%. It helps to build trust with buyers and encourages them to take notice of your brand when they recognize it. 

In this guide, learn how to build a photography style guide that supports brand consistency, streamlines your workflow, and helps you scale image creation productively.

What is a photography style guide?

A photography style guide defines how your brand should look and feel in every photo. Through examples and detailed instructions, it covers aspects like lighting, color tones, composition, editing style, and even model direction. 

Sustainable clothing brand tentree, for example, nested its photography guidelines within its overall brand guidelines. It covers how to be consistent with colors, lighting, and the models who showcase products.

Tentree’s photography guidelines offer guidance on models, lighting, and shadows.

The importance of a photography style guide

When customers can’t touch or see a product in the flesh, they rely on ecommerce product images to decide whether they want to make a purchase. A style guide keeps these images consistent, no matter where customers see your photos—be that your online store, social media platforms, or advertisements.

Think of Coca-Cola’s iconic red or Apple’s clean, minimalist imagery. Both brands create a variety of assets that are instantly recognizable because of their commitment and strict adherence to maintaining clear photography standards. This brand consistency can build recognition and loyalty, which is extremely beneficial in competitive markets.

Plus, when you have every detail documented in a photography style guide (as opposed to just in your head), you don’t have to think about each step in the image-creation process. This helps you delegate to others and minimizes errors as you grow your business. 

What should a photography style guide include?

• Color palette
• Saturation
• Focal length
• Shadows and highlights
• Lighting
• Composition and framing
• Background
• Types of photography
• Models
• Image files and naming conventions
• Mobile-specific photography guidelines
• AI and photography style consistency

A photography style guide breaks down your brand’s expectations for photo sessions and the editing process. Here are a few elements you should include in your image style guide to ensure your photos don’t miss the mark: 

Color palette

Your color palette is one of the most recognizable aspects of your brand identity. When you extend it to your photos, viewers will often recognize your brand even if your product is not in the image—like McDonald’s red and yellow color scheme used in its Golden Arches logo. 

Your palette should consist of complementing colors and similar hues. For example, if you use a pastel color palette, you should aim to reflect that in all your images.

Saturation

Color saturation, or the intensity of your colors, can dictate the emotions your brand wants to evoke. Saturated colors, like a vibrant, fire engine red, can evoke passion and make an image livelier, while a muted color palette is more subdued and mellow. 

Your photography guidelines can explain your stance on saturation. For example, you might say that you want to avoid saturated images because you want a more natural look. You can also explain when you’d use saturation. Take GPS and wearable technology brand Garmin. In its guidelines, it reserves saturation for the color black, which helps its photos look richer and more vivid.

Garmin covers color and style in its photography style guide.

Skin care brand Byoma is an example of a brand that uses saturation. To match its colorful product packaging, Byoma uses hot pink throughout its website. The saturated color feels youthful and playful, which reinforces the brand’s identity. 

Byoma’s homepage features a saturated hot pink. Source: Byoma

Focal length

Focal length is how far the lens is from your subject and how far your camera sensor is from your lens. It determines the wideness or tightness of an image. 

A long focal length brings your subject closer and a short focal length shows off more of an image. A 50 millimeter focal length, a standard lens that feels natural to the human eye, is common for product photography, but you might specify that photo shoots must also include tighter focal lengths to show off the details of your products. 

Shadows and highlights

Shadow and highlights affect the mood of an image. Shadows are the darkest parts of your images, and highlights are the lightest points. 

Shadows can add more depth and visual interest to an image, whereas highlights are often the most attention-grabbing part of an image. Your photography guidelines can detail what story you want your images to tell. 

For example, if you sell suits and want a more mysterious feel, you might want more prominent shadows. And if you sell delicate crochet doilies, you might want to push the highlights. 

Lighting

It’s always best to shoot with natural lighting when available, as this creates the most lifelike photo. However, natural lighting isn’t always readily available, so you may need artificial lighting. Your product photography guide should provide direction for lighting, noting any relevant artificial light setups.

Composition and framing

Composition is how you balance and arrange items in a photo, and framing is what you do and don’t include. Your brand can offer a minimalistic look with a lot of negative space to draw attention to a product, or choose to feature multiple items beside your product to provide context. The beauty brand Klur does the latter. 

With a dedication to creating clean beauty products, Klur uses its social media accounts to show off the natural ingredients that its products contain. For example, for a daily moisture cleanser, it features the bottle beside a spoonful of papaya seeds. The product is in focus, and the seeds are visible but slightly blurry, showing off the papaya’s supporting role in customers’ skin health. 

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by KLUR®️ (@klur.co)

Your style guidelines can include whether to incorporate techniques like negative space, rule of thirds, and diagonals.

Background

While white-background photography is the status quo in ecommerce, you have more flexibility when it comes to your website and other uses, like on social media. You could choose from one of the following options in your photography style guide:

• Transparent backgrounds. Great for logos or product images.
• Contextual backgrounds. For example, photograph a toothbrush in a bathroom. 
• Themed backgrounds. These are approved patterns, landscapes, or backdrops. 

You don’t need expensive editing software to change the background of a photo—Shopify Magic can remove and replace image backgrounds.

Types of photography

The use case of your photo often dictates the style guides that surround it. You might shoot your social media images, for example, in a different way than the white background shots for your ecommerce product pages. 

Plus, if you want your customers to associate your product with a certain lifestyle or emotion, create that link with in-context images. This requires a combination of styles, including clean-cut feature images, close-ups, and lifestyle shots. How much you use each defines your brand.

Models

Your models can help customers see themselves using your products. As Camille Ouellette, owner of jewelry brand Camillette, explains on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast: “You also need photography on people so people can really relate and see, ’It’s going to look like this on me.’” 

It’s one reason Camille aims to work with multiple models. “I’m trying as well to have different types of skin colors and bodies to show the jewelry on different types of people,” she adds.

The people in your images should reflect your brand so they can resonate with people from the age groups, community, and subcultures you’re targeting.

Fenty Beauty’s photography guidelines are a great example of this. As a brand that centers representation and inclusivity, it explicitly outlines the types of people who should be featured in brand photography.

In its guidelines, the brand outlines the goals of its photography:

• Capture color
• Clean compositions and shots
• Casting that reflects the diversity of our users

Fenty Beauty features different types of models so customers can see how products might look like on them. Source: Fenty Beauty

Image files and naming conventions

To show off your products in the best possible light, you need images of the highest quality. Your style guideline should outline the best image formats for different situations, how photographers should deliver images—for example, through a Dropbox link—and how to name images so that they are consistent and easy to retrieve when you need them.

Mobile-specific photography guidelines

Smartphone users account for around 45% of all web traffic in the US—your images need to look just as great on those smaller screens as they do larger desktops. Define image optimization guidelines, like compressing images and resizing, to cater to these smartphone users. 

AI and photography style consistency 

Leaning into AI helps you save time and money when managing your photography process. It lets you maintain photo style consistency by automating editing processes like color correction, cropping, and applying presets across large batches of images. 

Plus, some generative AI tools are capable of analyzing visual elements to ensure alignment with brand guidelines, flag inconsistencies, and even suggest adjustments. This reduces manual effort, speeds up workflows and ensures a uniform look, which is especially useful when working with multiple photographers or high-volume content.

How to create a photography style guide

Not only does your style guide involve similar angles, composition, and content, but it should also incorporate more technical post-production work.

1. Set the stage

Your photography style should match or complement your existing visual branding. So it’s important to understand what your existing brand is or develop one if you haven’t already. Provide a succinct description or overview of your photography and what you aim to do with it in your guidelines. 

For example, 1% for the Planet offers this one-pager in its guidelines: 

1% for the Planet shares its vision, mission, and model in its brand guidelines.

2. Guide how to compose photos

Distinguish different types of photography and their ideal composition in your guidelines so that creatives can stay on-brand no matter what type of image they’re producing. For example, white background product photos will have different requirements than lifestyle shots or event photography. 

3. Include examples

What does an on-brand image look like? Showcase examples so that people abiding by your photography style guide can get a visual representation of what “good” looks like. For example, Ben & Jerry’s photography guidelines show mockups that illustrate how to use backgrounds:

Ben & Jerry’s gives practical examples for photographers to reference.

It’s also useful to include examples of the things you want to avoid. For example, if you don’t want your social media posts to have products that are perfectly in the center, you can include it in a don’ts section. 

4. Show how to edit photos

It’s vital to use the same filters, shadows, and retouching techniques in post-processing for a consistent style. Consistent retouching adds another layer to your branding.

To streamline this process, provide approved Adobe Lightroom presets, Photoshop actions, or mobile editing filters (like those in VSCO or Tezza) that your team can apply across all visual content. You could even use artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as Adobe Lightroom, Capture One, and Luminar Neo to batch-edit images and ensure consistency across every image. 

5. Create templates for team use

Create templates for composition, lighting setups, editing presets and file formats to streamline production, reduce errors, and maintain image consistency. Having these presets at the ready also makes it possible for new photographers to quickly align with your brand’s aesthetic, saving time and training effort as your team grows.

6. Set up digital asset management for style guides

A digital asset management (DAM) system stores your product photography guidelines in a place that’s accessible to everyone who needs them—be that internal teams, freelance photographers, or external creative agencies.

Instead of sharing a Google Doc or presentation, DAM software ensures your style guide and visual assets are easy to access, update, and share. As your style guide evolves and your team scales, you won’t have to ensure everyone is working from the updated version.

Move forward with your brand and product photography

You don’t want all of your hard work creating a photography style to go to waste. Here’s a brief checklist of your next steps:

• Refine your photography process. Finalize your lighting, background, and editing setup to ensure every new image reflects your brand consistently.
• Create a photography template. Build a step-by-step guide that includes camera settings, angles, styling notes and editing presets. Having these templates ready to go saves time and allows others on your team to replicate your style easily.
• Delegate with confidence. Train a team member or freelancer using your template so you’re not the bottleneck as your business grows.
• Continuously improve your workflow. Schedule quarterly reviews to update your process and implement new tools or techniques that can help you stand out visually in your category.
• Build a resource library. Save successful shots and setup examples to use as internal references or training material.

Measuring the impact of consistent photography

Consistent visuals build trust and recognition, which can lead to measurable improvements in brand performance. Confirm whether that’s true for your ecommerce business by monitoring the impact of product photography through techniques such as:

Website analytics 

Compare metrics such as engagement rates, click-throughs, conversion rates, and time on page. You could even compare performance before and after visual updates to check whether approved images influence user behavior.

Customer surveys

Do customers take note of your newly consistent images? Are they influenced by them when purchasing? Use customer survey apps like UserLoop and Grapevine, which integrate with Shopify, to gather this insight.

Social media engagement

With a photography style guide, people should be able to recognize images that come from your brand. Use social listening tools to find instances when shoppers mention your brand but don’t tag it. This can highlight when competitors are using a similar style and loyal fans comment something along the lines of, “This reminds me of [your brand]!”

Return rates 

Monitor products with high return rates and dig into return surveys to figure out whether inconsistent product images are the cause. 

Photography style guide FAQ

How do I figure out my photography style?

Define your visual brand identity. Find examples of photography you like. Hone in on the examples that complement your brand identity and identify similarities. Experiment with different styles in your portfolio. Play around with photo editing software.

How do I create my visual brand with photography?

To create a visual brand for your photos, keep your style consistent. Ensure photography complements existing visual brand elements, such as logo and colors, and create style guidelines to adhere to.

What can be an effective guide for good composition?

Classic principles like the rule of thirds, leading lines, symmetry and framing are great to learn photo composition.

How often should I update my photography style guide?

If your business goes through a rebrand, that’s the perfect time to update your visual style guide. But even if your visual style stays relatively consistent, it’s a good idea to update your style guide at least once a year to reflect any new changes.

How do I ensure consistency across multiple photographers?

Create a detailed style guide to share with photographers. Conduct onboarding sessions and offer training. Provide reference images and examples. Encourage feedback loops during projects. Give access to photo editing presets or templates. Assign a lead photographer or editor to oversee final outputs and provide quality control.