Cleaner Shop Photos with Yeri AI: A Two-Evening Routine

Most product photos fail for a boring reason: the background. A cluttered kitchen counter, a shadow from the phone, a mismatched white. Over the last few weeks I rebuilt the photo set for a small online shop with Yeri AI, a browser-based image and video studio, and I want to write down the routine that actually worked, because the first attempts did not.

1. Shoot for the edit, not for the final picture

I stopped trying to get a perfect photo out of the phone. Instead I shoot every item on a plain sheet, from the same height, with the light coming from one side. The goal is a clean subject that a cut-out tool can read easily. Glass, hair and fluffy textiles are the hard cases, so for those I take one extra frame with a darker background.

2. Remove the background, then check the edges

Yeri AI has a background remover that handles most solid objects in one pass. I zoom to 200% and check three places: thin parts (handles, straps), transparent parts (bottles) and the bottom edge where the shadow used to be. If an edge is wrong I re-run on the darker frame rather than fixing it by hand.

3. Generate the scene from a short prompt

For lifestyle shots I upload the cut-out as a reference and describe only the scene: “on a light oak table, morning window light from the left, a linen napkin, shallow depth of field”. Short, concrete prompts keep the product unchanged. Long prompts full of style words tend to redraw the product itself, which is exactly what a shop cannot accept.

I usually draft with a fast model and only re-render the two best results on a higher-quality model such as Seedream. Writing down the prompt and the model next to each file saved me a lot of guessing later.

4. Expand instead of crop

Marketplace thumbnails are square, banners are wide, stories are tall. Rather than cropping the subject, I use the image expander (outpainting) to add space around it. One base image becomes three formats without the product touching the border.

5. Upscale last, then animate a few

Upscaling is the final step for stills. For the three hero products I also made short clips with image-to-video: a slow push-in, a little steam over a cup, fabric moving slightly. Small motions look natural; big camera moves warp the object, so I avoid them.

What I would tell another small shop

• Keep one reference image per product and reuse it, so a series looks consistent.
• Check text, logos and hands at full size before publishing anything.
• Budget credits: explore on cheap drafts, spend on finals.
• Keep the original photo; customers notice when an AI image does not match what arrives in the box.

None of this needs design software. The whole set, about forty products, took two evenings. The tool is at https://yeri.ai if you want to try the same routine; it has a free tier, which was enough for my first tests.