The Main Image Has Rules, and They Are Not About Taste

How it works

No model generates anything. The product is matted with a background removal model, the matte is shrunk by two pixels, and the original image is composited through it onto a plate of pure white at exactly the same dimensions.

The shrink is the only unusual step and it exists because of how mattes fail. The boundary between product and background is not a line, it is a band a pixel or two wide containing a mixture of both. Cut on the boundary and that band comes with you, so the product arrives on white wearing a faint outline of wherever it was photographed.

Cutting two pixels inside the product throws that band away. It also throws away two pixels of product, which is invisible on a solid edge and destructive on hair, fur, or fine wire.

The product's own pixels are otherwise untouched, and with no sampling anywhere, the same file always produces the same result.

Rules are not style advice

The unusual thing about marketplace imagery is that the constraints are external and enforced.

Pure white means the actual value, not a light gray that reads as white on your monitor. Marketplaces check it, and a background at 250 rather than 255 can be flagged even though no human would call it off-white.

The product filling most of the frame is a proportion rule. A well-composed shot with generous margin looks better on your desktop and takes up less of the thumbnail a customer is scanning, which is what the rule is protecting.

No props, no text, no logos, no borders on the main image. Those are all permitted on the additional images, which is where most sellers put the lifestyle shots and the feature callouts.

And enough resolution for zoom. The exact threshold varies, but the point is the same in every marketplace — below it, the zoom feature simply does not appear, and the customer loses the ability to inspect what they are buying.

None of this is about taste, and none of it rewards a nicer picture that breaks it.

Where the matte gives up

Two categories of product will not survive this cleanly, and it is better to know which one you have before you run it fifty times.

Transparency has no answer. A glass, a bottle of clear liquid, an acrylic stand — a matte assigns each pixel to product or background, and glass is genuinely both. What comes back is either milky where it should be clear, or clear where the old background shows through. Glass on white is a photographic problem, solved by lighting it against a white sweep in the first place.

Fine edges suffer from the choke. Fur, hair, bristles, wire, and mesh live entirely inside the band the shrink discards. For those, run without expecting the choke to help, and accept either a slight halo or a slightly thinned edge.

For everything else — solid objects with defined outlines, which is most of retail — this is reliable and exact.

What still has to happen elsewhere

This page does one job. The rest of a compliant image set is work in other tools, and it is worth listing so nothing is discovered late.

Framing to the required proportion, which is a crop, and best done where you can see the ratio.

Resolution, which cannot be created here — if the photograph is small, it is small, and enlarging it does not add the detail zoom exists to show.

The additional images, where props, lifestyle context, scale references, and annotations are all allowed and where most of the selling actually happens.

And the shadow, if your category and product need one. Use the deterministic shadow page for that, because it leaves the product pixels exactly as they are.

Publication gate

This page ships once the workflow has been run against a solid product on a gray sweep, a white product on white, a transparent glass, and a product with fur or bristles, with the background sampled to confirm 255, 255, 255 and the choked edge inspected at full resolution in every case.