Generate Professional Product Photos with AI (No Studio Needed)

beginner 30 minutes
OUTCOME

After this runbook, you will have 10+ studio-quality product photos generated from a single smartphone shot, ready to upload to your Shopify store.

Before you start

  • Required A smartphone photo of your product on a plain (white or grey) background
  • Required Midjourney account — Basic plan ($10/month) Start Midjourney Basic
  • Optional Adobe Firefly account — free tier is enough Sign up for Firefly
  • Required Discord account (Midjourney runs inside Discord)

Most sellers spend $200–$800 per product on a photographer for the first batch — and then can’t afford to iterate when they tweak packaging or want seasonal variants.

This runbook gets you to good enough to launch for the cost of a Midjourney subscription. Once you know which SKUs actually sell, that’s when you invest in a real shoot for your top 3.

The workflow 6 steps

  1. Prep your source photo

    Photograph your product against a white or light grey wall in natural daylight. Shoot at minimum 1200×1200px. The subject should fill at least 60% of the frame.

    Midjourney's image-to-image mode needs a clean subject to isolate. A cluttered background forces the model to guess where your product ends — and it guesses wrong 40% of the time. This single step determines 80% of output quality.

  2. Upload your photo to Midjourney via Discord

    Midjourney

    In Discord, open the Midjourney bot DM or a /imagine channel. Drag your image into the message field and send it alone (no text). Right-click the uploaded image → 'Copy Link'.

    Midjourney needs a hosted URL, not a local file path, in its /imagine prompt. The URL from the Discord-uploaded image is what you paste into step 3. Skipping this means the model has no visual reference and generates a generic product.

  3. Build the product shot prompt

    Midjourney

    Run: /imagine [PASTE-YOUR-IMAGE-URL] professional product photography, studio white background, soft box lighting, 85mm lens, shallow depth of field, commercial grade --iw 2 --ar 1:1 --v 6.1

    --iw 2 sets image weight to the maximum (2.0), telling the model your photo is the dominant input. Without it, Midjourney treats your image as a loose style hint and invents a product that looks vaguely like yours. --v 6.1 is the highest-quality current model.

  4. Select and upscale the best variation

    Midjourney

    From the 4 outputs grid, click U1–U4 on the best result. Then click 'Upscale (2x)' in the follow-up panel.

    The initial 2×2 grid outputs are at 1024px. The 2x upscale brings you to 2048px — the minimum Shopify needs for zoom to look sharp on retina displays. Uploading without upscaling means blurry zoom, which kills trust at the decision moment.

  5. Clean the background in Adobe Firefly

    Adobe Firefly

    Upload your upscaled image to firefly.adobe.com → Generative Fill → select the background → hit Delete (leave empty for clean white, or type a scene description like 'marble countertop').

    Even with --iw 2, Midjourney occasionally places your product in a slightly off-brand scene. Firefly's background removal is the most accurate free tool for product edges — it handles glass, fabric, and fine detail better than remove.bg at this scale.

  6. Export PNG and upload to Shopify

    Shopify

    Download as PNG (preserves transparency if you removed the background). In Shopify Admin → Products → your product → drag images into the media zone. Set alt text: '[Product Name] — [key feature]'.

    PNG preserves transparent background for any color-shifted banner you place it on later. JPEG locks you into the current background color forever. The alt text is not optional — Google Images is a real ecommerce traffic source and Shopify's own SEO checklist flags missing alt text.