How to Photograph Beverages, Bottles and Cans for E-commerce Listings (2026)

Drinks are some of the hardest products to photograph for an online listing. Glass and aluminium reflect every light and every wall in the room, curved labels bend away from the lens, clear liquids disappear against a white background, and dark liquids turn into flat black blobs. Yet the shopper scrolling a marketplace grid decides in a fraction of a second whether your bottle of cold brew, craft beer or sparkling juice looks premium or amateur.

This guide covers the practical techniques professional still-life photographers use for bottles and cans, scaled down for small sellers working with a table, two lights and a phone or entry-level camera. It also covers how to turn those shots into listing-ready images for Shopify, Amazon, Shopee, Lazada and the rest.

Why beverage photos are different

Most products are opaque and matte, so you light the front and you are done. Beverages combine three awkward surfaces in a single object:

• Reflective containers – glass and aluminium act like curved mirrors, picking up lights, windows, your camera and you.
• Transparent or translucent liquid – the colour of the drink only shows when light passes through it, not when it bounces off the front.
• Curved labels – text wraps around the bottle, so the edges of the label distort and fall off into shadow.

The fix for all three is the same principle: light from the sides and behind, not from the front, and control what the container can reflect.

Preparation: the step most sellers skip

Glass shows every fingerprint, dust speck and smudge at high resolution, and marketplaces with zoom will show buyers exactly what you missed.

1. Use your best stock. Pick the bottle or can with the straightest label, no dents and a correctly seated cap.
2. Clean with lint-free cloth and glass cleaner, then handle only with cotton or silk gloves. Silk sheds fewer fibres.
3. Check the fill level. Bottles in the same range should show identical fill heights, or your gallery will look inconsistent.
4. Blow off dust with a rocket blower immediately before each shot.
5. Remove price stickers and batch codes from the visible side where possible.

Lighting setups that work

The two-strip setup (for labels)

Place two tall softboxes or diffusion panels on either side of the bottle, slightly behind it, angled towards the product. This creates clean vertical highlight lines down both edges, which define the shape of the bottle, while leaving the centre of the label free of glare. A strip of white card in front, just out of frame, lifts the label without adding a hot spot.

Backlighting (for liquid colour)

To make a whisky glow amber or a juice look fresh, the light needs to pass through the liquid. Put a diffused light behind the bottle, pointing at the camera. For a white-background hero shot, a lit white panel behind the product does double duty: it gives you the pure white background marketplaces want and illuminates the liquid from behind.

A useful trick for bottles with opaque labels: tape a small piece of white card or foil, cut to the label shape, on the back of the bottle behind the liquid. It bounces light forward through the drink and stops the label from looking muddy.

Dark field vs bright field

Controlling glare and reflections

• Black flags: black card or foam board placed just out of frame absorbs stray light and gives the glass clean, dark edges.
• Tent the product: a white shooting tent or a ring of white card surrounds the bottle with even, featureless reflections instead of your room.
• Circular polariser: rotating a polarising filter reduces glare on labels and glass. It is less effective on metallic cans, which reflect light differently, so rely on flags and light placement for aluminium.
• Move the camera back and zoom in. A longer focal length (around 85–105mm equivalent) keeps you and the camera smaller in the reflection and stops the bottle looking bulbous. On a phone, use the 2x or 3x lens rather than the main wide lens.
• Dulling spray can tame hot spots on shiny caps and foils, but keep it off the label and never use it on a product you intend to sell.

Cans: special considerations

Aluminium cans are the least forgiving beverage container. The brushed metal and printed surface reflect in bands, and the design wraps a full 360 degrees.

• Use very large, soft light sources so the reflections become smooth gradients rather than hard stripes.
• Shoot the front panel square-on at the height of the can's midpoint so the top and base ellipses look natural.
• Show the back panel (ingredients, nutrition, allergens) as a separate gallery image. Buyers of food and drink increasingly check these before buying.
• Consider a label panorama: photograph the can at four to six rotation points and stitch or lay them out as a single infographic so shoppers can read the full wrap.

Condensation and the "ice cold" look

Real condensation evaporates in seconds under studio lights and runs in streaks. Photographers fake it with a mixture of roughly equal parts glycerine and water in a fine mist spray bottle. The glycerine makes droplets hold their shape for the entire shoot.

• Mask the label with paper or tape first if you want droplets only on the glass.
• Spray from a distance for fine mist, then add a few larger drops with a pipette for realism.
• Keep condensation for lifestyle and secondary images. Most marketplace main images should show the product clean and clearly legible.

Only apply glycerine to sample bottles you will not sell, and clean them thoroughly afterwards.

Camera settings

• ISO: as low as your camera allows (100 on most cameras) for clean, noise-free glass.
• Aperture: f/8 to f/11 to keep the whole bottle, from cap to base, in sharp focus.
• Shutter speed: whatever gives correct exposure; use a tripod so slow speeds do not matter.
• Focus point: the brand name on the label.
• White balance: set a custom white balance or shoot RAW. Drink colour accuracy matters: a juice that looks orange online and yellow in the hand generates complaints.

Shot list for a drinks listing

If you sell alcohol, check each marketplace's category rules before listing. Many platforms restrict or require approval for alcohol, and some prohibit images of people consuming it.

Sizing drinks images for each marketplace

Bottles are tall and narrow, which creates a problem on square-grid marketplaces: if you simply pad a portrait photo to 1:1, the bottle ends up occupying a thin strip in the middle and looks tiny in search results. A few practical rules:

• Crop tight vertically first, leaving only a small margin above the cap and below the base, then place on a square white canvas.
• Use 2000 x 2000 pixels as your master size. It exceeds Amazon's 1000px zoom threshold and downsizes cleanly for Shopee, Lazada, Qoo10 and Shopify.
• For single slim bottles, consider shooting a pair or the bottle with its gift box to fill a square frame more naturally, provided the listing sells both.
• Export as sRGB JPEG at around 80–85% quality to keep files under the 2MB to 3MB limits some marketplaces apply.

Resizing and padding a whole range of bottles by hand for five marketplaces takes hours. PixelPrep lets you upload a batch once and export correctly sized, white-padded versions for each platform in one go, so a new flavour launch does not mean a day in an image editor.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Front-lighting glass so the label is washed out by a hot spot.
• Your window, ceiling lights or tripod visible in the bottle's reflection.
• Dark liquids shot with no backlight, so they read as solid black.
• Crooked or bubbled labels on the sample used for the shoot.
• Inconsistent fill levels, angles or backgrounds across a product range.
• Main images cluttered with ice, fruit and glasses that the listing does not include.

Beverage photography checklist

1. Choose flawless stock; clean it and handle with gloves.
2. Set up two diffused side lights slightly behind the bottle.
3. Add a backlight or white panel to make the liquid glow.
4. Use black flags to shape edges and kill stray reflections.
5. Shoot on a tripod at ISO 100, f/8–f/11, with a longer focal length.
6. Capture front, back label, pack shot, poured serve, scale and lifestyle images.
7. Crop tight, place on a 2000 x 2000 white canvas, export sRGB JPEG.
8. Batch resize for each marketplace with PixelPrep and check every image at thumbnail size before publishing.

Get the lighting right once, note down the positions of every light and card, and you can reshoot every new flavour or seasonal release in minutes with a perfectly consistent look across your whole range.