Product and Apparel Colorways

Expanding Product Variations

Colorways are one of the most powerful tools in modern product visualization. With a single high-quality product photo, brands can generate every color variation needed for e-commerce, retail, and marketing. This approach dramatically reduces production and photography costs, speeds up time-to-market, and allows teams to build complete product libraries long before all physical samples exist.

Beyond e-commerce, colorways are essential for market research, product testing, sales forecasting, and pre-launch campaigns. Brands can evaluate consumer interest, secure early sales, and present full collections to retailers all without manufacturing every SKU.

But precision matters.

The biggest risk with colorways is inaccurate color reproduction. When color isn’t matched correctly, products can look misleading or defective, ultimately increasing returns, damaging customer trust, and impacting your bottom line. High-quality, pixel-accurate retouching is critical to ensure every shade, texture, and material is represented exactly as intended.

In a perfect world (and with an unlimited budget), every product variation would be photographed individually. But today’s fast-paced production cycles and marketing demands make that unrealistic. Colorways offer a smarter, more efficient solution - saving time, reducing costs, and maximizing the impact of every asset you produce. The key to maintaining uncompromising quality is partnering with expert retouchers who know how to translate color with precision and bring each variation to life authentically.

At OMS Photography in Cincinnati, OH our retouching team brings decades of specialized experience - including deep backgrounds in print production, prepress, and commercial color management. Their mastery of color accuracy ensures that every digital and print application, from e-commerce and catalogs to billboards, packaging, and retail displays, looks consistent, intentional, and true to the physical product.

With seasoned professionals behind the scenes, your product imagery becomes a powerful sales tool - delivering accuracy you can trust and visuals that drive results.

Meeting the Growing Demand

In today’s e-commerce landscape, the demand for colorways has never been higher. With a single high-quality product photo, brands can create 10, 20, or even hundreds of color variations, providing online storefronts with complete product assortments without the cost or time required to photograph every SKU. But the value of colorways extends far beyond standard product listings.

One of the most impactful uses of colorways is prototyping and market research. Whether you're reviving a past garment style or developing an entirely new collection, simply send your updated colors, patterns, or design concepts to a skilled retouching team. In return, you’ll receive an expansive library of realistic visual options - perfect for reviewing, refining, and presenting internally or externally. This approach is also ideal for updating seasonal collections, capsule drops, and limited-edition designs.

With these visuals in hand, many companies conduct consumer testing, guide merchandising decisions, or build advanced sales catalogs that allow retailers to choose styles before production even begins. While digital mock-ups can serve as a placeholder, leveraging real photography produces a far more accurate and convincing representation - giving buyers greater confidence and helping brands secure earlier commitments.

Ultimately, colorways empower teams to predict demand, reduce production risk, and launch products more strategically - leading to stronger sell-through, smarter inventory planning, and more successful outcomes overall.

How Colorways Happen

Start by reducing costs and streamlining your workflow, all you need to send is one physical sample of each clothing item. For optimal accuracy, we recommend starting with a mid-tone color such as gray, but our team is highly skilled at more complex transformations as well (we’ve even converted a black glove to true, bright white with perfect realism). Along with your sample, simply provide your desired colorways, patterns, and any placement notes - right down to specifics like stitching, trim, or fabric sections.

From there, our professional photographers will capture your product in the exact angles, lighting, and styling needed. Those images move directly to our retouching team, where the real magic happens. You’ll receive multiple rounds of digital proofs so you can review, refine, and approve the final variations with confidence. Once approved, we’ll deliver polished files in whatever formats you need - fully ready for e-commerce, marketing, or internal use.

If your project includes print applications, just let us know. Our team will prepare precise CMYK-optimized files for your printer to ensure the highest level of color accuracy and consistency across catalogs, packaging, signage, and other printed materials.

Work with the OMS Post Production Team 

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