Guide

How to photograph fabric so the AI gets the garment right

Almost every disappointing generation traces back to the reference photo, not the model. Ten minutes of care here changes the output more than any setting in any tool.

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Written by the Vastram Studio teamPublished 4 August 20266 min read

What makes a good fabric reference photo?

A good reference is flat, sharp, evenly lit by indirect daylight, shot straight down, filled with fabric, and unedited. It shows at least two full repeats of the motif and, if the textile has one, a border along an edge.

Everything the system knows about your cloth — its colour, its texture, how large the motifs are, which way they run, where the border sits — comes from that single image. Detail your photograph didn’t capture cannot appear in the generated garment.

Method

Five steps, about two minutes per fabric

Set the spot up once and work through a whole range without re-thinking it.

Find indirect daylight

Work next to a window with daylight but no direct sun on the cloth. Turn off overhead tube lights — mixed colour temperatures shift the fabric's colour in ways that carry into the generated garment.

Lay the cloth flat and smooth

Spread it on a plain, matte surface. Smooth out fold creases, especially the hard centre crease on newly folded stock. A crease reads as a shadow and can be reproduced as one.

Include a border along one edge

If the textile has a woven or printed border, frame so it's visible along one edge of the shot. Border placement on the generated garment is derived from where it sits on your reference.

Shoot straight down, filling the frame

Hold the phone parallel to the cloth, not at an angle, and fill most of the frame with fabric. An angled shot distorts motif scale, and motif scale is what makes the garment believable.

Check sharpness before you upload

Zoom into the photo on your phone. If individual threads or print edges are soft, reshoot — no amount of generation recovers detail the photograph didn't capture.

What goes wrong

Six mistakes, and what each one does to the output

Ordered roughly by how often they cause a reshoot.

Yellow tube light: Shifts the entire fabric warm. The generated garment inherits the shift, and a buyer receives a cloth that doesn't match what they approved. The single most common colour problem.
Direct sun or flash on sheen: Blows highlights to pure white on silk, satin and zari. Blown areas contain no data, so the generated garment loses exactly the detail that justifies the price.
Shooting at an angle: Compresses the motif toward the far edge, so the system reads an inconsistent motif scale and the print on the finished garment looks subtly wrong.
Folded or creased cloth: Hard creases read as shadows or as part of the weave. A centre crease down newly folded stock can end up reproduced as a seam or a stripe.
Border cropped out: If the border isn't in the reference, the generator has nothing to place at the hem, placket or pallu — the finishing that makes the garment look finished.
Filters and auto-enhance: Saturation and contrast boosts are re-interpreted as properties of the cloth. Whatever your phone did to make the photo look nice on screen becomes part of the fabric.

By material

Adjustments for specific fabrics

The base method works for most cloth. These are the cases where it needs modifying.

Silk, satin and other sheen fabrics. Diffuse the light — a thin white cloth over the window, or shade from direct sun. Let the sheen show as a soft gradient rather than a hard highlight; that gradient is what tells the system the fabric is lustrous.
Zari and metallic work. Same diffusion, plus a slight tilt so reflections fall outside the frame. Shoot a second closer frame of the worked section if the detail is the selling point.
Sheer georgette and chiffon. Place a plain white surface underneath. Shooting sheer fabric over a patterned surface mixes the two patterns into the reference.
Dark and black cloth. Overexpose very slightly. Phone cameras underexpose dark fabric, which crushes the texture to a flat black and loses the weave entirely.
Heavy textured handloom. Let a little raking light across the surface reveal texture — this is the one case where perfectly flat lighting loses information rather than preserving it.
Large-motif prints. Back off far enough to include two full repeats. A crop of a single motif leaves the scale ambiguous.

Technical

File requirements

Deliberately loose — a modern phone photo comfortably clears all of it.

Formats: JPEG, JPG, PNG, WEBP
Maximum size: 10 MB per image.
Resolution: Higher is better, within the size limit. Don't downscale before uploading — resolution is what preserves weave and print edges.
Sharpness check: Uploads are automatically scored for sharpness and flagged if they're too soft to generate from reliably, so a bad reference is caught before it costs a credit.

The two-minute rule

Reshooting a fabric takes about two minutes. Regenerating around a bad reference takes several attempts and never fully works. If you’re unsure whether a photo is good enough, it isn’t — reshoot.

Once you have a good reference, what happens to it next is covered in fabric to model, and the construction rules for each garment are on the garment pages.

Questions

Fabric photography questions

Can I use a scan instead of a photograph?

A flatbed scan gives excellent sharpness and even light, which is genuinely useful for flat prints. Its weakness is that it flattens texture and sheen — a scan of silk looks like a scan of paper. For fabrics where the surface matters, a well-lit photograph carries more information.

What about shiny fabrics — silk, satin, zari?

Direct light on a reflective surface produces specular highlights that blow out to pure white, and blown-out areas contain no information to reproduce. Move to indirect light, or diffuse the light with a thin white cloth. Angling the fabric slightly so highlights fall outside the frame also works.

Should I edit or filter the photo first?

No. Filters, auto-enhance and saturation boosts all change the colour the system reads as your fabric's colour. The one edit worth making is cropping to the fabric, which just removes distraction.

How much fabric should be in frame?

Enough to show at least two full repeats of the motif, so the pattern's scale and spacing are unambiguous. For a large-motif print that might be a metre; for a fine all-over print, much less.

Does a photo of the stitched garment work better than the fabric?

Often, yes — a flat-lay of the finished garment already shows how the print was placed, which removes a decision the system would otherwise make. Both work. What matters either way is that the pattern is readable and the light is neutral.