Most apparel brands in Montreal walk into a shoot day with a Pinterest board and a hope. The Pinterest board is fine. The hope is the problem. A multi-channel program (DTC site, wholesale line sheet, retail print, lookbook PDF, paid social) wants different crops, different colour pipelines, and different file specs from a single garment. If those are not planned before the steamer is plugged in, you re-shoot. Re-shoots double the cost and push the launch.

This is a working scope guide for apparel product photography Montreal brand operations leads use when they are quoting a real season. It assumes you have shot garments before and now need to make the program rigorous across more than one channel.

Why apparel photography is harder than catalogue product photography

A bottle of skincare sits where you put it. A jacket does not. Fabric drapes, wrinkles relax, sleeves twist, fit changes between sizes, dye lots wander, hardware reflects, and the shape of a garment on a person is not the shape of the same garment lying on a table or pinned to a mannequin. Every one of those variables is a decision someone has to make on set, or in post, expensively.

The second compounding factor is volume. A fashion drop is often forty to two hundred SKUs in a single shoot block. Catalogue work for a furniture brand might be twenty hero shots in a week. Apparel wants ten times the throughput at the same colour fidelity. That changes how you light, how you cull, how you back up, and how you brief the retoucher.

Three image types every Montreal fashion brand needs (ghost mannequin, flat lay, on-model)

For a complete program, every SKU usually needs three treatments.

Ghost mannequin for the PDP hero. Clean, hollow garment shape, no human face to age the picture, easy to swap across colourways. This is the workhorse e-commerce shot and the one wholesale buyers look at first on a line sheet. We cover the technique in detail in our notes on how we build invisible mannequin composites for hangtag and PDP work.

Flat lay for size comparison, fabric texture close-ups, and accessory pairing. Flat lays photograph fast and edit fast, which is why they dominate Instagram carousels and email hero blocks. They are weak for fit communication, which is why they cannot stand alone.

On-model for fit, scale, and emotional register. Hire fit models who match your sample size. A women’s sample 4 on a sample 8 model communicates the wrong story to the customer and produces returns. For brand-campaign frames where the model carries the picture rather than the garment, see the on-set storytelling approach we use on campaign days.

Fabric-faithful colour: ICC profiles, soft proof, and dye-lot variance

Colour is where apparel programs lose customer trust. A navy hoodie that ships purple is a return ticket. The fix is boring discipline at three stages.

On set. Shoot a colour checker frame at the start of every lighting setup and again whenever a bulb is moved or a window opens. Keep a dye-lot reference swatch from production in the frame for the first capture of each new garment, then remove it for the hero. Without the swatch, the retoucher has nothing to anchor against six weeks later.

In post. Profile your monitor monthly with a hardware calibrator, edit on a known display, and soft-proof to the destination output before approving. Our working notes on ICC profile management and soft-proofing for catalogue jobs cover the specific profiles we ship for Shopify, Faire, and offset print.

At handoff. Embed the colour profile in every file. Stripping the profile because the website “will convert it” is how brand reds become brand pinks on half your customers’ phones.

Crop standards across web, wholesale spec sheets, and retail print

One shoot, several crops. Plan them before the shutter clicks or you crop into a model’s eye in post.

For the DTC site, the PDP hero is typically a 4:5 portrait, 2000 px on the long edge, ghost mannequin centred with even headroom and footroom. Mobile is the primary surface (about seventy percent of traffic) so the garment must read at 400 px tall.

For wholesale, Faire and NuOrder line sheets want square 1:1 at 1200 px with the garment isolated on pure white (#FFFFFF, not eggshell). Buyers reject mixed-background line sheets at the door.

For retail print, including lookbooks, in-store signage, and trade-show banners, capture at full sensor resolution and deliver at the destination pixel count. A 24 by 36 in-store sign at 200 dpi wants 4800 by 7200 px. Crop into a 2000 px web file and you have a blurry print.

File deliverables by channel: sRGB JPG for web, CMYK TIFF for print, PDF spec sheets for wholesale

Each channel wants a different file. Mixing them is the most common reason a launch slips.

Web. sRGB JPG, quality 80, profile embedded, long edge 2000 px for PDP hero and 1200 px for grid thumbs. WebP is fine if your CDN serves it, but always keep the JPG master.

Wholesale line sheets. PDF compiled from 1:1 square JPGs at 1200 px, with garment name, SKU, wholesale price, MSRP, and size run on the page. Faire is finicky about file weight; keep each PDF under 10 MB.

Retail print. CMYK TIFF, 300 dpi, US Web Coated SWOP v2 or your printer’s profile, layers flattened, no transparency. Send a JPG soft-proof alongside so the print buyer can confirm intent on screen.

Paid social. sRGB JPG cropped to 1:1, 4:5, and 9:16 from the same hero, three crops per garment minimum. Hand the retoucher a crop guide on day one so they batch instead of one-off.

Production planning before the shoot: garment prep, steaming, lint roll, model fittings

Half of a good apparel shoot happens before the camera comes out.

Steam every garment the day before, hang it on a wide cedar hanger, and store it in a clean wardrobe room. A steamer on set is for touch-ups, not for working through eighty units from a freight box. Black knits attract lint; a roller and a vacuum table near set save twenty minutes per garment in retouching.

Run model fittings the morning of the shoot, not at call time. Pin to true sample size, photograph the pinned fit on a test frame, and confirm with the brand lead before you start the production run. If your model’s sample size drifted in the last month, you find out in the fitting and not on file delivery.

Build a SKU run sheet that orders garments by colour family and silhouette. Shooting all the blacks in one block, then all the creams, then all the prints keeps your white balance honest and reduces the lighting tweaks between frames.

Budgets and timelines for Montreal fashion brand apparel shoots in 2026

Real numbers, not aspirational ones. A focused ghost-mannequin shoot of forty SKUs runs roughly one shoot day plus three retouching days, and lands in the $3,500 to $5,500 range depending on retouching depth and rush. Add on-model frames with one fit model and you are at two shoot days and $6,500 to $9,500. A full multi-channel program (ghost mannequin plus on-model plus campaign lifestyle) across one hundred SKUs typically runs five shoot days and a two-week retouching window, billed between $14,000 and $22,000.

Quebec brands shooting for a fall launch should book studio time in June or early July; the September catalogue rush books out fast. For holiday drops, hold a tentative slot by mid-August. Lead time on retouching also lengthens in Q4, so brands that want a December email push should send the final approved RAW selection by the second week of October.

What to send in a brief so quoting is fast

A clean brief turns a week of back-and-forth into a two-day quote. Send these in one email.

SKU list with garment name, colour, sample size, and which of the three image types each SKU needs. Reference shots from your own past seasons or from brands whose visual register you share, not aspirational pulls from labels with ten times your budget. A delivery schedule with channel breakdowns: how many for the site by which date, how many for wholesale by which date, how many for paid social. Brand guidelines for colour, background, and crop. Sample garments couriered in advance so the studio can pre-steam and tag before the shoot day.

Brand operations leads who run a tight brief get tight quotes back. The shoot day then runs on its run sheet and the launch holds its date. If you are scoping a season and want a quote that reflects the channels you actually publish to, the studio enquiry form takes the brief above and a target launch date.