Replace product photo backgrounds in Leonardo AI for a consistent store look
Forty products photographed in forty different rooms. The fix that made the store look like a brand: consistent generated backgrounds, batch by category, with one honest caveat about reflections.
An online store lives or dies on looking intentional, and nothing screams hobbyist like product photos shot in four different kitchens. Leonardo AI's canvas and img2img tools can put every product into the same clean scene. The workflow matters more than the model — done in order, it takes an afternoon for a forty-product catalog and looks like a studio shot it.
The first pass is extraction. Every product needs a clean cutout from its original photo — Leonardo's canvas background removal handles most products, but soft shadows and translucent packaging need manual touch-up. Do this once, properly, per product. Save every cutout as a PNG with transparency; this file becomes your master asset and everything else builds on it.
Then build the scene, not the product. Generate one background per product category — 'marble kitchen counter, soft window light from the left, shallow depth of field' — and approve it as the category's look. The consistency comes from reusing that exact scene: same prompt with fixed seed where possible, same lighting direction, same surface. Your store page becomes a grid of products sharing one world, which reads as brand instead of collage.
Compositing is where Leonardo's canvas earns its keep: place the cutout on the generated scene, and fix the two things that break the illusion. Scale — products shot close-up look giant on a wide counter; match them to a believable size relative to the scene's depth of field. And shadows — add a soft contact shadow under the product, because a floating object is the number one tell of a composited photo. Ten minutes per product, faster by the tenth.
The honest caveat: reflective products — bottles, cosmetics, anything glass or glossy — are the weak spot. The original reflection won't match the new environment, and viewers feel the wrongness before they can name it. For those, either keep the original photo as the hero image and use the composited version in grids, or shoot reflections on a plain seamless background first. For everything else in the catalog — fabric, food, tools, packaging — the batch workflow turns a photo-dump store into one that looks like it hired someone.