Question: What colors should I use for my branding photo session?

Answer: Your branding photoshoot color palette should be based on your business’ brand!

Before your Branding Photoshoot, there are Decisions to make!

When you schedule a branding photoshoot in Minneapolis – or wherever you’re located – there are some decisions to make at the front of the process. Things like whether your photographer will come to you, or whether you’ll go to them. Or the classic “should I bring props??” that crops up in every business owner’s mind before a professional photo session. (The answer to that one, by the way, is “It depends!”)

But one of the biggest things you’ll need to solidify before you meet your photographer, no matter where your session will be, is what colors you’re going to lean into for the session. For brand sessions, color is EVERYTHING. It helps convey the tone, shapes the mood – and will make or break whether your images look natural online and in your business’ presence overall. Which brings us to today’s topic – what do you do if you’re unsure about the color palette to use for your branding photo session??

If you have a Style Guide, you’re ahead of the game!

Let’s start things off easy. If you have a style guide – like the kind from a branding pro you’ve worked with to create the branding for your business – then you’re ahead of the game, and honestly? You should have everything you need. Your style guide should walk you through the palette for your business, the high notes you need to hit as far as tone in your content, along with things like patterns or textures that line up with your brand standards.

You might even have pages that specifically go over wardrobe selection for branding photography, and in that case, you’ve literally got everything you need, right there, on a silver platter. So open up your style guide, and head to your closet!!

If you don’t, you still don’t have to reinvent the wheel –

However… if you read the last section and started kind of internally panicking because you don’t have a style guide, you’ve never worked with a branding strategist, and you made your logo yourself on Canva… DON’T FREAK OUT. You’ve still got options, and they’re not shelling out thousands to have someone create a professional brand suite for you.

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel before booking your session – or before a session you already have in the calendar with a branding photographer (or me! Hi, Jess here, GREAT to meet you!). There are a few simple steps you can start with to weed down to a color palette that’ll work for your session, and from there, you’ll land on clothing options (or a shopping list) in no time!!

Consider your Business’ Branding

Just because you’ve not worked with a branding professional, and/or the person you worked with didn’t give you a style guide, doesn’t mean you don’t have a brand! Every business has a brand – there’s just a super wide spectrum of consistency, intentionality, and efficacy. Which is just a bunch of big words to say “every business has a brand, but some businesses are more serious about it than others.”

So when you’re choosing the colors to lean into in your branding photo session – think about your brand. AKA, the customer-facing things you post for your business at the moment. What are you using that works well? Is there a palette in there that you can pick and choose from that lines up with your customers’ expectations and preferences? If you sell products, do those have a palette associated with them that you can use as a baseline? Asking yourself these questions can start weeding things down, without starting with a blank canvas. Because starting from something is always better than starting from nothing!!

Think about Tone

When you’re looking at the branding materials you’re already using to promote your business, think specifically about the tone of that content. So like, ask yourself: Is this bright and energetic, or moody and deep? Do I aim for vibrant color use, or muted ones? What does this make my customers feel?

The colors you choose for your branding photoshoot will go a long way to communicate tone when you start using your new photos online and in the real world, so making sure you think about tone before you select your final palette for the session is a super important step. It’ll keep you consistent, and as we all know, consistency sells!

List where your content will go!

Finally, if you’re choosing the color palette to use for your branding photo session without a style guide to lean back on, I suggest you literally sit down and list the places you’re going to use the images once you have your final gallery. Why? AUDIENCE. The audiences you have on different platforms might be slightly different, and have slightly different things that appeal to them, that you can wrap into one targeted session with a professional photographer. For example, if you’re going to use your images for collages that go on TikTok, you might want to emphasize different things than you would if your upcoming session is specifically for Instagram posting.

Different platforms serve different audiences – and that’s okay. And you might not be on all of them, which is okay too! On top of all that… you might need your professional branding photo session to stretch for all of the platforms you DO use, whether that’s Facebook & Instagram or TikTok & Pinterest – and that’s okay too. At the end of the day it’s ALL okay, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to any of these questions.

But thinking about where you’re going to use your photos might help get your brain moving on the palette you want to focus on for your photo session, and that’s what matters in this convo!!

Still need help deciding?

If you’ve gotten to the end of this and you’re still feeling uncertain about the color palette you want to use for your branding photo session… it might be time for us to talk. I absolutely love putting together unique, audience targeted branding sessions, that have attitude, and will stand out against your competition. So if that sounds like what you need, let’s talk! You don’t have to have an organized brand suite to start, you just need an idea, and some time. We’ll work out all the rest! Because your business – no matter what stage you’re at – deserves photos that will help it grow!

Bonus: Take a look at just a few results that my AMAZING team of collaborators and me have gotten for our social media management clients!