Ceramic artists who sell painted tiles online hit the same wall every time. The tiles look gorgeous in person and terrible in a scan. Glare on the glaze, a slightly crooked border, dust in the corners, and a color cast from the room lights. Cleaning them up one by one in an editor is slow, and a careless conversion can flatten the very brushwork that makes the tile worth buying. A patient AI image pipeline fixes most of this, if you prepare the scan properly first.
Shoot Straight and Even
Before any processing, get a clean capture. Lay the tile flat, shoot straight down from directly above, and use two diffused lights at 45 degrees from the sides. This kills the hot spot that a single overhead lamp creates on glazed surfaces. If you only have one light, bounce it off a white foam board. A scan with glare baked in is the one problem no conversion can undo.
Fix the Color Cast Before Style Work
Painted tiles under household bulbs come out orange; under LEDs they go cold and blue. Correct white balance in your capture or in a basic editor first. Starting a conversion on a yellow-tinted image means every adjustment fights that tint and the final colors drift. Get the tile looking neutral, then move on.
Separate Cleanup from Restyling
These are two different jobs and mixing them ruins both. Cleanup means removing dust, straightening a slightly crooked edge, and evening out the background — light, surgical changes. Restyling means changing the visual treatment, and that is what you want to avoid here. When you run a conversion, keep the strength low. You want the tool to nudge clarity and color accuracy, not repaint the tile. If the brush strokes start looking like a digital filter, back the strength off until they read as real paint again.
Crop and Pad Consistently
A catalog looks professional when every tile sits on the same background with the same amount of breathing room. Pick one neutral backdrop, one crop ratio, and one padding value, then apply it to the whole batch. Consistency across a grid does more for perceived quality than any single hero image. It also makes re-shooting a replacement later far easier, because you already know the exact frames to match.
Check the Edges Last
Style conversions sometimes blur tile edges or leave a faint halo where the object meets the background. Zoom to one hundred percent on each corner before you upload. A tiny halo is invisible on your laptop and glaring on a phone screen where most buyers browse. If you see one, a short re-run with a tighter crop usually clears it.
Done right, the whole flow is twenty minutes per batch of tiles and the results hold up next to studio photos. Prep the capture, split cleanup from restyling, keep the frames uniform, and let the image conversion tool do the boring part.