Quite often a photographer will provide you with current bottles shots and the images are rectangular in size. That is common, a wine bottle is tall and narrow, so the file size might be 900 wide by 3000 high. That leaves you with an image that looks like this...
Just as you see here, that is a long scroll and will not display well on a website in an open cart or allocation model. Therefore, what you need is an image that has square dimensions, 600 wide by 600 high, like this...
That extra buffer or open space on each side of the bottle will balance it out on the open cart or allocation page of your website. To make this conversion you should use a photo editing program, so all the settings needed are in place.
Adobe Photoshop is a common photo editing tool, yet comes with a cost. Therefore, I am going use GIMP - Gnu Image Manipulation Program. It was first launched in 1995, its a stable program, and you can download it for free on MAC or PC.
Just search online for "gimp photo editor"
Open the Gimp program. Drag and drop your rectangular image into the window and you will see this...
First, crop the empty space off the bottom and top of the bottle. Choose the "Selector" tool which in the current version of Gimp is the second option in the upper left...
Drag that selector tool to border the image so you are just at the edge of the bottom and top of the bottle...
In the Image menu, the one to choose is "Crop to Selection"...
That will remove the extra space at the top and bottom of the bottle...
For reference, compare that to the first image in this article. That extra space at the top and bottom of the bottle are gone now.
Next, the current file on my screen is taller than it is wide. If you want to get this to a 600x600 image file size, you need to resize the height of the image to 600.
Click the Image menu and choose Scale Image...
Set the Height cell to 600 and let the Width cell reset to match the constraints automatically. In the scenario below, the image went from 900x3000, to 180x600, then click the Scale button...
After that adjustment, the image may get really small on the screen. If so, click the View menu, Zoom option, and select "Fit Image in Window" and that will bring it back to a more workable view...
So now you have your image prepped. But you have to move that image to a 600x600 file size. Click the File menu and New, or Command+N on a Mac. A window will appear to Create a New Image and in that window you will need to complete three steps.
>Set the Width to 600 and Height to 600.
>Click the "+ Advanced Options" icon.
>For the "Fill with:" drop down, select "Transparency"
After clicking the OK button in that window, you will end up with a blank canvas that is Square and two tabs at the top of the window...
Click back over to the tab where your modified bottle shot lives. Using the command keys you want to "Select All" which on a Mac is Command+A, then "Copy" which is Command+C. Then click over to the tab where your blank Square canvas lives, and "Paste" which is Command+V. That will produce this, that same bottle shot in a Square image file...
Save this new image. Click the File menu, select "Export As" and in the file name, make sure you are saving it as a PNG.
Done!
Load that image file into your product, save it, wait 5 minutes for the production servers of the website to refresh and visit your open cart page or Test Group allocation to see the results.