Product photography is the one genre where you can lock your settings and mostly leave them. The subject does not move, the light does not change, and the camera is on a tripod. Here is where we start.
The starting point
Manual mode. ISO at base, usually 100. Aperture between f/8 and f/11. Shutter speed set to whatever gives correct exposure, which on a tripod can be as slow as you like. Raw, not JPEG. White balance set from a grey card rather than automatic. Manual focus, or autofocus once then switched off.
That will produce a technically correct product image in almost any controlled setup. The rest of this explains why each one, because knowing why is what lets you break them sensibly.
Why manual mode
Not because manual is superior. Because it is repeatable. If the camera is choosing exposure, it will choose slightly differently for a white pack and a black pack, and your range comes out inconsistent. Lock it and every product in the range is exposed identically.
Why base ISO
ISO 100, or whatever your camera's base is. There is no reason to go higher. You are on a tripod with a still subject, so you can always solve a dark frame with a longer shutter speed instead. Higher ISO adds noise, and noise lives in exactly the fine label detail that a marketplace zoom magnifies.
If you find yourself raising ISO in a product shoot, the actual problem is not enough light.
Why f/8 to f/11, and the part people get wrong
Two things are fighting here.
Wider apertures like f/2.8 give a shallow depth of field, so the front of the product is sharp and the back is soft. That looks lovely on a single hero image and is wrong for a listing, where the buyer wants the whole product legible.
Very small apertures like f/22 give the deepest focus but introduce diffraction, which softens the entire image. This is the counterintuitive one: stopping down past a point makes things blurrier, not sharper.
Most lenses are sharpest around two to three stops down from wide open, which lands in the f/8 to f/11 region, and that is also usually enough depth of field for a product. It is the practical sweet spot.
If you need more depth than f/11 gives, for a large or deep product, the answer is focus stacking rather than f/22. Shoot several frames with focus at different distances and combine them.
Why raw
Because white balance and exposure are fully recoverable from a raw file and only partly recoverable from a JPEG. On a catalogue where colour accuracy decides whether a customer keeps or returns the product, that headroom matters. The file sizes are not a real problem.
Why not automatic white balance
Automatic white balance guesses based on the scene. A white background is a scene it guesses badly on, and it guesses differently when a red pack enters the frame than when a blue one does. Your range then drifts in colour.
Shoot one frame of a grey card at the start under the light you are using, set white balance from it in editing, sync that to the batch. One frame, and your colour is right for the whole shoot.
Focus
Autofocus once on the most important part of the product, usually the front face of the label, then switch autofocus off so it cannot hunt between frames. If your camera can focus at magnified live view, use it. On small products, focus errors of a few millimetres are visible at listing size.
Shutter speed and the flicker trap
On a tripod with continuous light, shutter speed is simply whatever balances the exposure. Half a second is fine.
One thing to watch. Cheap LED lights pulse with the mains, and at faster shutter speeds that shows up as banding across the frame or as inconsistent exposure between otherwise identical shots. If you see that, slow the shutter down or replace the lights. It is covered further in lighting kits.
Use a timer or a remote
Pressing the shutter shakes the camera. On a two second exposure that is a soft image. Use a two second timer at minimum. It costs nothing and eliminates a whole class of images that look almost sharp.
Settings are the easy part
Worth saying plainly. Correct settings get you a technically clean file. They do not get you a good product image. Lighting, angle and consistency across the range do that, and they are where the actual work is. If you want the whole thing handled, our studio shoots on a courier-in basis from Thane.