As on-line purchases is activated, customers' demand increases for the realistic and accurate digital information of a product design. In this paper, we propose a practical method that can generate a realistic 3D model of a real product using a 3D geometry obtained by a 3D scanner and its photographic images. In order to register images to the 3D geometry, the camera focal length, the CCD scanning aspect ratio and the transformation matrix between the camera coordinate and the 3D object coordinate must be determined. To perform this 2D-3D registration with consideration of computational complexity, a three-step method is applied, which consists of camera calibration, determination of a temporary optimum translation vector (TOTV) and nonlinear optimization for three rotational angles. A case study for a metallic coated industrial part, of which the colour appearance is hardly obtained by a 3D colour scanner has performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.