What is automated product photography and how can it change your business? – UKTN

Product photography has grown to one of the most important aspects of any ecommerce undertaking. To successfully present products in digital channels you need to ensure quality photos that are memorable, informative, and attractive. To a high degree it is them that will drive your sales. Product photography will play an important role in your business whether you make use of traditional studios or outsource to external photo studios. Is this traditional way to do it the definite solution or maybe just one of the ways? We aim to show you that automation has influenced this area severely and invites a new look at visual content production.

Throughout this article we will underline the challenges that ecommerce product photography brings. Then we will focus on what automation in product photography is and how it answers the needs of an ecommerce business.

They will revolve around time, volumes, costs, and consistency. These factors put together constitute a difficult mixture of counterbalancing solutions that until recently seemed impossible to resolve universally.

Quality images for yesterday would be the dream of any ecommerce entrepreneur, however one that might stretch the budget significantly. The usual way to try to put this dream to reality was an in-house traditional photo studio. Just as frequently, companies hired external studios by way of outsourcing. None of these methods answered the challenges to a truly satisfying level.

It is the advent of automation technology that introduced new possibilities to the game of product photography. Lets analyze the challenges and new automated solutions step by step.

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E-commerce product photography is unlike any other type of photography. It needs to produce quality visual content at a cost-restrained budget in the shortest time possible. Hence, a lot of contrary challenges.

With these challenges certainly not exhausting the whole list, a question arises whether there are ways to eliminate or minimize some of them. What would be the holy grail solution to find a compromise between cost-efficiency, high-quality, and time-to-market?

Research and practice have shown that a new approach, photography automation, provides the answer. And it has been widely implemented in e-commerce in recent years.

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To automate product photography a holistic approach has been taken, which integrates equipment, software and the e-shop. From the capture of images to the publication in the online store all is done within one orchestrated process.

The hardware core of an automation solution is a photo studio cabin with lighting, a turntable and up to several digital cameras.

The cabin is available in various sizes starting from a small one good for jewellery photography and going as far as one for live models, furniture, and bicycles.

A dedicated software is a part of the solution, as it allows to control the equipment, camera included. This means full adjustability of lighting, camera settings, and a system to post-process the photos. As a handy bonus, software often takes care of the publication of the session results straight to an online platform.

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Thanks to tight integration between hardware and software, photo automation makes it possible to reliably remove background from images. It is done on-the-fly, without human intervention.

The whole work is performed within a single system by a trained operator, with very basic photographic skills required. The process seamlessly integrates typically separate steps of content production:

The automated cutting-out of the product from the background comes as a key improvement to the traditional studio method and is highly effective. Everything happens within milliseconds thanks to a dedicated two-shots method and state-of-the-art algorithms.

This is where a lot of time is saved in post-production. Also, the capture process is much easier: the operator does not have to struggle with lighting the background and the object at the same time, which is a typically difficult task even for an experienced photographer. Instead, they can focus on the product itself, while the background can be replaced with pure white (RGB 255, 255, 255) in the publishing step. Still, the process does not fail to ensure the high quality of the product image.

Automated studios allow one-click publishing to most common e-commerce platforms through a system of integrations. The list includes WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento and Prestashop.

Traditional product photography brings advantages such as high flexibility, when it comes to studio setup, or, in the end, the highest quality of pictures, as they are all hand-created by a professional. This generates much higher costs and cannot guarantee the level of throughput required when there are thousands of products to photograph. Some businesses will relish the benefits, as the downsides will not yet be relevant for them especially small e-shops, where numbers do not play a critical role.

For all kinds of businesses, however, automation will bring a better, new approach to the old known challenges. Lets see how it deals with them.

Automation will come in handy, when web-ready images are needed in minutes rather than in days. The photos are post-processed already at the same workstation where the capture happened. There is no need for external post-production, which involves migration of files and third parties. The process consumes less time and the focus can be shifted to sales, as products do not occupy warehouses for so long. This translates directly to savings and shorter time-to-market more is sold with the same resources.

With automated solutions all is centered around the repeatability of shots. Lighting setup, shooting angles, camera and cabin settings can be saved as templates in the software. This minimizes the capability for human errors and creates consistency. Whats more, the know-how stays within the company in a digital form rather than in a photographers experience.

Until the arrival of automation technologies, rich content has been costly to achieve and years were spent referring to it as a goal rather than a reality. With automated studios, it is now practical to produce it. A 360 degree product spin is created in a time not much longer than several packshots. Within a few minutes from placing the product on the turntable, thanks to automated publishing, it can land straight in the e-shop. Dynamic videos and 3D content can be captured in minutes, which influences time-to-market again. Rich content will also bring customer satisfaction, higher conversion-rates and fewer returns.

From the moment automation technologies are set up properly, a business can reach image production volumes unavailable to traditional photography. Much less resources are in use: lower time consumption follows lower space requirements and less skills on the side of equipment operators. A clear long-term competitive advantage results.

Growth is a part of any successful business plan and e-commerce is no different here. More products will be sold over time, needing more product photography and this at the same level of quality and costs. Automated solutions are available for replication on a copy and paste basis. Another studio is bought, the setup is copied, a new operator trained and growth in scale can be enjoyed. Any new workstation can be introduced to various company locations and produce consistently at the same quality. Warehouses in New York and Shanghai? No problem for automated product photography.

In the wide market of e-commerce, there will be cases where photo automation will not turn out to be the optimal solution. Smaller businesses, very specific products, artistic requirements of the sector might all turn the scales to traditional photography. Automation will be of questionable benefit in the following circumstances:

The future of product photography and ecommerce businesses is closely tied to visual presentation. For us, it lies with automation technologies. A to Z automation solutions are getting cleverer, faster and more easy to implement.

Any growing e-shop will find itself on the way to consider the benefits of automation. With this technology, time can be saved, results get surprisingly consistent and the operation can be taken out of the hands of experienced professionals. Less third-party dependency and good process scalability can easily be a game-changer, when considering improvements to the old product photography process.

And this technology is for real, relying not upon a miracle but on hand-craft and engineering. Whats more it is not out of reach. A good example of an all-encompassing solution would be the Orbitvu Alphashot studio series. If you are curious about how this works in practice, check out this video.

It is the right way to change your business indeed.

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What is automated product photography and how can it change your business? - UKTN