New technology product shot solution?

Garry Edwards

Garry Edwards

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Garry Edwards
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This is an impressive bit of technology, assuming that it works as claimed. One of my clients has seen a demo and says that it's brilliant, with the caveat that it's only suitable for web-sized images.

But at £47K, it isn't cheap.
 
It looks like it's an ovesized iPhone and it's controlled by an iPad. It will appeal to the "right people" and cost will not be an issue ;)
 
A company outsourcing around 1500 images a year can expect to pay in the region of £30 per shot, or a thrifty £2 per shot using in-house Styleshoots®.
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Which is 42K.

Almost literally a no-brainer.
 
It's also very limited in what it can do, and I can buy a pro camera and 4 lights for a lot less than 47K.
 
swanseamale47 said:
It's also very limited in what it can do, and I can buy a pro camera and 4 lights for a lot less than 47K.
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Yes.

But a photographer costs more.

I'm actually surprised there isn't a conveyor belt attachment on here. Load of clothes on a long belt, press a button and shoot and cut out 50 pieces. Operators can load second belt while the first is emptying.
 
So it is a camera mounted above a big lightbox with some additional lighting.....surely this is pretty easy to re-create, with the controlled lighting I am amazed you can't do it in one shot too with all the lights on in one shot with some carefully balancing.
 
From what I can see,the hardware is just flat, bland, fixed copy lighting, which will produce 'technical' shots totally devoid of shadow - which (unfortunately) is what a lot of people want.

The clever bit seems to be the software, which strips out the white background without losing edge definition.

It seems to be a perfect solution for high volume product shots where creativity isn't perceived to be important.
 
I often wondered how catalogue images are gathered and processed etc. Especially when there could be 1000s...
 
The simplist solution is always the best :), if any monkey can do it the better it is for the company £47k seems decent enough Investment to me :) I am a little suprised its not more enclosed though.
 
JonathanRyan said:
I'm gonna take a wild guess that you've never tried that....
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haha good guess :) but have done some product stuff (not with a white background) and following Edinburgh Garys attempt to get white background studio shots (of people) with no post processing. I think he finally managed this eventually and surely the same can be applied?

But as Garry said above the software is probably the very clever bit of this, but again I would be surprised if a well done Photoshop action would not be able to do similar.

I could be completely wrong, it just doesn't strike me as anything groundbreaking.
 
Jimmy_Lemon said:
I would be surprised if a well done Photoshop action would not be able to do similar
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You talk like an Art Director ;)

Yes, of course it can be done. Within certain parameters, to a certain quality. But the skills and time to do that reliably and consistently are more expensive that paying somebody in India to cut stuff out in PS. Apparently if you do 1,500 images a year it will cost £30 each all up.

In fact as far as I understand the rig it is using a custom algorithm (which may or mat not be a posh term for PS action) to subtract one image from another with a high degree of accuracy. That's not particularly new but it's automated and slick.

The key bit is that it looks like it would take less than 15 mins training to get somebody up to speed on this. And that's what's going to save you the real money. Photographer with years of experience at £x or intern at £0 (gee thanks Mr Cameron).

As for it being "dull" lighting - yeah, curse these shoppers that want to see what stuff looks like before they buy it....
 
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surely, for 99% of the time, if the light intensity underneath is right, and with the 4 lights knocking out the shadows, the need for PP is totally minimal

I did a shoot like this a week or so ago for a large batch of baby teeshirts by laying them on a underlit (flash) sheet of white pearl perspex, and lighting them normally from above (flash) . after the first one was set up, and the powers were set right, there was absoloutly no PP besides cropping
 
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