Shoe Photography Workflow Automation: Style Guides & Stills

00:05 

Intro: How Companies Use PhotoRobot

00:30

Footwear Photography Requirements

01:00

Following a Style Guide

01:50

Case 1300 Photography Turntable Overview

02:08

Case 1300 with Robot Arm Expansion

02:32

Using Two Workspaces Simultaneously

03:08

Capturing Images the Style Guide Requires

03:28

Sorting Products to Shelves & Barcodes

03:35

Capture & Post-Processing Presets

03:50

Scan Barcode to Start Turntable

04:30

Scan to Start Second Workstation

04:52

Outro: Manual vs Automated Photography

00:05 PhotoRobot systems are only useful for those who want to do 360° presentations of their products, right? Well, actually, in our opinion, nothing could be further from the truth. You might be surprised that about half of our customers  don't even do 360's at all. 

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00:20 But why would you even want to have a turntable based automated studio if all you're ever going to do is a series of stills for each product? That's exactly what this video will be about. 

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00:30 Let's use shoes as an example. Perhaps you run an e-commerce business that specializes in footwear, or maybe you have a company that manufactures shoes. One way or another, you're going to need a set of images that shows off how good the shoes look, what kind of material they're made of, or what kind of sole they have. 

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00:46 Imagery is what sells the product. And today, this is truer than ever. However, it will do no good if each set of images looks different. Inconsistency will make you look unprofessional. In other words, you need a style guide, a set of instructions that describe how the images should look.

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01:05 It is not humanly possible to do this manually, fast, and exactly the same each and every time. This is where PhotoRobot comes in. Perhaps the most important part of a style guide is information about the angles from which the items should be photographed. 

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01:19 Among other things, this is what you need to automate if you want to achieve consistency and high productivity. The two important angles that should be in every style guide are: the angle of rotation and something we call the angle of swing. 

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01:34 Let us imagine that the style guide requires eight angles, which include views from the front and the sides, as well as some high angles. Finally, you want to show the customer the sole of the shoe. In other words, the view directly from the bottom. 

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01:48 Of course, you could do this on a single workspace, and the PhotoRobot _FRAME would be the perfect candidate for this. But today, we will demonstrate the workflow on our _CASE 1300. It is based around a 1300 mm glass turntable that makes it possible to automatically remove not only the background but also the shadow beneath the shoe.

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02:08 It can be expanded with our ROBOTIC_ARM v8, which takes care of the swing angle and can go all the way to 90 degrees. But how will you photograph the bottom of the shoe? Well, you have  to take it off the turntable, flip it upside down, place it on a jig and then put it back on. Then, you have to wait for the camera to travel to 90° and take the image. All of this can slow down the work unnecessarily. 

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02:33 And for that reason, we believe that a separate workspace with a second camera mounted at the top is in order - as long as you have enough space for it.

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02:42 As you can see, not every PhotoRobot has to be turntable-based. This is our flat-lay table, which doesn't rotate the product, but it still has the advantage of a backlit, transparent surface. In this setup, there is a second camera mounted at the top. This is what we are going to use for the top view images of the jig, which holds the shoe in an upside-down position. 

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03:02 While this is happening, the next shoe can be placed on the _CASE 1300, speeding up the workflow even more. 

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03:08 Our photographer Eric will now show you how fast you can get all the images that the style guide requires. First, he's going to import a list of the products to be photographed. This will typically include barcodes. And if you already have presets created for different kinds of footwear, you can begin assigning them to individual items. You can even sort your products on shelves and assign unique barcodes to each of them, along with a dedicated preset. 

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03:34 As you may remember from our other videos, such presets can control not only the angles but also camera settings, lighting, as well as post-processing and other parameters. Eric will now scan the barcode of the shoe and place the product on the turntable of the _CASE 1300. 

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03:51 Because we have already assigned a preset, it is enough to scan the start barcode and everything else happens automatically. 

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04:30 But how about the second workspace? Do you have to change any settings in the software? That sounds like too much work, so we made it possible to simply scan the barcode of a macro that will switch to the second workspace, and the required images are taken without the operator having to touch the computer or the camera. 

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04:52 And there we have it. The shoe took just slightly over one minute to photograph using two workspaces. In our opinion, it doesn't get much easier than this. 

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05:01 Imagine you would have to do all of them manually. It would take a long time and there will be inconsistencies. But maybe you don't have to imagine it because you are living it. You know how much hassle manual photography is. 

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05:13 Don't you want to take the speed, quality and consistency of your photography workflow to a whole new level? If so, what are you waiting for? Contact PhotoRobot right now.