Written by Imagine a beautiful glossy spring catalogue from your home and garden store of your choice. You’re gazing over a lovely garden with a large sectional sofa, a warm fire pit and a clean swimming pool. It seems it’s a summer afternoon. The truth is that this picture was probably taken in a windowless, freezing warehouse, in the middle of November.
For the outdoor retail sector, making these alluring lifestyle photos is a huge logistical challenge. A heavy wooden shed is not easily dragged up a mountain, and spring releases can’t be made in the summer sun. These brands can’t afford to skimp on the photos and cover the vast distance between physical and catalogue perfection, so they turn to professional ecommerce photo editing services. This allows brands to produce ideal weather, location and products year-round, since the concentrate shifts from the shoot to the post production time.
Why Large Outdoor Products Are So Difficult to Photograph
Jewelry or small electronic devices can be photographed fairly easily as the environment can be completely controlled on a small tabletop. Outdoor and garden products, on the other hand, face a special challenge in the form of physical constraints that prevent them from successfully capturing images at scale.
The main difficulties are:
- The Weight and Scale of Goods: Forklifts, freight trucks and large teams of people are needed for the weight and scale of goods such as cast-iron grills, ten-piece dining sets or pre-made greenhouses, which makes it extremely expensive to relocate them and slow.
- Unpredictable Weather Conditions: If you take the time to book a gorgeous residential backyard for a week, there is a chance that it can get washed away with unanticipated rains, heavy clouds and harsh, inconsistent sunlight.
- Misaligned Seasonal Timelines: For retail manufacturing, inventory is often completed and photographed in the winter months, when the natural scene is not always conducive to the season’s desired clothing aesthetic.
Why Outdoor Brands Are Moving Product Photography Indoors
To say goodbye to the uncertainty of the outdoors, the savviest brands have thrown out the traditional outdoor lifestyle photo shoot. Rather, they lease large industrial warehouses with giant cyclorama walls. The large enclosed areas enable delivery trucks to come right up to the camera, eliminating the weight and transport dilemma at once.
The lights used by the lighting director are designed to be bright, and they are set on high towers to create a strong, directional light to help capture the bright light of mid-summer day. They make the highlights and shadows exactly as they would outside. This is only a partial solution, though. The camera finds the perfectly lit patio set, but that set is in an empty box, a gray box. The image is absolutely unsuitable for a consumer based life style catalogue. Digital intervention is all that’s needed to take a sterile warehouse and transform it into a beautiful backyard.
How Digital Background Replacement Creates Stunning Outdoor Scenes
The magic of the modern retail catalogue is here. After capturing the raw studio images, the background replacement starts. Brands take photos of empty backyards, wooden decks and manicured lawns during the summer in high-resolution “plates” that are sold to a brand.
The highly skilled retouchers then remove the bulk products from their backgrounds in the warehouse and move them into these rich environments. To do this effectively needs the best ecommerce photo editing services as the customer will immediately break the illusion if the product is not integrated well. Professional editors will take time to trim around intricate elements such as leaves on an artificial plant, the mesh of a screen door etc. More importantly, they recreate the contact shadows and ambient lighting, so the product appears to truly fit with the color temp of the digital sun, in the exact patio that it was originally photographed in.
How Brands Generate Hundreds of Product Variations from One Photoshoot
The digital workflow not only addresses the location issue, it also addresses the inventory variation challenge. There are 20 different fabric colors for one outdoor umbrella and 3 different metal pole finishes. If I took a picture of each combination I’d be in the studio for days.
Instead, photographers take only one base model with a neutral color. From there, brands can have the product images edited in a professional manner using a dedicated product photo editing service. Editors use texture mapping and color correction to create a navy blue, cherry red or forest green version of one gray umbrella. They can click to change the pole from brushed aluminum to dark bronze. The digital colorway generation cuts studio time in tens of thousands of dollars for brands and guarantees 100% consistency across the whole product page.
Why Retailers Outsource High-Volume Product Photo Editing
It takes a tremendous amount of technical know-how and time to produce these digital illusions. When a brand is introducing a new seasonal collection to market, they may require thousands of images to be processed, composited and color corrected in just a few weeks. This is where it becomes difficult to control a small in-house team and end up missing deadlines and product launches.
This is a heavy lift for large retailers that need to keep pace and quality, so they outsource it to dedicated ecommerce photo editing services. An outside agency provides the framework necessary for performing huge batch processing. At the end of a shoot, for example, a dedicated post production studio such as Visuals Clipping will receive hundreds of raw files from the warehouse and return fully realized, web ready lifestyle composites in a matter of moments. This way, the brand’s in-house creative team can spend more time on marketing strategy, and skip the tedious task of masking and recreating shadows in pixels.
Conclusion: The Future of Outdoor Product Photography Is Digital
It’s an incredible piece of digital engineering that the modern outdoor and garden catalogue is. The acknowledgement that it is an impossible battle to fight the weather and drag heavy furniture across the country has changed the way that brands approach their image workflows. They shoot for the edit, getting controlled, predictable, interior lighting and then go to advanced ecommerce photo editing services to create everything else from the ground up. This is a perfect, sunny day in a catalogue, whatever it looks like outside, because of the seamless combination of industrial studio photography and expert digital compositing.
Also Read: How Product Photographers Save Hours Every Week by Outsourcing Background Removal