Forum Moderators: buckworks
We are a clothing company, and we do our own photoshoots for about 80% of our products (and this percentage will only increase). We have an in house photo studio with a contracted photographer, and we probably average 3 photoshoots every 2 months right now. Photoshoots are streamlined now, but unfortunately it takes a solid week or longer to process the images that come out of the photoshoot, and in that time other projects have to be on hold. We have identified the bottleneck to be touching up and cropping the photos, so let me explain that process as well as I can (I am not the designer):
Each photoshoot is about 80 or more products, and each product is 3-4 photos (different angles).
The designer will import a batch of raw photos into Photoshop and using his tablet he will touch up whatever needs to be done (he's rather quick at this and as long as the model is without scars this isn't too bad).
After that, he has to manually crop each photo, and I believe this to be the slow spot. We operate two sites that utilize different crops too. Since we sell clothing, the crop may be slightly different for various products depending on pants versus shorts vs t-shirts. In the past, I've helped him rush some of these photos out by doing some cropping for him and it's really mindless: We use an existing photo (of the same type of clothing) as a template, overlay the new image, and you're done. The problem comes with the repetition: Doing this for 90 products x 5 variations and x 2 sites, we have to crop as many as 900 times!
I guess what I'm getting to, is does anyone has any tricks (or software or hardware) that I can pass along to him to try and speed this part up? We don't mind investing in something that will speed up productivity.
Thanks,
Brandon
P.S. We've toyed with the idea of outsourcing this to a local college student that can maybe work from home on this, so if anyone has any experience on that I'd be curious to hear it.
Outsourcing is an unknown, your in house talent is a known. You *may* find a student with sufficient skills to save you time and money, or you may get a pile of digital garbage that needs to be redone. Risky proposition.
The very best way to address this? Figure out some way to not have to do the retouching, or minimize it.
I'll give you an example: I had one "designer" once tell me that "every photo needs to go into photoshop and be reworked or you're going to have garbage."
Now let's flash back about 15 years, to a time before any of us HAD these tools. I was a high end drum scanner in the print industry; we didn't have photoshop, we didn't have a cloning tool (let's leave airbrushing of prints out of the argument for the moment.) Any compositing had to be done via manual film masks, and if the color wasn't right, you rescanned it. If the original didn't have what you needed to get quality out of it, you sent it back for a re-shoot.
So my response to this designer's pretentious claim was this: these tools have made the photographers and image composers lazy. "If the color's not right, tweak it in Photoshop." (The truth of this matter is, if the color levels are not there to begin with, you lose tonal range . . . )
So what I am saying is to reduce this bottleneck you need to review the image production process. Load more of the work on your photographer. "Back in the day" if there was a problem with the background, or color cast, or clarity, you reshot it. Until you get it right.
If you're repetitively having to bend the RGB curve in a certain way, this tells you they have a problem with lighting color cast. If you constantly have to increase contrast, change how you shoot. Fix all this at the front end, NOT the digital retouching end.
Have them frame the photos properly, eliminating most of your cropping issues.
The stock argument to this is "it's impossible, you don't understand." But I do, and I know it can be done. Your digital department should be able to automate the crop/resize process using actions in Photoshop:
- Open
- resize
- apply unsharp mask to sharpen AFTER resizing
- save to a different folder/directory
and whip through 900 photos in no more than a day or two. All they should be doing is opening, examine for defects, fix defects, save, DONE. If they're doing anything more than that, the problem is not the digital retouching, it's the input images.
Give them less work to do, and they'll do . . . more work faster.
[edited by: rocknbil at 5:15 pm (utc) on Feb. 6, 2009]
I assume all photos are coming in as electronic files. What software are you using now?
We try to do as much as possible in the photo studio. We use a professional photographer, a full studio, a makeup artist, etc. I'll definitely talk to my designer and see how much touching up he does and what we can do in the studio to get rid of that.
The one comment I am having problems agreeing with is: "Your digital department should be able to automate the crop/resize process using actions in Photoshop". Unfortunately, I don't think it's that simple in our case. Even though the model and photographer have their marks to stand on, the crop isn't always the same for each picture, so I don't know if we can be saved by a single action. I'm not even sure if we can create a different action based on the garment type (we have pants, shirts and swimsuits), but I think I'll give it a try tomorrow and see how it works out.
@lorax: We shoot everything in digital and import the photos into Adobe Photoshop (I think he's on CS3) in their raw format.
