Case Study: Footwear Photography using Shutter Stream Software
With over 3 generations in the footwear industry, The Zapatka family launched TheShoeMart.com in 2003 which has since grown to be one of the largest online specialty footwear retailers . With over 30,000 pairs of shoes in their inventory, TheShoeMart.com offers one of the largest selections of the most sought after footwear brands in the world.
Overview: Footwear Photography
Problem – Creating high quality footwear photography was consuming too many man hours and was a very expensive in house process. It was often difficult to get products live on the site when they arrived as photography was a bottleneck.
Previous Photography Workflow:
- Capture up to 8 different angles of each shoe.
- Upload a series of product images to the server
- Access the images from the server on the marketing computer
- Import images into Adobe Photoshop where photographer would remove the background and replace with pure white, crop the frame, resize to 1000 x 1000 pixels, rename, output to a local folder
- Upload to webserver.
Average time spent per shoe (8 images): ~40 minutes or about 5 minutes per image
Biggest Pain Point: The background removal process “Before, there was a lot more editing- we spent countless man-hours getting rid of the backgrounds” – Demian – Product Photographer – TheShoeMart.com
Shutter Stream Product Photography Software for Footwear:
TheShoeMart.com approached Iconasys in July 2014 with the intention to streamline their image editing requirements. “We were interested in an application that allieviate the amount of time and effort we were dedicating to image editing” says Demian.
After a short consultation over the phone with an Iconasys sales representative, TheShoeMart realized Shutter Stream would not only be a tool that could help with their image editing processes through batch applying edits to a set of images in a single click, but also a program that could handle the entire end to end imaging workflow. ‘The idea of a single program that could tie in every aspect of our photography workflow was especially appealing as it could even further speed up our processes” says Demian.
Since the introduction of Shutter Stream Product Photography Software into their workflow, TheShoemart.com has shot over 5,000 product images using the software. This has equated to an estimated 300 hours – an investment that has paid for itself time and time again.
Increased Imaging Consistency (Live View, Pre-Crop and Image Overlay Features) – “The ability to see the product on the monitor in real time before we capture the image combined with the image overlay and pre-crop tools has really helped with our imaging consistencies.”
Shooting Images that are a Perfect Square – “As we require all images as squares on our website, the ability to pre-crop our product images at a perfect square before capturing meant every image we shot was already a square – we no longer had to Crop using Photoshop after the fact.”
Instant Image Review – As images are captured they are immediately uploaded into Shutter Stream for instant feedback. This allows users to ensure a high quality result prior to moving on to shooting the next product image or angle.
Integrated Workflow – Demian states “the added benefit of Shutter Stream Product Photography Software was it was an end to end photography workflow solution that could handle all our website product photography requirements in a single program on a single computer.”
Eliminating the need for Photoshop – The automated background removal tools have allowed TheShoeMart.com to completely remove Photoshop from their product photography workflow. In a batch process images can be stripped from their background and replaced with pure white.
Batch Image Renaming: TheShoeMart.com requires product images be named by SKU number and each separate angle denoted numerically. Shutter Stream automated image renaming specific for this requirement. Simply enter a single SKU number and each image in the set will be denoted numerically (additional options include alpha ex. a, b, c, d or custom ex. front, back, side, top etc..)
Batch Image Resizing – Output all images exactly for our specs of 1000×1000 pixels in a batch process during the saving/output step.
“Shutter Stream has proven to be an indispensable tool that has not only helped with image quality and consistencies, but also significantly increased our photography workflow. Thanks Iconasys!” – Demian
Thanks to Demian, the Zapatka family and the rest of TheShoeMart team for their help and cooperation with this case study!
Learn more about Shutter Stream Product Photography Software for the Footwear Industry