When it comes to Product Photography, the key to a successful workflow is product information. Having the right information in the studio is critical to speed ut the process. Here are som of the most critical aspects of how product information may increase quality and speed up production. Three of the most critical questions to have a good understanding of is:
- Which products are we planning to shoot?
- How should we shoot the?
- How do we know that we are read?
Which products are we planning to shoot?
When it come to planning the studio work it is essential to know which products should be portrayed. Normally this is done via an excel list sent to the studio with all the products to shoot.
The challenge her is knowledge of the assortment and how to work with it. Lets say you get a list of products to shoot and then someone sends you all the samples to shoot. A couple of questions arises:
- How do I know which physical sample belongs to which line in my excel.
- Should I manually tick them off in my excel?
- What do I do when the list mis-matches from reality?
Most modern companies have some form of a product information system or product management solution where information may be extracted. With Assetflow you can easily import that to your predefined set of information fields. Using our open API you may integrate with your own eco system.
How should we shoot them?
Once you have sorted out that you have the right samples in the studio andall the product information you may start planning how to shoot your products.
The best situation is if you have the option to plan ahead, this means that you get the product information some time before the products/samples arrive at the studio. You may then sort the digitally and analyse how to shoot them.
- What kind of products are they?
- Do we need a model?
- How many variants of images should we produce per product?
- Are they carry over products, i.e. can we re-use some images?
You probably have your specific set of questions but with a dynamic solution in place you should be able to add as much information as is required to define different planes for different product types and marketing needs.
With Assetflow you have the ability add tags and information fields that can be used for planning purposes. Furthermore you can define different style guides that may be attached to each product. The style guide defines what angles and views that are required for each product
How do we know that we are ready?
If you only shoot a few products this is easy and not an issue. But, if you are shooting hundreds of products a week with multiple images per product, this can become extremely difficult.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could match your ready made images to the same product list that you start6ed out with? Being able to se, product be product, that you have the right set of images?
With modern studio tools this is perfectly feasible and may be done using simple uploading and and matching of images to products.
With Assetflow we have done just this, you can upload images that are automatically tagged to the right product and visualised in a UI. If you have an issue with naming images we have a tool to rename images using dynamic matching patterns.
