Hi all! I'm fairly new to photoshop, but I've been put with our design team at a trading company that deals in a very high volume of cosmetics, jewelry, and accessories to take, edit, and put up photos of our products for the web and our inventory system. Our editing is done using photoshop (recently upgraded to CS5), and photos are taken in a lightbox (ortery photosimile 200 using a Canon Powershot A640), but we are looking for ways to streamline our workflow so that we can crank out finished pictures faster. What plug-ins/Filters would work best for jewelry and cosmetics for cleaning up dust/noise, fix up low quality images (as we occasionally get photos from our vendors of varying quality), or otherwise streamline our workflow?
Currently, my workflow goes a bit like this
1.) Take a photo of the product using Canon Powershot A640 in Ortery Photosimile 200 lightbox. The photos usually have a very plain background, with occasional noise and unwanted details from a dirty background.
2.) Export the picture as a high quality JPEG to my workstation to edit in photoshop
3.) In Photoshop, I crop the image to take out excess border around the product, autolevel or manually adjust the level to brighten and lighten the product slightly, then extract the product using some combination of the lasso, marquee, magic wand and pen tool. I have some trouble here with silver or light+semitransparent objects that have little contrast with the background, but have a lot of fine details (chain links, lots of tiny pearls, etc). Nothing I can't get, but it is time consuming as I have to go through and adjust my selection for each problem area. If the edges are jagged as it occasionally happens with the wand tool, I smooth out my selection 1-3 pixels a few times.
4.) I copy my selection and paste it on to a new layer, then set the other layer(s) off so that only my product is visible. This modified pictures is saved as a PSD. A new 1024x1024 pixel template is created, and this newly created product layer is pasted, resized and placed onto the canvas however we want to show it, and a 1 pixel shadow drop added. This refined PSD is saved and undergoes some batch resizing/framing for the web/inventory system. (Trying out Dr. Russell Brown's 1-2-3 script to resize, rename, save into a desired directory and apply an action script I made to apply a custom frame to the image)
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Since I am still pretty new to PS, I was hoping someone more experienced might be able to suggest any tools, filters, plug-ins or some sort of adjustment to my workflow that could make editing these photos quicker. I believe AlienSkin, Topaz Labs, Niz, etc seem to have plug-ins that allow us to clean up images, sharpen details, and improve low quality scans, but am unsure what products stands out for ease of use, efficiency, and efficacy for cosmetics and jewelry that we would consider investing in them. Any suggestions/comments would be very helpful!
SpikeyKun
Currently, my workflow goes a bit like this
1.) Take a photo of the product using Canon Powershot A640 in Ortery Photosimile 200 lightbox. The photos usually have a very plain background, with occasional noise and unwanted details from a dirty background.
2.) Export the picture as a high quality JPEG to my workstation to edit in photoshop
3.) In Photoshop, I crop the image to take out excess border around the product, autolevel or manually adjust the level to brighten and lighten the product slightly, then extract the product using some combination of the lasso, marquee, magic wand and pen tool. I have some trouble here with silver or light+semitransparent objects that have little contrast with the background, but have a lot of fine details (chain links, lots of tiny pearls, etc). Nothing I can't get, but it is time consuming as I have to go through and adjust my selection for each problem area. If the edges are jagged as it occasionally happens with the wand tool, I smooth out my selection 1-3 pixels a few times.
4.) I copy my selection and paste it on to a new layer, then set the other layer(s) off so that only my product is visible. This modified pictures is saved as a PSD. A new 1024x1024 pixel template is created, and this newly created product layer is pasted, resized and placed onto the canvas however we want to show it, and a 1 pixel shadow drop added. This refined PSD is saved and undergoes some batch resizing/framing for the web/inventory system. (Trying out Dr. Russell Brown's 1-2-3 script to resize, rename, save into a desired directory and apply an action script I made to apply a custom frame to the image)
~~
Since I am still pretty new to PS, I was hoping someone more experienced might be able to suggest any tools, filters, plug-ins or some sort of adjustment to my workflow that could make editing these photos quicker. I believe AlienSkin, Topaz Labs, Niz, etc seem to have plug-ins that allow us to clean up images, sharpen details, and improve low quality scans, but am unsure what products stands out for ease of use, efficiency, and efficacy for cosmetics and jewelry that we would consider investing in them. Any suggestions/comments would be very helpful!
SpikeyKun
