There is an old saying, cut your coat according to your cloth. The moral behind that saying is to cut things or takes measures according to your available resources. In the world of eCommerce photography, however, it is somewhat different. You don’t cut clothing or cut out photo background to make things, you cut them to make things better than before. This is not the product cycle; this is the post-production phase. Shooting the product image is the production phase and the cut-out photo background is the post-production phase where the images are edited for perfection.
Why cut out photo background is so important?
Imagine that! You take product photography by going through a serious measure. Setting up the camera, lights, making sure the product is positioned properly, arranging all the props needed, and only then shoot the product. After all the work done to take the product image, you end up cutting the background out of the image. Some might think you are out of your mind. Some might think that you lost it completely and do not know what you are doing. But people familiar with eCommerce marketing or product photography will know why you are doing it.
Cutting out the image background doesn’t mean you are damaging the image. It doesn’t mean all the work done to capture the image is going right down to the drain. It might seem that way at first if you are not familiar with the subject matter. But if you look carefully at the eCommerce websites, you will see the products there blends in into the website background perfectly. If there were to be a table or floor or background of some sort behind the product, the product would not blend into the background of the website or catalog that evenly. To make the entire website seamless and to attract more attention to the product itself, the background is removed by using the cutout photo background service.
Can you cut out photo background yourself or you need to hire someone?
It is not that difficult to cut out a photo background from an image. With some practice and online learning, surely you can cut out the background from an image with ease. It doesn’t take that much time either to do that. For a simple image with a clear outline, it can take as low as ten to fifteen minutes to cut out the background. For complex images like fur items or trees, it can take as much as forty-five minutes or even more.
The question is, why in the world you will spend that much time editing an image? If it is your personal image and you need to remove the unwanted background, yes you can go ahead and do that. But the amount of learning curve involved in doing this for a single image, it just doesn’t worth anyone’s time, it is better to just find an online cutout photo background service provider and spend few dollars in editing the image.
If you are a business on the other hand, then there is no way in the world you have the time to edit your own product images. Some businesses require hundreds of images edited on a daily or weekly basis. The business owner doesn’t have that much time to edit all those images. Even own in-house staff becomes too expensive to cut out the photo backgrounds of that many images. It is therefore the common and most efficient business practice to hire someone or outsource the entire photo editing to an offshore retouch studio.