E-Commerce Catalogue Cut-Out Production

The brief

Product photography arrives from the studio with a mannequin in it, a bench behind it and a shadow that belongs to a different surface. Between that and a product page there is a stage that automated tools still lose money on, because the places they fail — a lace, a mesh panel, a sequin, a strand of hair — are exactly the places a customer zooms in.

What we do

Paths, drawn

Clipping paths are drawn by hand with the pen tool rather than auto-selected. On footwear that is the whole job: laces, mesh and midsole edges have to hold up at full zoom, and an automatic selection softens every one of them.

Masks, for what a path cannot cut

Fringing, sequins and flyaway hair do not have an edge to trace, so they go through channel masking into a clean alpha instead. A watch is the other end of the same problem — a skeleton dial and a mesh bracelet lifted off a cluttered bench onto pure white without softening a single link.

Ghost mannequin

Mannequin and studio clutter removed, neckline rebuilt from the inside shot, so the garment keeps its shape on a white product page instead of collapsing into a flat-lay.

Grounding

A cut-out with no shadow floats. Natural shadow and surface reflection are rebuilt so the pieces sit on the page — the difference between a product photograph and a sticker.

How it is delivered

Transparent PNG for compositing and flattened white for the marketplace, from the same master, so the retailer is never re-cutting the same shot for a second channel.