Imagine finding your dream jacket on a second-hand site. From the product photos, it looks like it could be perfect—but the more you look at it, you start to doubt the quality of the cloth and the seller. The photos have poor lighting and are shot against a messy background, so you can’t be certain of how the jacket would look in real life, and the seller’s professionalism clearly leaves something to be desired. Are you willing to hand over your dollars to a business that can’t be bothered to earn your trust?
The same cloth presented in elegant studio lighting with a clear, crisp backdrop, multiple angles, and detail shots—now that would be enticing.
With the monumental rise of the e-commerce industry, the number of online apparel stores has multiplied many times over, with countless sellers vying for attention. Buyers aren’t likely to choose a shop with poor-quality product images when they have a dozen other options that don’t make them worry that they’re going to be ripped off. When it comes to making conversions and boosting your revenue, great images are paramount. The aesthetics of your store tell a story about the quality of your brand, so you’d better make sure it’s a good one.
On the other hand, we get it. Great product photos are expensive, and if you’re a budget-conscious seller, you can’t afford to pay big bucks for everything from models to pro photographers to post-production. But even if you’re DIY-ing some or all of the steps in the process, you have options that can help you compete with the pros. In this article, we’ll take a look at how automated clothes photo editors like autoRetouch—an AI-powered editor with tools built especially for apparel photography—can give you the level of polish your customers are looking for.
Why Pick an Automated CLOTH Photo Editor?
Beautiful apparel photos make a tremendous difference in how your products are perceived by buyers and can boost everything from your SEO game to your conversion rate. What’s more, accurate product photos keep your buyers informed and help you avoid returns and angry customers.
However, manual editing can be a slow, exhausting endeavor, and you can expect slower turnaround times and higher costs if you’re hiring an editor to do it for you. That’s where AI-driven editors like autoRetouch can come in handy.
Here’s why we think you should give automated apparel editors a spin, including some of the most helpful and specialized tools you can use to raise the quality of your product photos.
1. Batch editing
Automated editors let users bulk-process their images. If you’ve ever done your own editing, you know just how tedious and time-consuming it can be to edit photographs manually—your fingers might be cramping at the mere thought. Thankfully, with the batch editing features in automated editors like autoRetouch, which can edit up to 100 photos at once, you can apply the same effects and filters in bulk and cut your processing times down to minutes or even seconds. Even better, autoRetouch has a simple, friendly user interface and requires no technical experience to use.
2. Background removal
Many fashion retailers and marketplaces feature uncluttered images against a white background, for obvious reasons—it’s better to highlight the clothes than distract your buyers with colorful backdrops. But clean, minimalist looks aren’t as easy to pull off as they look, and may require a lot of time in post-production to get rid of unwanted elements. Automated editors can dramatically reduce the time it takes to clean up your photos. The remove background component by autoRetouch cuts the backdrop from your apparel images with just a few clicks.
You can also use this feature to repurpose your product photos across various marketing channels—it makes it simple to change the backdrop as needed.
3. Background customization
From a branding perspective, there are lots of reasons you might want to modify the background for your apparel photos: creating unique, flashy posts for social media, meeting the requirements of a particular marketplace, or giving large groups of photos a consistent look. The custom background component from autoRetouch allows you to switch out backdrops quickly and easily, making it a breeze to experiment with new color palettes and branding ideas.
4. Ghost mannequin generation
Buyers like to know what they’re getting into—literally, when it comes to their clothes. Selling apparel online presents a challenge on this front. You can’t let your shoppers try on your clothes before they buy, but you still need to find ways to reduce costly returns and exchanges. Ghost mannequin photography is one way to address that. Ghost mannequin photos are blended together from several shots of the same cloth to show both the interior and exterior, as if it was posed on an invisible model. It’s a great way to showcase the shape and fit of a cloth in 3D. Unfortunately, generating ghost mannequins manually is an advanced editing technique, and it’s too time-consuming to be cost-effective for most businesses. However, autoRetouch’s ghost mannequin generator makes this visual technique accessible to anyone. All you have to do is upload your photos and the algorithm will blend them together seamlessly.
5. Fabric swatch creation
Another simple, powerful way to increase consumer trust is by showing off the fine details of your clothes in your product photos. autoRetouch’s fabric swatch extractor automatically identifies a suitable fabric sample from your photos and generates a swatch that can be used as a close-up. The algorithm is even smart enough to identify a swatch in an area free from creases, buttons, and accessories and output a representative color sample. If you have clothes available in multiple fabrics or colors, you can use the extracted swatches as previews of the color variations when customers are navigating your shop.
6. Skin retouching
If you use models in your product photos, you’ll need to invest in skin retouching at some point. A smooth, natural look is standard for model photos but can be difficult to achieve as a novice editor, and time-consuming even for an experienced one. Fortunately, this is another problem that can be quickly solved with AI tools: autoRetouch has a skin retouching component with an algorithm designed to remove skin imperfections based on skin color, body part, and ethnicity. The tool has a light touch, ensuring that your models won’t look overdone or excessively airbrushed, which can pull the focus from your clothes and make the photos appear fake.
In Conclusion…
E-commerce shopping is all about user experience, and the success of a business depends on its ability to replicate a bit of the magic of shopping in person. If you really want your shoppers to start spending, you need to showcase your products in a way that increases your credibility and their trust and excitement. The great news is, you don’t need a massive budget to nail it. Using an AI photo editor lets you show off the best of your apparel at a low price point, so you can take home larger profits and give your customers a shopping experience that will bring them back again and again.