Transcripts
1. 360º Product Photography - Class Introduction: When a customer walks into a shop and then he or she likes some product on the shelf, they would probably grab it and look at it from all sides to inspect it. But that would be a different story when people shop online. The traditional way of displaying the product is only by a couple of pictures, and sometimes that will not be convincing to hit the purchase button. And this is where exactly the 360 degree product photography and spin viewing become useful. They will see the product as if they hold it in their hands. I'm Adam, but I am an expert commercial photographer for many years. And part of my speciality is 360 degree product photography. And I have done it for lots of clients for their products in the past few years. Fashion and accessories, fine jewelry, devices, and much more. In this fun photography class, I'm going to show you how to capture and create an interactive 360 degree view for any product which is a trendy method of showing items online, whether it's an online shop or just showing your special products on your website. And it's not just a spinning animation, it's interactive, Viewers can swipe the product to view it from any angle. Also, I will show you how to add a clickable hotspots for viewers to show them a hidden specific features of a product. I will explain everything about 360 degree product photography, starting from the theory behind it and how it's made, and what setup you need and from where to get them. Even I'll show you how to make your own 360-degree setup at budget. We will shoot a few different products on white. Afterwards. I will show you how to assemble and prepare your captured images easily. And then I will teach you how to use a couple of my favorite softwares for producing 360-degree views. And finally, I will guide you through publishing your project online and insert it to your website or your client's website. And as a bonus, I will show you how to publish your 360-degree product animation on social media. You will enjoy this class as the entire method and outcome is totally different from regular photography. If you are a product photographer, you will elevate your photography skills to another level. And even before finishing the class, I'm sure you will get thrilled and excited to start shooting your products right away. But, I recommend finishing this class until the end, lots of tips and techniques you'll learn from me.
2. 1 The Concept Of 360 Object Views: The idea of 360 degree product viewing is really simple. And even the concept of motion pictures is not new. It's been there since ages. Do you know how the TV classic animated cartoon used to be made? They are basically a series of still photographs of an object on film projected in a rapid sequence. Same way, we capture the product or object from every angle in a full spin. And through special softwares, we arrange and display those pictures in a sequence, which eventually looks like the product is spinning. But now we can even make it interactive, with a swipe viewers can spin the object in both directions. And with a special softwares that we will use to publish our 360 degree product views, online visitors do not need any special applications to display them. Our interactive animations can be viewed directly on any web browser, on any device, on any website we want.
3. Required Equipment: We will need the following photography setup to produce 360 degree product views. And we will talk in a moment about each one in details. The first thing we will need is the turntable. It's a platform that we place the product on & it starts spinning while we shoot. A motorized, our manual spinning turntable will do the job. I will show you in this class how to make your own manual spinning turntable by yourself, which will cost you less than $15. And about the motorized turntables, they are available online at different sizes and functionalities. And some of them are affordable. Depending on what size of products you intend to shoot, you can choose or what is suitable for you. But one thing you need to make sure about that Your turntable must have automated stops and a remote control, cause we don't need just a continuous spinning turntable that is used for displaying at shops. The second thing we need is lighting kit. We have two good options for lighting. The first option is continuous photography. Light not flash strobes, as we need precisely stable light for all the shots. Choose your kit with soft box diffusers. I have talked about lighting equipment in a previous class. But briefly, if you still don't have continuous lighting kit, they are available online to purchase. We need three lighting heads with soft boxes and stands. The other option for lighting, you can use a large Lightbox which used for product photography. You need one with a large opening at the front and adjustable light. Make sure the size fits your turntable. And adjustable light, so you can lighten both; the background and the product inside the Lightbox. The third thing we need, of course, is your camera. A DSLR camera, or any manually-operated digital camera As we will shoot on a fully manual mode, shutter speed, aperture, ISO, white balance, and focus. All should be manual. Then we need a camera tripod, any steady camera tripod would do the job. And the last thing we need is your computer with the following softwares, Adobe Lightroom Classic or similar available software to edit and export images in bulk. A remote capture software which usually comes with your camera, Check the camera manufacturer's website, probably you will find that a remote capturing software there to download, also, as an alternative, you can use Lightroom Classic to tether and control your camera for shooting remotely. And lastly, we need a 360 spin software for editing and publishing your projects. I'll recommend a couple of them, paid and free softwares. And I will show you how to use them, of course.
4. Make Your Own Turntable At Budget: If you would like to try 360 degree product photography and you don't want to spend much on your turntable, I will show you now how to make your own simple turntable with manual spinning. But if you are a professional photographer or you plan to shoot lots of products in 360, I would recommend investing in a motorized 360 photography turntable as it is faster and more practical to use on the long run. So what we need for our handmade ten table? First we need (Lazy Susan), It is a pizza rotating plate. You can find it on at the IKEA and it's about $10. We need seamless white hard paper, fine tip marker and pencil and a ruler and some paper glue. I will be using mount spray, but you can use any paper glue. Let's make it. We need to make our stalls first. So let's place a mark on the edge of the turntable for two centimeters between the stops. You can make the marking process easier and faster. Cut a two centimeter piece of any paper to use it as a marking guide. Continue monitoring all around until you reach the first mark. Now we need to make the surface of our turntable white, And this is where we need the white hard paper. We will flip the turntable upside down on the hard paper and draw a cutting guide with a pencil. Cut the hard paper perfectly. Next, we need to glue the hard paper and place it on the surface of the turntable. Make sure it's accurate and it is centered. That's it. Our ten table is ready to go. We will use any steady narrow object as a pointer. I will use a screw and hold it down with blue tack. But you can use any object as a pointer, just make sure it doesn't move. Let's highlight one of the marks to make it a little different from others, as it will be our starting and ending point when we shoot.
5. Let's Set Them Up: Let's first try our manual turntable, which we just made, and then we will use the motorized one. We will place the turntable on a steady surface. Then we will arrange our diffused lights two on the front sides. And the third one will be the background itself. Right behind the turntable to make sure that we get a nice bright background, which would look like this from side view. Make sure that this background light is straight horizontally and facing the camera. And the turntable will be of course front of this background. Let me show you how it looks like for real, Here is the backlight that makes our white background. And here are the other two lights on both sides. And here is the turntable. And the camera is here. I would like to mention here that if you have a product photography light box, then you can skip the light setup part which I have just explained. You just need to put the turntable inside the light box and make sure that the adjustable built-in lighting inside the light box is aiming properly at the turntable and the background as well. To get a nice seamless white background in your shots.
6. Shooting on DIY Turntable: It's important to shoot in manual mode. As we need consistency in all our images. All should be captured with the same right exposure and the same color tone. So we need to set up a camera with the right shutter speed and aperture and a customized white balance. And also, don't forget to switch to manual focus on the lens. If you are not confident about manually handling your camera. I have made another class previously explaining everything about manual shooting for products on a white background. You can check it out if you like. You will find it under the title PRO PRODUCT PHOTOGRAPHY ON PURE WHITE BACKGROUND. The last thing we need to do before shooting is to connect our camera to the computer Cause we will shoot remotely using the available remote capture software, as we don't need to touch the camera at all between the shots. And any tiny movement of the camera will make us do extra work for the image alignments later on. So save time and connect the camera and run your available remote capture software. Now, settle your turntable and place the pointer object at front. Look at starting mark that we have made and align it to the pointer. I'm going to shoot this interesting handmade jewelry box to let viewers see it from all angles, in every detail. Place your product exactly in the center of your table to make sure it is centered a ruler or can help you with that. The padding on both sides should be equal. And the same rule applies for the object's front and back padding. We will take the first shot. Looks cool. Right? Now. We will take one shot on each mark, which are basically our stops. Gently. I will spin the turntable, one mark ahead, and take my shot, again to the next mark and shoot. And so on, until I reach the last mark. Let me speed this process up. Now, finally, we have reached the last mark. We will take this shot and then we will stop. Great. First phase is accomplished. We will go to the next phase to prepare the images in a moment. But first, let me show you a how to shoot another product and 360 on a motorized photography turntable this time.
7. Shooting on Motorized Turntable: The motorized turntable is more practical to use, especially that you don't need to touch it at all while shooting, spinning will be operated through its remote control I am going to shoot this device, a pocket music speaker from JBL, a cool gadget with some features that we need to show later on with a Hotspot icon. Place your product exactly in the center of your table, I have marked the center point on this turntable already to make things easier. Now, you can decide for yourself how many images will be displayed in a full spin of the object We know already more stops or more images will give us smoother spinning motion, but also a little slower loading time for the viewers online. And the opposite is true. So we will choose something moderate. I will set the turntable for 64 stops on a full 360-degrees spin. So we will have 64 images. The turntable will start rotating by itself and pause a couple of seconds between stops to take my shot. In your camera, the object should be centered and I would recommend making some room around the object, cause you will need that later on. Everything is ready. Let's fire. Now waiting a few seconds. and then the turntable stops.. I will take now the other shot. And Next, again, taking my shot. And so on. I will continue shooting while the turntable is spinning by itself. Until finally I reach the last spot and the last image. And as you see, the process is faster than the manual turntable. That's great. Now we have a consistent 64 total images. Let's collect them and prepare them for the next phase.
8. Prepare images: Now we have our good images in both folders. The box images we made on the manual turntable, and the speaker gadget that we made on the motorized turntable. Make sure that they are sorted sequentially. And now we will prepare the images. I will use Adobe Lightroom Classic for that as it is convenient for bulk editing and exporting to a desired image size. But you can use any other similar software that you are comfortable with. I will import the images now. We have two folders. One for the images we shot on the motorized turntable, and the other one for the images done on the manual turntable. I will start first with the box images. Everything looks good here. So I will just do some basic adjustments. At the (Develop) section. I will do some image sharpening and I will reduce some noise of the image. If your images need different treatments, such as exposure or white balance or anything else. You can do that here before applying the same adjustments to the rest of the images. Cause remember, consistency is the key. Now we need to copy what we have edited on this image to the rest of the images. Right-click on the image. (Develop Settings), (Copy Settings), and then select all other images. Right-click. (Develop Settings), (Paste Settings). You will see changes applying now to the rest of the images. Now we need to export them. Go back to the (Library) tab. And with all pictures are selected. Click Export. Choose a destination folder. And at the image settings area, I will set the image quality anywhere between 50 to 65 percent. And as for the image size, I will export mine with a width of 900 pixels. Don't go higher than 1200 pixels, otherwise, it would take ages to load when viewed online. That's it. Now, we are done with the first product images I will import and the other images of the other product, which is the speaker gadget that we shot on the motorized turntable. colors and object positioning are perfect. So I will just follow the previous procedures for the image sharpening and noise reduction. And here is another useful tip, to make sure that your 360 degree product animations looks good on all devices; I usually publish them in a square view. So they will look the same on both vertical and horizontal screens. So I'm going to crop the images to make them square. That's why we kept some room around the object, when we were shooting this sample object. Click on the (Crop) image icon and on the Aspect ratio, choose (1:1). Now, I will apply the same settings to all other images. I will copy settings from this image and select all images and paste settings there. Now, you will see the same settings applying for all images in a few seconds. Click on Library section and select all images. And hit (Export) button. - Excellent. Now we have the final image is ready for the final phase. Let's make our products spin.
9. Overview On 360º Spin Softwares: There are plenty of softwares out there for 360-degree objects spinning with different capabilities. And some of them have common features. And each have their own software pricing strategy, either one time purchase or monthly subscription packages. In the past few years, I have tried several softwares, and here is my final choice among them; WebRotate 360, and Sirv. Both have free and paid version. I will go through both and show you the differences between them. And then I'll leave it up to you to choose what is more convenient for you to use. My first choice is WebRotate 360. It is a native computer software that can be installed on both Mac and Windows. They have the basic version which is free, and the Pro version, which is paid. All information and technical differences between them are available on their official website (webrotate360.com), and from there you can download it. Let's jump into the software and I will show you how to make your first 360-degrees spin.
10. Using WebRotate360 Software: The first thing you need to do is to create a new project. Click on the first icon on the left to do that. Give your project a name here. And here, you need to define where the project will be saved on your computer. Click on the folder icon and choose the destination folder. Then here you need to locate the ready images that we have prepared and exported previously. WebRotate will import them from there. uncheck those options because we don't need them at this point. Now you will see the default preview of the product Spain. This is how it will look like on publishing. You can swipe and look at it to double-check everything. Let's do some customization before we publish it. I will go quickly over the tools here on the right side panel. Our tools are arranged in four main tabs; The first main tab is interface, which is here obviously to customize the interface, how the viewer sees it. Inside this tab, you can choose the skin, which is the appearance of the viewing window with its navigation buttons. Choose one of the pre-made Control Panel sets. And here is where you can set the viewing window size, which we need to change for a square view instead, because we have exported our images to (one to one) aspect ratio. If you remember, look at the blue guides here, they indicate the original image size, and the space outside here is the viewer window. So let's set our viewer to square. I will set it for 600 x 600. And now you can see how it became squared, just as we need it. And here we have more options. And they are clear enough to understand what each one does. I'll keep everything as default. Here is the styling section. You can change the browsers background color from here, choose whatever suits your page theme. I will choose dark gray. If you wish to do more customization to the viewers toolbar, you can give the toolbar background color, change the opacity, or change the buttons opacity. And also you can change the location of the toolbar; centered, left or right, and you can also place it on the top part of the viewing window. The next tab group is control. Inside it, you can control the motion behavior, how your animation interacts with our viewers. In this area, you can control the speed of rotation when viewers drag or swipe. The most important one is the first slider, taking this slider to the left will make the motion faster. and if you slide it to the right; that will make it slower. And in this area, you can control the first action. When a visitor opens the spin view. You can make it rotate by itself continuously once animation is loaded. Or you can make it spin just one time and stops, or by default to rotate only by dragging. I will put it to rotate one time just to show visitors that this is an animation and not just a static picture. This section is for rotation direction. It is useful if it happens that you were shooting your object when your turntable was rotating in an opposite direction, So here you can reverse the direction. Since I shot my images while the turntable was rotating clockwise, I will keep it clockwise here. If I change it counterclockwise, it will go to the opposite direction when dragging or swiping. As for the rest of the options, I will keep them unchecked by default. As I don't need these options. In the same group of control tab, we have more options. Activate the Zoom with one click on the image, make the object spin with just hovering over the image, and without dragging, or use the mouse wheel to make it spin. I will keep them all off. This one will keep it on, as it allows the viewers to see a clear view when zoom function is used. The rest will keep them unchecked. Inertia is an interesting feature in WebRotate 360. It gives your spin a more realistic effect when someone drags the object a little faster before releasing it, it keeps running for a little while until it stops. Just like playing with a wheel. If I wanted to spin further when released for two seconds, I will put the value here 2000 milliseconds. And if I change it to one millisecond, it will stop exactly when I release the mouse. I will put it on 1000 ms. In the zooming area, you can allow viewers to rotate the object when it is zoomed in. It is nice feature, but it will takes a little more loading period. So I will keep it unchecked for now. The other two options here, we'll keep them as default also, and we will talk about them in another class where I will explain how to shoot in multiple rows. And now we will move to an interesting thing for objects spinning to add more interactivity to it and make it more useful for our clients. It is the HOTSPOT feature.
11. Add Hotspot to Spinning Objects: The hotspot feature, it is a little spot where you can add on a specific area of the product to explain more about it. Like a hidden feature or additional function of the product. You can tell people about it with text content or additional image or video, or even a link to a specific page or website. Let me show you how to do a hotspot. Now, what do we need to do is to open an image, for example, that shows more about the product feature. Just as a sample for this class, I have already taken one shot previously of the speaker, when the plug wire is out. Click on new hotspot. Give you a hotspot a name, It is useful if you are adding more than one hotspot. I want to have a pop-up image or this hotspot is clicked. So I will keep the first render option. And of course, it must open this popup once a viewer click on it. Here, You can position the popup image window on the viewer. I will keep it in the center of the viewer. And here you can customize the hotspot icon look. Different shapes and colors and sizes are available here to choose from, And also, you can add your own icon if you wish. Now on this tab, I will attach the image that I want to show once the hotspot is clicked. I will choose my sample image, which I made previously. I have resize this image to 900 pixels width. And I wanted to be scaled by itself with the viewing window size. Now, we need to place the hotspot on our rotation object. And since the object is moving, the hotspot needs to follow it. Let me show you how; I want the hotspot always show on this area. So I will click one time here. a selection indicator shows that we have now at a hotspot in the place here, we need to move now to the next frame and place the hotspot on the same area which is moving slightly, On your keyboard; use left and right arrow keys to move forward or backward. On the very next image, click again on the desired area for the next same hotspot. Hit the left arrow key again, and click on the area. Keep going, and you will see colored path showing where the hotspot is placed. Now it's enough for this product as the hotspot area will go behind. So I will stop here. Here is the path which is orange color. But to make it more visible for me, I can change the color of the path here. I will make it blue. And by the way, this bath is visible only while editing, viewers will not see that. If it happens that you clicked on the wrong area while placing your spots, don't worry, you can delete this last spot easily. Right-click on the spot you need to delete and choose (Delete current spot). And if you want to start over and delete the entire path, click here. And let's now test it and see how it looks. This icon here is for publishing the project, Hit it. By default, the project will be published to the folder where we have chosen previously when we created the project. So you don't need to change anything here except one thing. The layout of the viewing window inside the web browser. I always use mobile full-page (iframe), as it is responsive and centered in the page. So it will look good on any browsers view. Hit Publish. Let's go to the published folder on your computer and open the HTML file. Nice. The product will spin by itself for one fall around and then stops. But of course, you can drag and spin manually anytime. And here is, our hotspot. Works perfectly. But the control buttons here are not clear enough. I can change their color or I can choose a different skin. Let's do that. I will go back to WebRotate. And since we are here, I'll save my project and proceed. I will go to the interface tab again, and I will choose difference skin. Then I will hit Publish button again. It will overwrite the changes on the previous published file. That's it. Looks perfect. Now. You need to know that you can add more than one hotspot on your product 360 spin if you want, and each hotspot can have a different action. For that. Just click on Add hotspot again and follow the previous steps. You can make the new hotspot when clicked to open up text content box, for example, And you can customize this text layout just the way you want. Or if you want, you can tell your new hotspot to open up a web page that contains further information about that product. Or a link for a video, or even more. And now let's jump to the other software.
12. Using Sirv Platform: SIRV an online platform for 360 degree products spinning. So you don't need to install it on your computer, You will be working directly on the web browser. It is more simple than WebRotate 360, so it has some limitations. The Hotspot feature, for example, still in testing period and under improvements. Also compared to WebRotate 360, WebRotate has more advantages when your project is published. Spin animations are smoother Than Sirv, and also your published files are stored on your computer so you can host them wherever you want. Not just embed them to a website. Rather than that, Sirv is a good platform. It is fast to get your 360 Project spinning in no time! They have different packages for pricing depending on the storage size as the images will be stored online on their server. And animations are published using their online platform. And they offer five gigabyte for free so you can try it out. As I said, serve is really simple platform. I will go over it quickly and show you how it works. I'm already logged in. I have just created a free account for this class purpose. And this is your default dashboard, Once you are logged in, you will see two folders. One for spins, the other for images. You can upload your resized and sorted image files here. And the platform converts them to animated spin right away. Inside the images folder, create a new folder. Right-click, create New Folder. Or you can do that from the shortcut here. Name your folder. Once done, Sirv will take you inside this folder. Upload the ready images here by dragging all images at once and dropping them in here. Or you can click here. On Upload. The platform will upload and process the images in no time. Once done processing, you will see here the spin is ready. Check it out. That was quick, right? If you wish to do some customization on your spin, you can do that here. All sections are sorted here and easy to understand. Now, our spin animation is ready, how to use it on other websites? All you have to do is copy the embed link here and paste it on your HTML website through your HTML editor. If you don't have any knowledge in HTML. And you have a website that is made using WordPress or Shopify or other e-commerce platforms. You can use the already free search plug-ins and extensions for that platform.
13. Sharing Your Spin Animations On Social Media: Sharing your spin animations on social media is easy. You can publish it as a GIF animation or a video file. Both will be displayed as a continuous spinning animation, as social media platforms are not designed for interactive object spinning views. But, along with sharing a static GIF animation or video, you can share a link of your spin where it takes the visitor to the website or page that contains your real interactive product view. To export a GIF Animation version of your spin on WebRotate 360, click on this icon here. Choose speed of rotation here, and choose the exported gif quality here. Note that the higher quality means also the bigger file size. Keep this box checked as we need our animation to keep spinning continuously. And since it is a static motion, you need to keep it looping. And here it is. Good-quality animated GIF image file. You can post it easily on Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn, and almost on all other social media platforms. On Sirv, also you can create a GIF animation of your spin. On your main dashboard. Click on the three dots on your spin file and choose Download as GIF. Choose the desired dimensions here. Sirv keep it proportional for you, but the maximum allowed width is 650 pixels. And here is the total number of frames, which are basically the total number of the uploaded images of the object. So, ours are 64 images. And here you can control the quality of your GIF file. Let me download it as is, so you can see how it looks. Also on Sirv, You can have your animation as a static video. Here. Also, you can integrate it directly from here to your Amazon account.
14. Final Thought: As we have reached the end of this class, I hope it was useful for you, as you know now how 360-degree product views are made, and you know already what tools you need and how to use them to shoot your products in 360, and prepare your images for editing and publishing using special softwares for that. And I know that you are excited now to start shooting and producing high-quality 360 views of objects. And I would love to see that. Please, share your work with us on the discussion section if possible, and feel free to ask anything related to this class. I'm here to help. If you have enjoyed this class and found it useful, please share this course link with others, cause someone might be looking for this class as you did. And also, your sharing can help me to make more classes like this one. Thank you.
Adam Bader, High-end Commercial Photographer
