Consider this – You are an online seller, running a handmade jewelry store on Etsy. In order to get high-quality product images for your Etsy store, your only option is to hire a professional photographer. So, eCommerce product photography not only costs you a lot of money but also takes a lot of time. It may take you days or even weeks to get your images.
Now consider this – Instead of going through all this hassle, you just pick up your smartphone, click photographs using your phone camera, and that’s it. Your phone does the work for you.
That’s what artificial intelligence (AI) is capable of. Over the past few years, every other smartphone maker has been trying to use AI in some form or the other to improve their cameras.
It’s not just smartphones where we are seeing AI being used dominantly. Over the past decade, AI has embedded itself in almost all aspects of our lives. We use AI assistants in our homes, we interact with AI apps in our phones, the social media platforms we use are based on AI algorithms, and our workplaces involve engaging with AI in some form.
AI has shown interesting applications in education, retail, healthcare, entertainment, telecommunication, etc. As per Statista, the global market for AI is expected to reach a size of over half a trillion by 2024.
Today we’ll look at how AI apps are ushering in a new era for product photography. We’ll look at the various applications of AI in product photography.
Photo editing
Photo editing (or photo enhancement) is one of the most popular applications of AI in photography. Using machine learning algorithms, AI apps are making image editing accessible to everyone.
Even beginners can make use of such apps and retouch or enhance images with just a single tap. These AI apps are giving Photoshop a run for its money.
Using deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), AI apps can upscale low-resolution images, produce sharper images for printing, enhance photos, and add extra details.
These apps also offer smart editing features like tone and color correction, geometric correction, high dynamic range fusion, etc.
The smartphone cameras also have automatic image enhancement features to give a boost to your images.
Image recognition
Image recognition using machine learning has grown more advanced than ever. Many smartphone cameras use image recognition to click portrait images by identifying objects and people to blur them and create a portrait image.
AI is also being used for automatic object tagging like identifying people or objects in an image. AI can also create artificial backgrounds in images using technologies like Generative Adversarial Network (GAN).
AI photography assistant
AI is also being used as a smart photography assistant to intelligently guide users to make the most out of their cameras. It can control the camera settings like exposure, aperture, or suggest the best settings.
It also comes on its own in terms of ‘image stacking’ where it can take multiple photos to capture all details in a scene at various exposures. It can then take these multiple photos and merge them to create great results.
Photo management
AI also has applications in photo management where it simplifies the process of sorting out photos that are not needed.
It can also assist photographers in the culling process where they choose the best photographs from the bunch. Instead of looking through hundreds of photos, AI can do the job and instead sort out the good and bad photos to save time. AI can do the selection for photographers while saving time and reducing human error.
Lighting and coloring
AI is also being used in lighting and coloring of product images. It can colorize photos in just a few clicks or make edits based on how the AI has been trained.
Using machine learning, neural networks can be trained to detect significant elements and thus make it easy for photographers to crop unnecessary parts.
Conclusion
We only shared a few examples of how AI-powered apps are changing the face of product photography. One such app that can simplify product photography is DoMyShoot.
This AI app can simplify eCommerce product photography for online sellers. It allows users to get high-quality product images using nothing but their smartphone camera.
Whether someone is in the comfort of their home or in a production unit, they can use the app to get marketplace-ready images quickly and at a fraction of the cost. So, why not take DoMyShoot for a spin. Download the app now.