I work for a company that sells light bulbs and we are launching a new website, and as part of that we are updating the image for each light bulb we sell. Basically, I have about 10,000 images that need to be cropped and put on a white background. We have already edited a few thousand, but we are looking for a way to speed up the process. I’m not necessarily trying to automate this, I’m just trying to reduce the amount of time it takes for each image.
The part that takes the longest is selecting the light bulb itself. The fastest and most accurate way we have found to do this is to simply use the “Polygon Lasso” tool and follow the edge the best we can. We then refine the edge by smoothing it. Once the bulb is in its own layer and looks good, we just save the photoshop file. From there we batch process the images by resizing them and saving them to JPG that are optimized for the web.
So again, the part that takes the longest is “selecting” the bulb. As you can see in the image below, the bottom edge of the bulb is very hard to see. We aren’t Photoshop experts, but we know enough to be dangerous. What would you recommend to make this process a little faster? I’m open to anything.
