Online retail of home goods is very visual. When purchasing a piece of consumer electronics, technical features are important and influence the buying decision, but when shoppers are buying a velvet sofa or a hand-woven wicker basket, they make all their decisions on the screen. A customer has to just see a picture of a wool rug or a smooth ceramic vase to feel the luxurious feel or smooth finish. However, there are many home decor companies that are failing to meet the needs of their customers, who are seeing a lot of content, due to the use of simple automated editing tools.
Unfortunately these “quick fix” algorithms often obliterate complex detail. The days of a basic image background removal service are gone and the time has come to have a professional one to truly capture the essence and quality of a product in a saturated market.
Why Home Décor Products Are the Hardest Images to Edit
The ecommerce photography category of homeware is arguably the trickiest. One single lifestyle or product photo shoot can have a clear glass coffee table, a soft faux-fur throw, a highly reflective metallic lamp, and a porous stone sculpture. All these materials respond to light, shadow, and background colours in completely different ways.
Removing a background from a solid, geometric object, such as a smartphone, is fairly easy. However, when trying to separate a faux-fur blanket, you’re facing thousands of tiny, flying fibres. Automated AI tools work on a stark contrast and rigid algorithms and seek out hard lines to cut. They just don’t understand a fuzzy edge or a frosted glass vase that is semi-transparent. The outcome is invariably a product which is blocky and lacks the tactile qualities that made it desirable in the first place, and is made of plastic.
How AI Background Removal Damages Home Décor Product Images
Ecommerce brands that focus on speed and inexpensive software are extremely lacking in quality. Automated tools often create “halos” of the original background, which look like amateur work. Even worse, they cut out all the necessary textures with ferocious clipping paths. A high quality velvet pillow, that was so expensive, suddenly turns into a flat piece of paper. The subtle contrast of the rattle in the chair gives way to chunky and unrefined background color caught up in the rattle’s rips.
There is a real loss of texture, which affects the bottom line. Without being able to see for yourself, the premium quality of materials, a customer will not be prepared to pay a premium price. In addition, inaccurate representations result in a huge volume of returns. Once the product reaches the customer’s door, and they see it is dramatically different from the artificially smoothed, poorly cut image they’ve seen online, trust is lost and they’re gone for good.
Why Professional Editors Deliver Better Homeware Images
It’s not only technology that is necessary to maintain the absolute integrity of homeware products, it’s also the trained human eye. That’s where it’s all or nothing as far as home décor brands are concerned if they partner with a specialized image background removal service.
A one-click magic wand is not used by all professional editors. Rather, they employ sophisticated and refined methods. Perfect and crisp clipping is achieved with manual, hand-drawn paths and complex image masking for hard goods and not a single fur, wool, or tassel is lost with image masking in soft edges.
Also, a good image background removal service is able to understand how to maintain lighting continuity. If a background is removed with an AI tool, the shadows and reflections from the original image are typically also removed. Professional editors carefully replicate real drop shadows or reflections allowing the product to look like it’s standing on the ground, rather than awkwardly floating in a sea of pure white space.
Benefits of Professional Image Background Removal Services
The transition from automated algorithms to a first-class image background removal service can have real-world effects on your entire ecommerce ecosystem. When it comes to background removal, professional services realize that there is no single correct way to do background removal for elaborate interior decoration.
- Maximized Perceived Value: Perfection in the rendering of textures creates a luxurious look. Great photos will make your product look good enough to be worth the extra money.
- Cross-Platform Consistency: Your products are displayed on your site, Amazon and/or a digital catalog, but it is important that they have a consistent, clean appearance that meets the rigorous rules of the marketplace.
- Focus on core business: edit complex homeware images in-house without wasting time and creativity. Outsourcing lets your staff concentrate on marketing and product development, while the experts work on the pixels.
- Fewer Product Returns: Honest and hyper-accurate imagery means customers will know exactly what they are getting, and they will have the right expectations from the first click of “add to cart.
Final Thoughts
Your imagery is your storefront window, your sales pitch and your brand identity all in one for the highly competitive home décor market. Your photos need to do the heavy lifting since your customers will not be able to touch your products. Using automated solutions that eat away at edges and ruin your great, textured products and inventory is an expensive error that costs you conversions.
To break out and make a statement, brands need to raise their visual standards. For example, Visuals Clipping is aware of the precision required for intricate textures to come alive when it involves homeware. With the help of a special image background removal service, brands can make sure that every fiber, weave and glass edge are flawlessly preserved. Don’t let algorithms crush your gorgeous products! Pay to have all your clippings done professionally and have genuine quality in every single pixel of your home décor.
