Tutorial: Cutting the mannequin out of images

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15 Oct 2013

PSDClip is a company based in Leicester that not only clip, crop and remove backgrounds, they also specialise in invisible mannequins, which is great way to instantly professionalise your product imagery. They’re well aware of the challenges facing eBay sellers with the new picture standards and are ready to process your images if you need help, however they’ve also been kind enough to share some of their secrets in case you want to do the work yourself.

Today Richard from PSDclip shares the secret of how to produce great clothing images without having a mannequin showing in the final image. You’ll need Photoshop, but if you’ve deep inventory stunning images are worth spending a little time on. (You can click any of the tutorial pictures to get full size images)

Typical product shot using a mannequin

Here’s the typical product shot that most online sellers are capable of producing and alongside it is the final result we’re aiming to achieve

Step 1

Using the pen tool in Photoshop clip around the product leaving part of the mannequin in place

Step 2

Using the pen tool again clip around the neckline and roughly finish the path above.

Step 3

Take a picture of the inside of the garment like below.

Step 4

With the path you made around the neck selected, paste the neck line into the selection [edit/paste special/paste into]

Step 5

Scale the neck to fit to required size using the transform tool also warp if needed. Once you are happy with the placement of the inside neck add a realistic shadow by selecting the neck image layer and click blending options. Depending on size add an inner shadow to the layer for this example we used the following values. Angle – 90, Opacity – 67, Distance – 1, Choke – 15, Size – 14.

Step 6

To finish the image off clip the back of the neckline and add a white background job done!

If you don’t have the time, skills or software to edit images yourself, PSDclip prices start from £1.25 per image. This includes clipping paths and removing backgrounds creating an invisible mannequin effect. PSDclip have offices in India so their prices are very competitive, however they are always on the other end of the telephone in the UK where you can speak to a friendly advisor.

One Response

John Williams says:

17 October 2013 at 3:18 pm

Richard’s tips are practical advice for smaller volumes where time is available to spend on post-production. For larger volumes, ecommerce sellers often outsource background removal to specialists like PSDClip to lower their costs of image production.

Work Smarter, not harder…
Using the invisible mannequin is an example of a better process than digitally inserting the back of garments – it is simple, saves time and gets products to pixels faster.

Further, automation technology is available to achieve the invisible mannequin look AND remove the background at capture in a single step for even higher image production volumes (+100’s of items per week) and/or faster time-to-market (hours instead of days.)

Great post – valuable to all ecommerce sellers!

John