By Connor Moriarty, Studio Manager and David Shiller, Publisher

In recent years, AI has started to make significant impacts in the world of lighting product photography. As businesses increasingly rely on compelling visuals to capture consumer attention, AI is poised to transform lighting product photography, offering unparalleled efficiency, accuracy, and creativity. Here are six ways that AI is set to reshape lighting product photography:

Dynamic Scene Generation & Customization

Almost everyone in the lighting industry is familiar with application images, even if they don’t know the term for it. These are images of a lighting product application, such as an oil refinery, hospital MRI suite, high end home, or office building, with a manufacturer’s fixtures installed. In some cases, they can be professional photographs of a real-world lighting installation. However, much more often a manufacturer marketing department arranges to photoshop the lighting product into an attractive, stock, application image. At least that’s how it has been done in the past.

Lighting Solution Development’s product photography studio has begun using Adobe’s new Photoshop Beta generative fill AI as a tool to customize scenes faster and more efficiently. It is faster at removing things from a scene, as well as extending / replacing elements of a scene, generating items that weren’t previously there, and ultimately offering significant flexibility to our clients with a specific creative vision.

Creative Storyboarding & Concepting

Typically, the longest and most laborious part of our photoshoot planning process is trying to understand our clients’ visions, ensuring we are all on the same page with what their expectations are. This usually means lots of emails, phone calls, sending reference images, and ultimately trusting that we understand their request.

AI now allows a faster visual storyboarding process. With revolutionary tools such as Midjourney and DALL-E, we can turn words into imagery, making our client conversations heavily visual, and making the process much more efficient. These tools aren’t quite good enough to generate final, high-quality product imagry, but what they are great at is quickly generating a rough draft of what we want to do. Describing colors, compositions, or overall aesthetics can be virtually impossible with words, but AI can turn those words into pictures, allowing us to show, not tell. Our clients have been very receptive to this method and appreciate us putting in the work to show them what we are thinking.

Automated Editing and Retouching

Traditionally, product photographers have spent countless hours manually editing and retouching images to ensure they meet the desired standards. However, AI-powered tools are now capable of automating these processes with astonishing precision. By leveraging machine learning algorithms, AI can analyze and enhance lighting product images, correcting imperfections, adjusting lighting and colors, and even removing backgrounds. This automation not only saves photographers valuable time but also ensures consistent and high-quality results across a large number of images.

Intelligent Image Recognition & Tagging

Product photographers often face the daunting task of cataloging and organizing vast collections of images. AI brings a game-changing solution by utilizing advanced image recognition algorithms. These algorithms can analyze visual content and automatically tag products based on their attributes, such as color, shape, or material. This enables photographers and businesses to quickly search, sort, and retrieve images, simplifying the process of asset management and streamlining workflows. Pivoting from asset creation to asset usage, AI can influence the way we use the images that we create.

Virtual Installation & Augmented Reality

One of the challenges in the e-commerce industry is bridging the gap between online shopping and the tangible experience of experiencing installed lighting products in a space. In the past, we’ve done our best by creating more engaging, interactive content such as 360° spins, infographics, and application images, but these only get you so far.

AI-powered virtual installation solutions are set to transform this aspect of lighting product photography. By combining computer vision and augmented reality (AR), AI algorithms can overlay virtual representations of lighting products onto images of interior or exterior application spaces. This enables consumers or specifiers to virtually move within a lit space, providing a more immersive and interactive online shopping experience.

Enhanced Image Search & Recommendation Systems

With the proliferation of e-commerce platforms, both consumers and specifiers are often overwhelmed with vast product catalogs. AI-powered image search and recommendation systems provide a solution to this information overload. By analyzing product images, AI algorithms can understand visual similarities, allowing users to search for products based on visual cues rather than relying solely on text-based searches. Furthermore, AI can leverage data on customer preferences and behaviors to offer personalized product recommendations, increasing customer engagement and conversion rates.

Conclusion

AI is transforming the lighting product photography industry in ways that were once unimaginable. From automated editing and retouching to virtual installation experiences and personalized recommendations, AI-powered solutions are revolutionizing the way businesses capture, enhance, and present their lighting products.

As we navigate this new AI journey, it’s important that we view it as a tool that can help make our clients’ imagery more efficient, creative, and successful. More information about Lighting Solution Development’s product photography service is here.

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