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Photographing Glass Products | PhotoRobot

Using PhotoRobot’s portable device, the CASE 850, in under 1 minute you can photograph glass products, post-process, and publish images in the cloud. Discover more in this guide to photographing glass products for e-commerce, and see how PhotoRobot’s CASE can streamline workflows in the studio.

Photography of glass products for e-commerce

Photographing glass and other reflective or semi-transparent products for e-commerce presents various challenges for photographers. To capture the perfect product photos, you often have to master lighting setups, camera settings, and post-processing for glass product photography. 

There can’t be any visible reflections, nor should there be poorly defined edges, or missing details. This is true from crystal and glassware, to sunglasses, gems, jewelry photography, or any products with reflective or semi-transparent elements.

In this post, we’ll share how to photograph glass and reflective products quickly and easily using PhotoRobot’s CASE 850.

Among our automated studio photography equipment, this is one of our more portable robots, able to fit in a personal vehicle and set up in a little over 20 minutes. Keep reading to discover the CASE in action, and to see just how effective PhotoRobot’s open design is for photographing glass products.

The Challenge: 360-degree photography of a glass cube

To show you just how fast PhotoRobot can photograph glass products, we’ve chosen to share how we recently went about photographing a glass cube for a client’s request. The order was to capture a single-row spinset of 24 images around a cubic, glass award.

For this type of 360 product photography, we chose to use our standard portable turntable device, the CASE. For lighting, we improvised a simple paper tent to negate unwanted reflections. 

Obviously, we could have chosen a standard photography tent, but we wanted to demonstrate the versatility of this workspace. It provides a range of creative options by using diffuse paper, allowing you to easily adapt the space for photographing various types of products. 

The Equipment: the CASE 850 and PhotoRobot_Controls

Product photography turntable, lights, camera and computer.

PhotoRobot’s CASE 850 is compact in size, highly portable, and fits into nearly any space available. The 850 mm glass plate ensures shadow-free photography, and finding the center of the product’s rotation is easy thanks to PhotoRobot’s laser positioning

For this project, we also installed a custom portal to work in combination with our improvised paper tent. We find these to work much more effectively than other ready-made solutions on the market. 

Assembly and prep time

Unloading and assembling the CASE took less than 20 minutes. This is standard for the device, as it's our most portable and mobile photography robot to date. In no time at all, we were set up on location and ready to begin shooting. All we had to do was prep the product. 

Camera targeting glass cube rotating on photo turntable.

From here, photographing our glass product can be done in under a minute. This is thanks to PhotoRobot’s software suite for automation and control, which also manages the heavy-lifting in publishing to the cloud and image post-processing.

360-degree shooting

With this glass product, it takes less than 20 seconds to snap all 24 photographs and upload them to the cloud. In less than 1 minute total, we can shoot, post-process, and publish to the cloud to be linked to any number of webpages. 

Photography software generating 360-degree spin image.

Simply trigger the sequence, and PhotoRobot_Controls takes over to automatically post-process according to the presets we have programmed for photographing glass products like this.

For this glass product, we used the following presets, and PhotoRobot handled the rest immediately after capturing the photos.

  • Automatic Cropping
  • Product Centering
  • Background Removal and Cleaning
  • Image Sharpening

Image post-processing and publishing to the cloud

All of the image post-processing is driven by PhotoRobot_Controls, our suite of software for full automation and control of our robots, post-processing, and image publishing. 

Capture to post-processing to publishing 360 spins.

In this example, we were using our Cloud version, which enables speedier production. Local post production would have required more time, approximately 10 seconds per image, so 4 minutes per spin. 

Using the Cloud version, this time is cut nearly in half. This is due to the fact that you simultaneously capture product photos while at the same time post-processing in the Cloud. The machine is fully automated with this entire process, meaning the only way you could possibly streamline workflows further is by prepping the next product in line for shooting.

The results

In under 1 minute, PhotoRobot was able to accomplish the following output.

  • Number of images: 24
  • Capture speed: 18 seconds (all 24 images)
  • Postprocess speed: 25 seconds (all 24 images)
  • Total production time: 43 seconds (all 24 images - including on-line CDN publishing via hyperlink / feed)

Technical Specifications and Equipment

Enrich your product photography with PhotoRobot

PhotoRobot specializes in product photography solutions, no matter the type of product. Whether it's for glass or other reflective and transparent objects, or another industry entirely like automobiles or heavy machinery, our line of robots include solutions for 360 product photography of products of all sizes.

To discover more about photographing glass products, or to meet our line of robots for yourself, contact us today to book a PhotoRobot demo.