It would be amazing to give your shoes different environments for lifestyle photos for eCommerce product listings. Surely you wouldn’t physically go to different locations to do photoshoots for that, especially when you have AI, right?
When that’s the plan, the question is how to composite real shoes into AI backgrounds. Because you don’t want to risk the images generated by AI tools faking your carefully taken shoe photos.
Keep up with this blog. Here you are going to learn the easiest process (with an alternative) to fit your shoe photo on an AI background as if it was photographed that way.
AI Compositing Real Shoes into AI Backgrounds
Your newly taken precious shoe photo needs to go through proper image editing without compromising its originality in the slightest. The goal is to take it to a point where it looks like it was in the AI background from the beginning.
You can do this by following these steps, where AI tools will take over your burdens:
Step 1 | Take multi-angle shots of your shoes in natural light
You can jumpstart this step from your studio or home. Just make sure the shoe is getting natural light from the windows in the room. This way you won’t get a dark cast on your shoes that you might need to edit out later.
Another bright side of it is that the scattered natural light is so smooth that it doesn’t ruin the edges of the shoes when cutting out the background.
Step 2 | Remove the photographed background
First, you need to remove the background you used behind your shoes during the photo shoot. There are many tools on the internet for this simple editing, which have become more effective with the touch of AI over the past few years.
| The problem is – you can’t just pick randomly from them because you might not get a quality picture of the shoes after cutting out the backdrop. |
You can try Deep-Image to get quality results on the edges of shoes after cutting the background. You’ll also want to put the popular editing tool Photoroom at the top of your list.
Step 3 | Create a relevant and clutter-free surround with AI
This step has a technical name you may have already heard – AI product staging or virtual product staging. What you’re actually doing here is using AI to create a new environment around your background-free shoe image.
All AI image generators have ample opportunities to practice image-to-image and text-to-image by uploading your shoes. But it’s not like you just give a command and bang – you get what you want.
The command you give, that is, the prompt you write, must be so comprehensive that it includes everything that will and will not be in the image.
After giving this prompt, your turn to supervise will begin, where you will verify the results of AI tools. It’s very obvious that what you don’t get in Midjourney, you get in Nano Banana.
You can prompt a context like this by describing your shoe as broadly as possible in words:
[In focus is a pair of [properties of the shoes you photographed, for instance, retro navy blue-ish sneakers made of suede], placed gently on a staircase. The soft, sweet sunlight of the early morning casts the vibrant shadow of the sneakers on the stairs. The surrounding area is an urban street with the sunlight gently reflecting off the worn concrete. A little way behind, the soft morning sun shines on an old brick wall. The front wheel of a bicycle leaning against it casts its shadow on the wall. The image was taken in a natural frame parallel to the eye, with an 85mm lens at f/1.8 aperture, in 4K resolution.]
Step 4 | Refine your final images with AI image cleaners
After trying a few times, you got some relatively good images, but it’s still not completely zero flaws. Don’t give prompts again for these minor errors. It won’t do any good, rather, what you get later may ruin whatever good you got earlier.
So, you’d better save or download it right away when you get a result that is close to the expected.
| AI image cleaners focus on the flaws in the image rather than retouching the entire image. |
You will find this behavior in Nano Banana when Midjourney always gets busy with generation only. You can resort to an AI tool Claid, which is so effective at adjusting lighting effects that you don’t have to intervene manually.
Another important thing these AI flaw cleaning tools do is add a touch of glow and shadow around the shoes to make them look very realistic.
Manually Editing Your AI Lifestyle Shoe Photos [AI Composition Alternative]
In this method, steps 1 and 3 of the above 4 steps will remain unchanged, and steps 2 and 4 will be changed. This is where manual editing will come in instead of using AI tools.
For good reason, you need to be proficient in the technical aspects of widely used photo editing tools like Photoshop.
In Step 2, you need to apply clipping paths to separate the shoe from the background, where you need to draw an outline around the shoe very carefully.
Step 4 actually is all about taking care of the color and lighting issues of the entire image, including the shoe.
| The best way to tackle these technical challenges is to turn to professional shoe image editors. |
The thing is – this manual process is quite time-consuming indeed, but you can rely on it, which you won’t find with AI tools. You will feel this the most when it is time for you to work on a large scale.
Frequently Asked Questions About Compositing Real Shoes into AI Backgrounds
1. How do I set the shoe shadow right against the direction of light in the AI background?
If you want to do this while creating an AI image, your sample instructions in the prompt can be like this: “Bright sunlight from the top left is falling on the shoe, and the shadow of the shoe is casting on the right side of the shoe”.
2. Why doesn’t the floaty look disappear from my sneakers even after I apply a light shadow?
The shadow you added is definitely not a contact shadow, that’s why it happened. It’s very possible that your shadow isn’t touching the bottom of the shoe. To get rid of this floating look, you need to pull the shadow from the part of the shoe sole that touches the ground.
3. Is the photoshoot mandatory for compositing real shoes into AI backgrounds?
Yes, of course. Since you’re dealing with real-world shoes, there’s no better way to do it than this. You can never get the same authenticity for your actual shoes with AI as you can with photography.
4. Why don’t the colors of the shoe sole’s edges on the AI ground match the colors of those in the real world?
Basically, in the real world, when you place your shoes on the ground, the color of the ground reflects on the shoes, which is known as light wrap. AI often fails to follow this natural rule, which is why the shoes appear to be their own color in the image instead of the reflection.
5. How to avoid cutting off shoelaces when removing backgrounds?
This usually happens when using the magic-wand selection tool. If you want to stay in manual editing, you’ll be better off carefully using Photoshop’s Refine Edge brush here. And if you want to use AI, Cutout.Pro might be better.
Final Words
If you want to play the big game in product listing in ecommerce, it will be worth going for a combined process of both AI and manual. And that’s how to composite real shoes into AI backgrounds, which you can rely on to not fake your shoes.
When creating the shoe’s contours with AI, make sure your prompts don’t miss out on small details. Once you have the final AI image with the shoes, you can hand it over to the human photo editors. They’ll do the rest from here.
By now you have a pretty good idea of which AI flaws demand which kind of edits. But how do you know how well the editors you’re giving the photos to can handle those tasks?
This is where the retouching zone comes in. They are a team of professionals who understand and know the ins and outs of footwear products very well.
Ecommerce businesses have been reaping the benefits of photoshoots in their editing for over a decade. You can be one of them too. Just take their free trial, and that’s the first leap towards your journey to achieving a rising ROI.
