Image retouching for a film prop rental house

The problem

The rental house stores tens of thousands of props, from a modest copper mould to a collector's piece, and every one of them needs a catalogue photo a production designer can actually work from. Shots were taken in the storerooms, on a phone, between two racks: cluttered backgrounds, yellow light, neighbouring props in frame. Each image then went out for manual retouching, counted in tens of minutes, for a result that varied from one operator to the next. The catalogue moved slower than the acquisitions, and whole sections of the stock stayed invisible to clients.

What we built

A pipeline that takes the raw photo and returns a catalogue image. The prop is cut out, the background replaced with the company's neutral ground, exposure and white balance brought back to a common reference, and a consistent drop shadow recomposed so every entry looks like the others. It runs in batches over the day's uploads, and each processed image is filed automatically against the matching prop, linked to its reference. Doubtful cases, transparent objects and highly reflective pieces, are held in a review queue rather than shipped half-right.

How it went

We started from several hundred existing photos and from entries already retouched by hand, which served as the quality reference. The first two weeks went on the cut-out and on detecting the cases to hold back, then on colour normalisation, calibrated with the catalogue manager against props he knew by heart. Rollout went storeroom by storeroom, comparing each processed batch against the historical entries before moving on.

Today

The catalogue now fills at the pace of acquisitions rather than the pace of retouching. Photos taken in the storeroom during the day are online the next morning, and the entries finally have the consistency a professional catalogue is expected to have.