Remove The Background from your images
Remove The Background was one exhibitor that fascinated me when I saw their stand at the Ecommerce Expo exhibition this week. Basically they remove the background from your pictures for you, changing your photos from amateur snaps to professional product shots ready for your website or marketplace listings.
It’s about as simple a service as you can get, you upload your photos to the Remove The Background website, choose your options, pay your money and they deliver your finished images back to you ready for use.
Basic cost is just £0.79 pence per picture for producing your image on a white background in .jpg format. For a little extra you can choose to have a different file format, a different coloured or transparent background, faster delivery, resizing of images, rotation of the image and a whole lot more.
The thing that’s great about Remove The Background’s service is that there’s no change in price dependent on how complex the product shape. is. It’s the same cost to have a bicycle image cut out onto a white background compared to a much simpler bicycle helmet.
I asked about this and Remove The Background said, whilst one week a seller might have a number of complex images, they’ll end up loving the service so much they’ll have all their images processed. Remove The Background balance the easier images with the harder work and keep the cost the same.
If you want to give Remove The Background a trial they’ll process three images for free for you! There’s also no limit to how many images you send for processing and no minimum order quantity. Whether you upload 1000, 100 or just 10 images the price remains the same low £0.79 (plus any additional features you choose to order).
ebuyerfb says
10:09 am on 07/10/2012
Bonanza claims to offer a similar service for between $0.13 and $0.99. http://api.bonanza.com/background_burner
I’ve never used either so can’t really say if one is better than the other.
Chris Dawson says
6:16 pm on October 7th, 2012
That’s not a lot of use for people without a Bonanza account, and it’s an automated program not an expert human so it’s limited in efficacy.
Personally I still love Fluid Mask or the lower cost Bling! It from Vertus, but that’s time consuming. Cheap and expertly done for less than £1 is a bargain!
ebuyerfb says
9:10 pm on October 7th, 2012
You don’t have to be a Bonanza user to use it. They do include free “Background Burns” for Bonanza subscribers depending on whatever package they have but to everyone else it is still available. You do bring up a good point that a human isn’t involved. It sounds like Bonanza is instant but in the case of Remove the Background it takes anywhere from 24 hours to 1 week depending on how much you are willing to spend.
If I were in the market for either of these products I’d probably recommend using both. Use Bonanza’s for the simple pictures you want a quick turnaround on and send the complex ones and the ones that don’t turn out well to these guys.
Gerry007 says
9:42 pm on October 7th, 2012
.
Just found fluid mask 3.2 for £35 + P&P, tempted…
Merlo says
12:52 pm on October 8th, 2012
Thanks I’ve just bought it- the reviews are good and at that price it’s a bargain.
Merlo says
12:21 pm on October 10th, 2012
Just received Fluid Mask from Smartimages and it’s version 3 not 3.2. It may not be such a bargain as it won’t run on my windows 7 64bit PC.
Gary says
12:44 pm on October 10th, 2012
It is advertised as 3.2
Must admit don’t normally look at tech stuff on Tamebay but this article did catch my eye.
My experience is in these circumstances that rather than shipping the software back at a cost to the supplier they refund the whole purchase price in full or at least try to do a deal.
Be interesting to see how Smartimages handle the customer complaint.
Merlo says
1:51 pm on October 10th, 2012
All sorted; a prompt response from Smartimages to download the newest version off the manufactures website and then use the activation code off the CD.
Gary says
2:33 pm on October 10th, 2012
Very good. Let us know how you get on.
It is the batch processing feature that would interest me. If it can do 500 solid images at a time it could be worth a closer look.
The idea of fiddling around with a single image does not appeal at all as a seller of products where images are used once only for one item for a maximum of 10 days. I auto batch everything.
Remove the Background are no doubt of interest to sellers who require quality images that have a shelf life of several months or sellers of high value products.
Whirly says
7:11 am on 08/10/2012
That looks like a sweet product, cheers for the heads up.
Dom says
8:38 am on 08/10/2012
Indian sweat shops
Chris Dawson says
8:50 am on October 8th, 2012
Actually no, the production team are based in Hanoi, Vietnam and from the photo on their website they look like a team of young people having fun and making money.
I would doubt very much if it’s a sweat shop, I would suspect they’re educated, highly computer literate and equipped with the very latest graphics software to make the job semi-automated but with a human eye to ensure everything is done perfectly.
If you happen to drop past Hanoi they have an open invitation on their website to pop in and say hi, so go see for yourself
Marinus van den Elshout says
8:31 am on 09/10/2012
Hi Chris,
That a very nice article you did on Remove The Background. Thank you for that.
I recognize the example of the bycicle / helmet, since i was the one mentioning it to you
Judging by the responses it looks like people think this is some sort of automated service. It is not!
The photo of our production team on our website is dated 7 months back, our production team is WAY bigger than this and we are growing at a staggering rate.
You will always get the best result if a person does the actual work. What we do is not new, its just the way we do it.
Besides the actual editing we have automated ALL OTHER processes for a streamlined production. So yes, we are a group of people having fun and we do so with a group of skilled programmers that supply a high-end backend.
We are constantly working on improving the user experience, a large update will be implemented this month. We look forward to your feedback once it is implemented.
All the best,
Marinus van den Elshout
Managing Director RTB (Benelux)
Aliste says
4:46 am on 27/10/2012
The idea of fiddling around with a single image does not appeal at all as a seller of products where images are used once only for one item for a maximum of 10 days. I auto batch everything.