Question on How to Best Shoot Clothes

[johnstern]

Hi, I have general questions on best practice to shoot studio quality images of clothes on mannequins for display in an online catalog.
Which camera type/specs are best for reducing extra digital editing of photos such as contrast/brightness, cropping, resizing. I am saving and displaying the images as jpg's.

What is the best set up to get high quality images with the least amount of editing?
Currently I use a Sony 10mp digital camera. The problem is I have to individually recrop each image to remove excess space between the clothing item and edge of the frame. I was wondering is there a way to do this within the shooting process or to automatically crop images.

I already run batch process for brightness and contrast. I just bought softboxes to help diffuse light and reduce digital editing. Now I need to get the correct camera and efficient shooting and editing techniques down.

Does anyone do this, shoot clothes on mannequins for professional online cataloging? Could you give help tips?

Thanks, John

[OsmosisStudios]

Set up the mannequin in front of your backdrop, setup your lights where you want them and put the camera on a tripod. That's really the only way of being able of getting consistent results. Using manual exposure, manual white balance, etc. Camera type doesnt matter as long as what you can do is repeatable.