Snuggle Hamster Designs recently did a soft rollout of "cutouts". Cutouts are where we take Zazzle's own in situ mockup image and cut the background out for you. Here's an example from one of our users:
As you know there are plenty of tools available for doing background removal. But when you want to get the best results there is no substitute for using Photoshop to create a very precise mask. What we do is we create these masks by hand and save them to our database. We automatically match them to images you import from Zazzle. So now you don't have any work to do to get them. Your cutout(s) are just there on your Store > Images page for you to download and use:
No guesswork. No special tools. No tedium. And the image will be of the highest resolution Zazzle offers: 2048x2048 pixels. You can just download the image and use it in your favorite image editor to add it to some background you want, add shadows and effects, and off you go.
This is a Premium feature. You'll have access to this and all the other Premium features if you pay the $19/mo subscription fee. We haven't changed the fee at all since starting. We have just kept adding more features. That's our plan going forward too.
There are some caveats worth noting. For one thing, if you switch on watermarks on Zazzle then 2048x2048 images will have watermarks. We can't get rid of those. But you'll see a checkbox allowing you to switch to using 1000x1000 source images. Those won't have watermarks. You can of course switch that off in Zazzle too if you want high res cutouts.
We haven't made cutouts for every possible preview image from Zazzle and probably never will. Our current goal is to hit 50% coverage soon. We are above 25% already. We calculate coverage by taking every product imported into SHD and figuring out how many of them have at least one cutout available. So presently about 1 out of 4 of your products are likely to have cutouts already. And we are continuing to hand-craft more masks so more of your products will have cutouts.
Finally. If you do not have a Premium agency then you'll see a low-res (500x500 pixel) preview of a given cutout with watermarks on it.
Is this a massive game changer? Nah. You've got plenty of tools to choose from. Some of them do okay with some of your products. Sometimes the results are stellar. Sometimes they are very lackluster. But this is super easy. Like I said. It's just there. Already cut out. Ready to use. Already cut about as well as a graphic artist could do by hand using Photoshop.
What I do is create a background that is the same size as the Zazzle image, then I overlay the Zazzle image over the background, and erase the shape of the product from the background using the product as a guide.
I then delete the product layer, and I'm left with a background with a product-shaped "hole" in it.
i can simply drop that background as an overlay on every example of the product, whatever design I have on it, using it over and over again! Here's an example.
