Picture Instruments - A Customizable Automation Solution with Robin Ochs and Austin Timyan

Summary

Picture Instruments is a maker of automated imaging devices and software, everything from all in one studio solutions with automated product & lighting control, to plugins and stand alone software packages. Daniel had the pleasure of hosting Robin Ochs and Austin Timyan on the podcast for this episode, so they could share with him a bit about the origins of the company and where they see themselves growing in the future.

Key Takeaways

• The companies growth has been organic, and a bit niche focused. Picture Instruments has built its features and software components based on the needs of customers as they come. Wine sellers, car companies and dealerships, and beyond.
• While each unique customers solution is specific to them, Picture Instruments doesn't overextend on the customization. Features are developed that benefit as many customers as possible.
• Picture Instruments also sells some of its software as stand alone pieces, available to end users who need plugins for various types of work.

Full episode transcript

Daniel Jester:

From Creative Force, I'm Daniel Jester and this is the E-commerce Content Creation Podcast. Picture Instruments is a maker of automated imaging devices and software, everything from all in one studio solutions with automated product and lighting control to plugins and standalone software packages. I had the pleasure of hosting Robin Ochs and Austin Timyan on the podcast for this episode so they could share with me a bit about the origins of the company and where they see themselves growing in the future.

Robin Ochs:

The next big topic is 3D content production. As Austin mentioned, a lot of images in a spin this remove background are a good basis for 3D photogrammetry.

Daniel Jester:

A quick shout out to Jorge, who met up with me in Barcelona back in September and helped pull together this episode with his colleagues at Picture Instruments. Now, let's jump in with Robin and Austin. This is the E-commerce Content Creation Podcast. I'm your host, Daniel Jester. Joining me for this episode, I have two members of the team from Picture Instruments, Robin Ochs and Austin Timyan. Welcome to the podcast.

Robin Ochs:

Hello.

Austin Timyan:

Hello, Daniel. Thanks for having us.

Daniel Jester:

Your colleague Jorge came down to Barcelona for the Pixels Flow event in Barcelona. Jorge found me at the cocktail the night before the flow event. Let me know about Picture Instruments, let me know that he was a fan of the podcast. We got some introductions going and I spoke to the two of you last week and you gave me a really interesting story about who Picture Instruments is and how the company was founded. Robin, I'm going to throw it to you to tell us that story. I was unfamiliar with Picture Instruments before I met Jorge and I think maybe many of our listeners are. Robin, take it away. Tell us who is and what is Picture Instruments?

Robin Ochs:

Let me start from the beginning. Before I had Picture Instruments, I had a company and we made audio plugins for music production. After I decided to start something in the visual industry, I had an idea for a calibrating software and searched for a developer. I started with a student and told him my vision and he said yeah, let's do it. After a few weeks, when we started programming and preparing a website and everything, I met a guy on an exhibition at a video booth. It was Torson [inaudible 00:02:31], who invented the freemask system for Hensel. I don't know if you're familiar with it. It's a system there you can switch between two flash groups, one for the normal-lit image and one for a backlit image to use it as a mask to automatically remove the background. Yeah, I was excited about this technology and he told me the only things they are missing is a software which can automatically post process these images to remove the background automatically while shooting.

I asked my developer, "Hey, maybe let's switch to get a good introduction in the photo industry, and let's try to do this software." He told me, "Oh, maybe it's a week of work to have a proof of concept." Yeah, and then we started right away. I contacted Torson and told him, "Hey, we do it. We do the software, we realize your idea." He didn't answer me but I thought, let's do it anyway. I was amazed by the idea and I thought, if Hensel don't want someone else will need it or find it useful. We started right away.

But of course, until we had a product which is ready for the market, we need a licensing server and all the things around including color management and so on. It took us almost a year, but then I contacted Torson again and after an hour, he gave me a call and oh, let's meet Hensel. Two days later we meet tens and made a handshake deal for distribution and they started distributing my software. This was the start of Picture Instruments and it's the start of our product photography machine and car studios and everything, what we have today.

Daniel Jester:

You can do a lot of automation if you control the hardware and the software side of things, but your approach to this is a little bit different. That's one of the things that I think is really interesting about Picture Instruments. Robin, tell us a little bit about how you formulated this approach because it's a little bit of a, I don't know if segmentation is the right word, but you have bits and pieces of the software and the hardware and your customers can come to you and take the parts that they need or want to implement a solution that works for how they work or how their studio operates.

Robin Ochs:

Yeah, I think it's a bit on the one hand how we grow and on the other hand, how we can deliver what our customers need or want. After we made this first piece of software to remove the background, first I thought, oh, we have the solution and Hensel have the solution. Every customer can build what the customer wants to build. But after a while, customer contacted me and asked me, "Hey, we don't want to assemble our machines ourself. We are not [inaudible 00:05:08], we don't have a metal company," and so on. And then wine company come to us and said, "Hey, we need to shoot wine bottles and wine bottles are not shoot in a normal machine." they said, "Please build something for us." And then I took the challenge and we built something. And then the second piece of software is the [inaudible 00:05:28] shot software started the development.

We had the [inaudible 00:05:31] shot software and the mask integrator software. One software controls the turntable, controls the light and then it hand over the images to mask integrator. Mask integrator can operate, makes a background removal while [inaudible 00:05:43] shot is going on with the shooting. In the end, we attached two more softwares. One is crop and recess for the post-processing. If you want to output the images in several formats for several platforms with different backgrounds and so on, there can be a job list and all images can run through the job list while the customer is taking pictures for the next process. Can enter the next product number, can start the next shooting process while crop and recess post processing images from the last process, including retouching service. If you want to have images retouched, we can upload it to retouching service or server, no matter which company does the retouching.

But after the retouching, it can be re-imported to crop and recess again to make several batch processing based on the full resolution retouching and we're touching. The forest part of our software system is in 360 WebSpin software. If you want to shoot 360 WebSpin with interactive views, then this software can process these images and we also have a separated player plugin. If the customer wants to include a bigger amount of numbers of images to their own website, we can deliver as a player, we can deliver the solution for shooting the products and so on.

These four pieces of software which behave like one software is they communicate with each other, but are still separate and flexible makes us flexible to deliver custom solutions for special needs. We have a lot of customers. One customer for example, is a car company in Switzerland. They want to control our system with their system. We made an API for them so they can hand over the car vehicle identification number, they can start our system with their device, our system tells their system if the shoot is finished and so on. This way we are most flexible.

Daniel Jester:

I'm glad you brought up the car company. I think this is a good opportunity to pass it over to Austin because this specific niche of solving this problem, which cars is one of those industries I guess that obviously recognized the value of having their inventory photographed really well and available on their website so that customers could shop and see what's going on. But it's also one of those things that's really challenging to shoot. Cars are big and they're reflective and they've got a lot of different angles and surfaces. Austin, tell us a little bit, is it the car niche that brought Picture Instruments to the US? Do I have that right? Tell me a little bit about how that was born, the US side of the business.

Austin Timyan:

I think it was 2015 or 2016. I was actually going through my old emails to try and find when Robin and I first met. But I saw a video on YouTube where Picture Instruments was talking about the wine box, the wine shoot machine. At the time, I was working for an automotive reconditioning company. Cleaning cars, cosmetic repairs, paint work, basically anything that is needed to take a used car and make it ready for the lot for car dealerships. We were processing over a thousand cars a month and with that type of volume, we wanted to get into photography and actually have been since about 2010. It's interesting you say car dealers recognize the importance of photos. It actually took them a while to recognize how helpful for the sales process having really high quality, high quantity photo sets for the clients were.

We started off with curtains and fluorescent lights and slowly professionalized the photography studio for cars. In 2016, I see this video of the wine box and immediately called Picture Instruments and say, "Hey, wine bottles are glass. Wine bottles are reflective. You have to have a very well controlled studio. Could we utilize your software for automotive?" That's how our relationship started. Picture Instruments was one of our vendors and over the course of about a year, we modified the software to control a different type of turntable at different speeds, different needs. We were using flashes because it was such a large space where the wine box was using LEDs.

It went from 10 minutes with an employee that had to be highly trained to five minutes with an employee that still required training to operate the studio, but it was a lot more consistent and easy to use. It was a bit of a gamble on the part of the company I was working for. We spent a lot of money on the project but still to this day, that studio is operating without much change and it has shot hundreds of thousands of cars. Definitely a success.

Daniel Jester:

Yeah, the turntable is the game changer on large object photography, especially a car. Because a car isn't even just a big heavy thing. A big heavy thing, you can get a bunch of people and you can rotate and lift it, but a car, you can't do that. The only way to turn it to get your different angles is either move the camera or move the car. To move the car under its own power, you need a ton of space to be able to just turn it around. The turntable is a game changer and that in and of itself I think is a super powerful business case for anybody shooting anything big. I'm going to share this story really quick because I wish that I was aware. I was vaguely aware of some companies that were doing automated turntable devices, certainly at a smaller scale, but when I was working for Amazon, we did a shoot in Las Vegas during the big furniture home goods show there because many of the companies that were at this show were going to be selling or were already selling some of their products on Amazon.

The last day of the shoot, I had 40 grandfather clocks that I had to shoot. After we moved one of the grandfather clocks on set, and when I say on set, we were in the middle of a showroom building a set out of whatever we had brought with us. Once we got one of the grandfather clocks on set, I was like, it's going to take us two hours to shoot this thing just because of how hard it is to move just to get the different angles and the things like that. My solution at the time was a turntable, but I didn't think to go say, does anybody out here make a turntable for photography?

I sent our assistant to a hardware store to buy a furniture dolly and a piece of plywood that we wrapped in white paper and made our own turntable, or not even a turntable but just a cart that we could move onto set, then we could rotate it ourselves. That saved us a bunch of time, but imagine if you're shooting something that big and that heavy day in day out, if it was just automatically moving itself after every shot was completed. The business case on just physically handling the product alone is incredibly powerful.

Robin Ochs:

For [inaudible 00:12:38] request from Austin for the car studio, brought up the fifth software into our program, which is a chroma mask for background removal via green screen because we thought, oh, if we have all the system, it communicates with controlling, it makes background removal, why not bring in a second keying algorithm to the same software and use it for car photography? Because Austin told me I want to have a background with a green screen, I want to put different banners for different dealers behind the cars and this brought the next solution for green screen. It seems that our whole life or our whole company and a lot of solutions are here because customers asks us for that and we said, hey, let's make it happen.

Daniel Jester:

Yeah, that's the thing I want to talk about next that I really appreciate about companies like yours, like Picture Instruments, that it's been built off of solving the problems of your potential customers and just opening up that line of dialogue. Because Picture Instruments, you have a collection of products that you sell, but at the end of the day, it sounds like you've been able to come up with an entire suite. I've been on the Picture Instruments website. There's an entire suite of modules and pieces of software, combinations of software and hardware that solve all kinds of photography problems that aren't inherently solvable through Capture One or Photoshop or things like that. I guess let's just talk a little bit about that philosophy. Is there any problem for your customers that you aren't willing to solve?

Robin Ochs:

So far, we haven't found any customer asking us for something which we was not able to solve. Maybe in the end, it's sometimes a question of the budget. If people ask us and want to have something really advanced and really special, nobody else need it and they don't have a budget for it, then it could be a problem. But in the end it's like problem-solving and good thing is our philosophy is never give something exclusive to clients. 90% or 80% of what customer asking us is good for the whole system. It's good for other customers as well. The company grows, the software grows, and it's getting more possibilities from time to time. In the meanwhile, we build a complete meter data system, which we can now use for several applications.

We can use it to re-import images, to name images after they are going to a retouching service. We can use it to have different jobs or different kind of articles for different purposes for different whatever. It makes us very flexible solving the solutions and always having a discussion with the customer how to integrate it in our system in a way that everyone can profit from it and not the only customer. 90% of the time, we find a smart way to integrate it in a clever way so it makes the software better and it's not a one customer solution.

Daniel Jester:

Very interesting. Austin, I want to ask, at what point did you make the jump to join the team at Picture Instruments? That's the first part of the question. The second part is I think the United States studios have an interesting relationship with automation and I think there's still a ton of opportunity in the US for this type of studio automation. Not to muddy the waters too much, but my first question is, I'm just curious about at what point did you make the jump to join the team? The second part is how have your conversations been with studios and how has your philosophy around problem-solving, how has it landed with some of your customers or potential customers here in the US?

Austin Timyan:

I made the jump to join the Picture Instruments team a year ago, actually. It's coming up on a year January 1st here. But as I mentioned, our first relationship was vendor client. Picture Instruments developing software for the reconditioning business, and then a few years after that, I actually started reselling Picture Instrument software here in the United States independently. That was specifically in the automotive space. That flows into your next question. Surprisingly, car dealers, especially high volume groups, were really early adopters to this automation thing. It has a lot to do with the quantity of images and video footage that they want for every single piece of inventory. Because used or new cars, you need actual images of the object, whereas for other objects, you can just take a picture of one article of clothing and it covers any size and object. Really, starting in automotive we had a lot of success first over in Europe with the Volkswagen group and Porsche in Central Europe, and then coming over to the United States with a company called Shift, which is on the west coast.

They do all online sales and then a number of other large dealer groups that wanted a full solution for automotive from the hardware to the software, including training and upkeep. That was really the industry that I knew and it was where we started our focus, but now we're shifting more to targeting commercial studios as well as e-commerce studios, which I would call a commercial studio that's focused on quantity and quality. But on the commercial side, a lot of these studios view automated photography machines as a toy. They think, oh, the quality is not going to be there. We have all this equipment and all these experts. Why would we want to buy another piece of machinery we're just not going to use? Our mission is to prove them otherwise. The 360 content is a great add-on for clients if they want to do interactive spin. 360 video in a very controlled environment where you can actually automate the lighting control.

You're producing what I would call at least social media grade video clips for advertising. Now, as we talked about last week, we're getting automatic transparencies of every single angle of the product, including the top and the bottom. With the customization, we can add multiple heights to that 360 spin. With the transparent images, it's an ideal place to start for photogrammetry to move into 3D modeling. It's not taking over the industry, it's not something you see in every single store, but having the ability to really, just get all the visual content you can imagine with the push of a few buttons, that has value on top of the magazine quality photo shoots. We haven't had a ton of success with the commercial studios, but they're coming around to it. The more e-commerce focused studios, of course they get it. They want to deliver hundreds of images and dozens of video clips to their clients and our software and our hardware allows them to do that off the shelf.

Daniel Jester:

That's been my observation with the automated devices as well is that pretty compelling video clips that would be great for social and look very highly-produced are a pretty lightweight lift with an automated device. If you have an automated way of controlling the movement of the product or the light, the light is actually a really clever one. We did this with Ember a few years ago where the product was stationary, the camera was stationary, and all we did was sweep some light across it and we just had it on a little automated turntable that the light was sitting on and just moved it across. That becomes a really well-produced piece of social media content that looks really great and is not that hard to do if you're equipped with some automated devices. If you can move the product, if you can move the lights, if you can move the camera.

The other thing that was really interesting was thinking about, there's a lot of these re-commerce companies, Trove comes to mind, that are actually very similar to used car dealerships. I hadn't really made that connection before, but you're absolutely right. A used car dealership that wants to have a presence online needs to have every piece of inventory photographed in as much detail as possible. The same is true for a company like Trove. Every piece, every Patagonia jacket that comes in needs to be photographed because they're all going to be unique, they're going to have varying degrees of wear and tear that needs to be documented. I've often thought that a re-commerce company and an automated device manufacturer is a match made in heaven because you can just move so quickly because you have to shoot almost everything that comes through your door.

Austin Timyan:

Those are big targets for us. Looking at companies that, especially on the high-end side where they're selling objects for a hundred to a thousand dollars, it makes a ton of sense. One thing we haven't mentioned yet today is the other part of Picture Instruments, which is more the consumer facing side where we have Photoshop plug-ins, Lightroom Final Cut Pro, Premiere, the whole nine yards. When you're talking about those video segments, to be able to control all the hardware to get the footage that you want, but also an automated fashion, send it over to After Effects and apply different templates for motion, using 4K resolution, the combination of the moving lights, the moving product, being able to do digital zooms and crops, there's really no limit to what you can produce.

As we have gone after some of these resellers, that's been a part of our value proposition is push a button and have an unlimited trove of content for any type of advertising, marketing, or e-commerce. This is still in the early stages of pushing it. Our focus has been Europe, but we're hoping over the next year to come back with some of these big name clients that are a proof of concept for what we can deliver.

Daniel Jester:

Yeah, and actually on the consumer facing side, I should mention it is the gift giving season now. I just saw a thing on LinkedIn, it looks like you guys have developed a plugin in conjunction with the guy from PiXimperfect. As somebody who doesn't love retouching my own photos, I have used his tutorials a lot to learn how to do stuff quickly and easily. For the listener of this podcast, if we're doing our official E-commerce Content Creation Podcast gift guide, Picture Instruments has a whole assortment of plugins for all different things that are geared towards the people that are doing the work. It's not necessarily a big commercial enterprise solution, but I need to be able to do this, this plugin does it really well. They're all on the website, which just to throw it out there now, picture-instruments.com and you can see all of that stuff. In the last few minutes, Robin, what's next for Picture Instruments? Where do you see the company growing? Where do you want to go in the next, let's say two to three years?

Robin Ochs:

Yeah, I think one thing is what Austin already mentioned and what we're talking about regarding the moving lights, controlling lights and so on. Here in Europe, we are next to selling machines. We also have a product photography service here in the United States and here in Europe. We started it because we had a lot of requests from small companies having only 50 items, 20 items. They thought, oh, buying a machine is $2,000. But then they found out it's not a $2,000 thing, and then we sought offering our services, not a bad thing. Here in Europe we have already a prototype where we can control and create animated light animations which are fired in combination with turntable control and camera control. We can record a repeatable situation on light and movement in the turntable. And then as Austin told, post-processing it automatically, more or less automatically, with different templates.

That's a big thing to improve it, make it better, make it perfect, bring it to our machines so other customer can profit from it, too. It's a thing we are using on our site. It has some technical hurdles to make it perfect and only if it is perfect we can sell it, but that's the thing we are working on. One thing that's already working, but maybe I quickly mention it, especially regarding light control. We have solutions which we started within Flash Studio and Austin brother's company is a detailing service, then we switch to LED to be more controllable and we found out that a backlit image is better the more even the light is. And then we had some customers again asking us for flash and better control light or better light quality with flashes. And then we made a combination using only LED for background removal and flashes for the front image.

And then we have some customers who already own some expensive [inaudible 00:25:31] lights and so on and they don't want to throw it away and they want to keep on using their own lights. As long as these lights supporting the mix protocol, they can use it in combination with our background removal backlight and our machine and our turntable and everything. I think into this direction we want to be more versatile. The next big topic is 3D content production. As Austin mentioned, a lot of images in the spin with remove background are a good basis for 3D photogrammetry, but it's not a click and be amazed story most of the time because 3D capturing is complicated.

Sometimes there are holes into the product. You can look inside. Sometimes there are reflective stuff inside and so on. I think offering product photography without retouching, you can do it. Maybe this retouching is better because you have sometimes small scratches, but I think if you are coming to 3D, retouching is obvious or post-production refining the products and this is a big step which we want to optimize or create a process which is working pretty fine.

Austin Timyan:

To add to what Robin was saying, or really more Daniel, what you brought up with unmesh from PiXimperfect, we had an incredible experience working with PiXimperfect on the PiXimperfect plugin. What we find is working with creatives, working with really smart artists who have a lot of experience and a big following, it's a great way for Picture Instruments to grow, great way for us to grow, to learn, to meet people. The combination of our programming experience and delivering things through the Adobe marketplace. For the next year, the next two years, we're always looking for artists and people like that to cooperate on a project with, we were actually just at Adobe Max last month and that was a big conversation we were having. How do we best use our experience and who can we match with to deliver a really cool and unique product? Shout out to our PiXimperfect plugin for Photoshop. Check it out.

Daniel Jester:

It makes a ton of sense to me. If it's not that heavy of a lift to take the technology that you've already developed and make it a little bit consumer facing, you become now a multichannel technologist company. You have enterprise solutions that are very advanced and then you have something that you can strip away the things that they don't need and sell it as a Photoshop plugin for the individual contributor to use, which I think is a really smart business model. I'm not a businessman, but sounds right to me. Last question before we wrap up the episode.

Robin, I'll throw it to you first and then Austin if you have a followup. We're asking everybody who comes on the show, what do you see as your biggest challenge in the next 12 months? Since you guys are a solution provider for a lot of studios, you can interpret it either way. You can tell me about what Picture Instruments sees as the biggest challenge in the coming year and also maybe what you're hearing from some of your customers is their biggest challenge in the next 12 months or so. Robin, we'll go to you first.

Robin Ochs:

Maybe I talk about the Picture Instruments side because everybody knows about the economic side and we hope it's getting better soon. But on our side, we started with machine learning early this year and we make very good progress. I think it's a big challenge to put it into all of our software in an applicable way that it's useful, that it's reliable, because we have what I saw in machine learning in the last months and years, it said it's only reliable, 80%, 90%, but what's up this last 10%? Is it if you want to have an automated process where people are not looking anymore, you can't upload bullshit to your online shop. This will be a big challenge to make it reliable, how to include it into our system on both sides.

In the end, everything comes together no matter if you're making plugins or if you're making product photography software. If you are developing something for calibrating, it's in the end also in our post-processing for the product photography to apply color looks, to apply color management or for neutral colors, calibration systems and so on. The next big challenge is machine learning from my side.

Daniel Jester:

Great answer. I love that answer. Thank you. Austin, what about from your perspective?

Austin Timyan:

Automotive has been a huge part of our business for all the reasons that we talked about before. A big challenge looking forward is how the market is going to come together around electric cars. There's a lot of uncertainty right now in whether or not the used car market, which has been so hot, is going to continue to thrive or if prices are going to come down. We're looking at this first and second generation of electric vehicles and there's a big question in the air about resale values, about whether people are going to completely abandon gas vehicles quickly and what does it matter to Picture Instruments?

There's been a pause in long-term investment in that whole space, specifically in hardware investments. What is our company going to look like? Are we going to have this massive car dealership on the most expensive real estate or are we going to move totally online and buy a warehouse? Everyone is holding their breath and seeing how things are unfolding, but our goal is to have the most compelling product offerings that'll fit whatever happens in the market. Our focus will continue to be software, software. How can we give the dealerships what they want with the minimum capital investment up front? That's what I'm looking at in the coming year.

Daniel Jester:

Very interesting. Austin, Robin, thank you so much for your time. Jorge is not on the call with us, but I wanted to pass on my appreciation for him coming to Barcelona and introducing himself. Picture Instruments is a really interesting company. I love your story. I really appreciate a company that builds their business off of problem-solving. To your point, Robin, about machine learning, it's not about doing something for the sake of being able to do it. It has to solve a problem. I think that's just a smart way to grow and a smart way to build relationships that are really meaningful for your business. Again, thank you so much to you two for your time and my thanks to Jorge for meeting up with me and introducing me to your company and I wish you guys all the best and we'll reconnect in a few months and see what 2023 looks like for you all.

Austin Timyan:

Absolutely.

Robin Ochs:

Thank you for having us here.

Austin Timyan:

Thank you, Daniel.

Daniel Jester:

That's it for this episode of the E-commerce Content Creation Podcast. Many thanks to our guests, Robin and Austin, and thanks to you for listening. I really mean that. Thank you. The show is produced by Creative Force, edited by Calvin Lanz. Special thanks to Sean O'Meara. I am your host, Daniel Jester. Until next time, my friends.