Software

The Crayfish turntables are designed to work with every DSLR camera and all computers. We deliberately designed them not to need a computer or software. You are now able to use your favourite capture software, PC or Mac and upgrade your camera at anytime knowing it will always work with the Crayfish. We use Adobe Photoshop and Sirv.com to create 360 photography. This is one of many ways you can produce an interactive image, and we will document how easy it is, and why Photoshop and Sirv are far superior to any specialized 360 software out there. Disclaimer – we are not affiliated with any products we recommend, we have been producing 360s for 15 years, and the solutions we suggest offer the best value for money, they are fastest – and produce the best results.

We recommend Photoshop and Sirv. Please watch our instruction video below:

Adobe Photoshop CC – $9.99 monthly
We think this is the best choice for batching images for 360.  Photoshop is much faster than 360 software, and it can do so much more.  The tools for retouching out blemishes and enhancing your photos are far superior to anything else on the market.  The video and instructions below will show the simple steps for producing a 360 image.

www.sirv.com – From free
Sirv revolutionized 360 spins for the web. It is now possible to upload a set of photos, wait a few seconds for a link, copy and paste this anywhere on your website, and you will have an interactive 360 image with zooming.  In the past, websites would need a lot of re-coding and designing to integrate 360’s. Now, you can be up and running and testing your new interactive images within minutes. Sirv works on all the major browsers, phones and tablets, iPhone and Android. What we really like is how it is constantly being updated and improved in the background. For example, if iPhone releases a new software update, the team at Sirv are immediately on top of it checking everything keeps spinning.   Sirv is hosted on very fast servers, and the 360s are delivered intelligently, ensuring loading times are reduced to a minimum.   A great use of Sirv which we discovered later when using it with our clients, was the ability for different departments to log in and download a single frame from the 360 for a publication. The organisation and structure saves us hours each day.

Sirv needs a series of jpeg images numbered in sequential order. We will use photoshop to crop our image – clean up the background – add some sharpening and number 1 to 36

 

1. Here are 36 images of a white shoe. They are untouched and straight from the camera. The original size is 5616 x 3744px. First – select an image of the product side on and drag it into photoshop.

2. We will record an action on 1 image – then play it to the other 36. First – click the new action button

3. Click Record – everything you do now is recorded – you will see a RED circle in the actions window

4. Click the crop tool – and set the width to 1400 px

5. move the sliders to remove unwanted space – leave some room left, right, top and bottom. press ENTER twice to accept

 

6. Press Command and L on a Mac, or CTRL and L on a PC – this will open ‘Levels’ (this is to make the background true white)

7. At the same time – hold the ALT key and drag the white slide to the left – this will show you what is not true white.

8. Now you can see the background is clean and true white – let go of ALT and the mouse button.

9. the next small adjustment is to add some contrast – move the black slider to the right.  If you want to see how it looked previously, un-tick the ‘Preview’ box. pres OK when you are happy.

10. Click Filter -> Sharpen -> Unsharp Mask – this will sharpen your photo which could be a little soft.

11. Do not add too much – we will add around 30% – click OK

12. press Command and U for Mac, or CTRL and U for PC – this will open up a window to adjust colour.  In this example we have pushed the saturation up by 5%, this will make your colours punchier.  If there is too much yellow in your photo, you can click on ‘Master’ drop down – select ‘Yellow’ and suck out the colour by reducing the saturation. Try to set up your white balance on your camera, so your photos do not need too much adjustment.

13. Click File -> Save as – create a new folder called 360 and save it in here.

 

14. Select maximum 12 for JPEG settings and click OK.   We want to upload the jpegs to Sirv with the highest quality. Sirv will compress the jpegs and set the size in the settings menu.

15. We have finished recording our batch and we must remember to press STOP. Now you can close your image so Photoshop is empty.

16. Press File -> Automate -> Batch

17. Browse for the 360 folder you created. Make sure the settings are the same as ours, and rename the product – we called it WhiteShoe_  click OK

18. Inside the 360 folder you will see 36 correctly sized and labelled images ready for Sirv. You can delete the first image.

19. Go to www.sirv.com and log into your account and click on the Products folder and Create a new Directory

20. We have called our new directory White Shoe – click Create

21. Click on the new directory (White Shoe)

22. Click on Upload and a window will pop up.

23. Select all your images from the 360 folder and drag them into the pop up window

24. Check there are 36 images in the window and click Upload

25. Click on the spinning icon under Spins

26. Your spinning image is ready to be embedded into your site – click ‘Embed’

27. Click the ‘Copy’ button and paste the one line of code into your site. We have done this below to view the spinning shoe  (The longer lines of code above this will only need inserting once into the <head> of your website. Once this is done, only the single line will be needed.  Contact Sirv support if you need help with this – they are very quick to respond – support@sirv.com

28. Your image is now live on your website – 2 minutes 49 seconds