Surface Material Swap
Hand it a photograph of one thing and it puts that thing down on another surface — stone, oak, linen, steel — with the shadow the new material would really cast. Two fields; the background stays out of it.
We made two examples, from two different photographs: a flat steel chef's knife on honed limestone and a soft wool scarf on pale oak, two surfaces chosen from opposite ends of hard and soft. Both objects come through untouched, down to the knife's three handle rivets and the scarf's nap.
The framing holds almost exactly, because a new surface takes up no room and nothing has to move. On soft or grained surfaces the shadow is very convincing: on oak it breaks along the grain. On hard surfaces it can come out softer than it should, with no light bouncing back under the object. If you want a crisp shadow, check it and generate again.
Generated for this library
Input
Object a steel chef's knife, wood handle
Surface honed grey limestone, hard and slightly cool
Photograph knife-front.png (1254 x 1254)
Returned 1 image · 1:1 · the same object, a new table
object silhouette, finish and marks carried over
unchanged - nothing added to it
camera same eye line and distance; outline lands on
itself
surface limestone against steel - cooler, matt,
and far lighter in value
shadow soft and tight under the blade - less crisp
than honed stone should give
back plain and out of focus, unchanged
words none, in any scriptYou fill in 2 fields — the braced lines at the top. Everything below them is fixed.
- 1The object, in three or four words
- 2The surface, and what it does to light
Surface Material Swap
What this makes
Hand it a photograph of one thing and it puts that thing down on another surface — stone, oak, linen, steel — with the shadow the new material would really cast. Two fields; the background stays out of it.
The whole template, in one piece. The steps below are the entire workflow.
How to use it
- Copy the whole template with the button above.
- Attach your photograph and paste the template in the same message.
- Replace the two FIELDS lines. In the second, always say whether the material is hard or soft — that is the line the shadow is built from.
- Check the result by overlay before shipping: put it over the original and look at the object's outline. If it grew, shrank or tilted, the camera moved.
- For a set, run each product separately against the same surface line, rather than asking for them together.
What you swap
- The object, in three or four words
- a steel chef's knife, wood handle
- The surface, and what it does to light
- honed grey limestone, hard and slightly cool
Before it runs
- An actual photograph of the thing, attached to the message. There is nothing here for a description to work on.
- A visible contact point. The whole treatment is the meeting of object and surface, so a shot cropped above the base has nothing to rebuild.
- A surface that is not the object's own colour. Oak under an oak-coloured thing clears none of the difference the ground law asks for.
- One surface per run. Two materials in one frame is a set, not a swap, and it is a different template.
When to reach for it
When a packshot is right and the table is wrong: a listing shot that needs warmth, a set of products that have to sit on one surface, a photograph taken on whatever was to hand. Templates in this genre swap the surface and keep the old shadow, which is what makes a composite look like a composite.
What changes
- One photograph in, one out — the object where it was, a new material underneath it.
- The shadow is remade for the new surface: crisp and short on stone, soft and swallowed on wool.
- The background stays plain and out of focus, so the only change is the one you asked for.
- The object is untouched, down to its marks, and the camera holds its distance and eye line.
- The surface has to differ from the object in two of value, temperature and texture, so the thing cannot dissolve into its own table.
Pairs with
- Customer Snapshot EffectHand it a clean product photograph and it takes the picture again as a customer would — wrong light, off-centre, a real room behind it — with the product itself unchanged. Two fields.
- In-Use Room BackgroundHand it a photograph of one thing and it builds the room that thing is actually used in behind it — out of focus, overlapping nothing — while the object and the camera stay exactly where they were. Two fields.
- Photo RelightingHand it a photograph of one thing and it relights the frame — another hour, another direction, another hardness — leaving the object, the surface and the background exactly where they were. Two fields.