360° car studios for car dealerships

You need more than just a good camera to shoot promotional images of a car. Due to the very glossy car paint you need a clean background and an especially clean surrounding, so no disruptive elements are reflected in the car paint.

If you want to survive in the competitive premium used cars market, then you need consistent and revenue increasing photos that engender so much confidence in the customer that even a longer drive to buy a car won’t pose an obstacle. It’s not very practical, from a logistical and financial standpoint, to rent a professional car photo studio, so many car dealers use a local photography service. But the image results will then heavily depend on the external circumstances, like the weather and the light conditions, the surroundings or the subject background.

The easy to use 360° car studio from Picture Instruments, which delivers consistent and high-quality picture results, will be installed in your premises, i.e. at the location where the premium used cars are being prepared and made ready for selling. Connecting the car photo studio to the existing Picture Instruments software infrastructure also leads to numerous possibilities.

Hardware components of the Picture Instruments 360° car studios

The 360° turntable
We recommend you to use a turntable, so you don’t have to reposition the cars all the time and can get the best picture results. The turntable of our car photo studios is specifically designed for the characteristic features of the car business. It has a height of only 5.6 cm and can be easily installed on the existing hall floor. The whole structure needs an area of 8 x 8 meters.

The LED light tent
The LED light tent is certainly the best and most flexible solution to light a car and at the same time creates a homogeneous photo surrounding. Even a smartphone video that was recorded in a Picture Instruments LED light tent can be used, without any post-processing, for a short video clip, which can be used as an advertisement on the sales portals.

Watch LED light tent iPhone clip (27sec)

Compact version

A smaller version of the studio only needs a total area of 13 ft deep and 12 ft wide and is very suitable for motorcycles.

The Moto Studio

Individual light control

With DMX you can control the individual zones of the light tent independent of each other, so that you can adjust the light to your own needs or to the color of the car, whenever you want. The different light situations can be saved as a preset via the preset function and accessed comfortably at the push of a button.

Watch video for possibilities of light control via DMX (59sec)

The flashlight studio
If there’s already an existing room with four white walls, then it would be a more affordable alternative to the LED tent to put flash devices into that room, so you save the costs for the light tent construction and the LED panels. The image results would kind of look like this:

The Picture Instruments Software

Serial Shot
Our software Serial Shot controls the whole photo studio (turntable, camera including picture transfer and also the light controller via DMX if applicable). The pictures are also sorted and named according to the vehicle identification number and other criteria. If needed we can connect a picture management system over an API to transfer the images into an existing infrastructure.

Background removal
If the car photo studio has a LED light tent with corresponding light zone division or a green screen, then our control center “Serial Shot” can communicate with our background removal software to swap the background. You only need a couple of additional clicks to change the backgrounds of all images of the whole 360° rotation, without interrupting the car photography workflow at all.

360° Player Plugin
The 360° player technology from Picture Instruments can be integrated into your website to make the car pictures from the turntable interactive on your website. Your website will turn into a real customer magnet with the interactive 360° objects.

360° Interior
The complete photo process for the 360° interior photography can also be integrated into the Picture Instruments workflow. It works completely automatic via the Ricoh Theta V camera (or a newer model). If the car photographer would like to manually shoot panoramas with a DSLR and stitch them himself, then it is also be possible to further process those panoramas automatically in the workflow.

Detail gallery and 360° views in one single player frame
360° exterior images, 360° interior images and also detail images can be combined in a single frame, so the customer has the best possible experience if he’s interested in a car.

The modular 360° car studio specifically for the car trading

The Picture Instruments software solutions for car photography can be adjusted flexibly to the different needs of the car dealers or dedicated car photo studios. The cost-intensive and time-consuming process of producing absolutely necessary car pictures for e-commerce is being optimized in a future-oriented way by using a 360° car studio from Picture Instruments.

We already develop individual 360° car photography solutions for different car dealers and brand manufacturers since 2015. Over the years this turned into a modular system made up of software and hardware, so that we’re now able to offer the fitting car photography studio, which is adjusted to the local needs and conditions.

Watch the example workflow at Autohaus Helbig (3min13sek)

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Asking is free!

We certainly can’t answer every question on one single web page. We would be happy to talk about the versatile possibilities of a 360° car studio with you in a personal conversation. We are happy about every call or message that you send us via the contact form: