Skip the lineup: a smarter approach to sports team photos
Getting a whole sports team together for a photo sounds simple enough. Until you actually have to do it.
There are rows to organise, players to shuffle around and attention to capture. Add in finding a suitable location, and those minutes quickly add up across a busy club photo day.
A team composite offers another option. Photograph each player individually, then bring those portraits together to create the finished team photo. Once the images and templates are ready, post-production can take as little as 90 seconds per team.
The result? Less time standing around for players and coaches, and less time on site for photographers. Everyone gets to keep the day moving, while photographers can reduce production time and costs.
From individual portraits to a finished team photo
So, how does it work? Instead of photographing the team as a group, you photograph each player individually and assemble the team photo afterwards. By combining Netlife PhotoLink with the third-party Team Photo Composite software, you can streamline the process from the initial portraits through to the finished product in the webshop.
Step 1: Photograph each player
Photograph each player individually, with the images captured tethered directly into Netlife. This gives you an individual image of every player without having to organise the whole team into position.
Step 2: Prepare the player cutouts
Once the portraits are ready, remove the backgrounds and export each player's selected image as a transparent PNG.
Exporting all teams at once, with each team saved in its own folder, helps keep everything organised and makes the next step easier.
Step3: Build the team photo
Import the player cutouts into Team Photo Composite, where they can be arranged into rows to create the team image.
Resize and reposition players to get the right spacing and perspective. You can also prepare reusable layouts for different team sizes to speed things up when working through multiple teams.
Once you're happy with the composition, export the finished team as a transparent PNG.
Step 4: Bring the finished team back into Netlife
Batch import the completed team composites back into the Netlife job. If the files are named to match the team or group names, Netlife can automatically place each composite into the correct group, saving you from sorting and assigning them manually.
Step 5: Let Netlife handle the finishing touches
This is where automation really starts to save time.
Netlife's face recognition can identify the players in the composite and populate their names. Once the names have been checked, tagged assets such as backgrounds, foregrounds and logos can be combined with the composite through your Netlife product template.
The finished team photo is then automatically assembled and ready for the webshop.
Making the most of automation
The key to getting the most out of this process is a little preparation upfront: consistent player portraits, reusable team layouts and correctly tagged template assets.
With these in place, you can repeat the process across team after team, reducing manual work and speeding up post-production. The finished photos can also sit alongside other personalised sports products in the webshop, such as trading cards.
Want to see the process in action? Watch the workflow demonstration below to follow the process from individual portraits through to the finished product.
Need a hand setting up a team composite workflow? Contact support@hvpsolutions.com.
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