Game ready at scale for an Australian sports brand
A national Australian sports brand needed a production partner that understood movement, material and speed. PixelPhant delivered a sports specific pipeline that cut average revision time to 28 minutes, reduced reshoots by 68 percent, and let the brand push campaign assets live on the same day for priority drops.
Executive summary
The client is an Australia headquartered sports label selling performance apparel, team kits and footwear across retail and online channels. Their shoots produced action photography, studio packshots and close up detail images. The visual output was inconsistent and slow to publish. PixelPhant designed a bespoke sports post production system focused on motion handling, colorway control, texture conservation and instant feedback. The result was faster launches, fewer reworks and reliable marketplace acceptance.
Client snapshot
- Location: Sydney, Australia with distribution across Australia and New Zealand.
- Products: performance jerseys, training apparel, footwear, protective gear and accessories.
- Monthly image volume: 12,000 images.
- Typical weekly campaign drops: 800 to 1,200 images.
- Stakeholders: product managers, creative leads, eCommerce ops, marketplace team and finance.
Primary problems we solved
- Motion blur and product softness in action photography that reduced product legibility and hurt conversions.
- Colorway drift where the same product in different shoots looked mismatched online.
- Texture flattening on mesh, knit and rubber when generic retouching was applied.
- Marketplace rejections due to crop, bleed and compression errors.
- Slow revision cycles that delayed timed drops and match day promotions.
- High volume of micro invoices that tied up finance with reconciliation work.
What we built
A sports first image operations system with the following pillars:
Sport specific spec matrix
- Colorway matrix per product family to lock color targets for each SKU.
- Motion spec for action frames with selective deblur, burst merge and region sharpening.
- Detail spec for textile grain, stitch definition and hardware fidelity.
- Footwear spec covering profile, top down and outsole shots with shadow geometry rules.
Burst merge engine
- When photographers provide burst sequences we align frames and stitch the sharpest pixels for the product while keeping natural motion in the background.
- Result: logos, numbers and seams are sharp without losing the sense of movement.
Colorway gating
- Each variant passes through a gated color check using brand LUTs and a color target library.
- If a variant deviates more than the accepted delta it is auto flagged and routed for a live correction session.
Texture first retouching
- Frequency aware workflows keep mesh and knit texture intact.
- Micro dodge and burn preserves fabric dimensionality without creating plastic finishes.
- Logo and patch fidelity protocol avoids haloing and vector overlay unless explicitly approved.
Marketplace and channel exports
- Export templates for the Australian marketplaces we tested including required pixel dimensions, aspect ratios and compression.
- Auto-validation prevents uploads that would be rejected.
- Social and paid ad derivations are generated alongside ecommerce derivatives.
Live collaboration and instant revisions
- Creatives annotate images inside the PixelPhant dashboard and watch retouchers apply changes live.
- Priority sessions allow same day live fixes for match day assets and campaign hero imagery.
- Revision history and decision notes are saved with each version.
Automation and commercial controls
- Manifest driven intake with required fields: order_id, sku, spec_id and photographer_id.
- Visual hash deduplication avoids reprocessing identical files and eliminates double billing.
- Consolidated monthly invoice with line items by spec and image count.
Implementation timeline
- Week 1: Rapid audit of 2,000 images to map common failures and color variance.
- Week 2: Build colorway LUTs and test burst merge engine on action sets.
- Week 3: Roll out live revision sessions and marketplace export templates.
- Week 4: Full production handover and finance integration for consolidated billing.
Measured impact
- Average revision time for priority images dropped from 16 hours to 28 minutes.
- Reshoot requests dropped 68 percent within the first 60 days.
- Marketplace upload rejection rate dropped 77 percent.
- Time from shoot to live for campaign hero assets fell from 72 hours to 18 hours on average.
- Processing throughput increased 3.8 times during seasonal peaks without raising the error rate.
- Finance reported an 82 percent reduction in time spent reconciling image invoices.
Notable technical wins
- Repaired a sponsor badge on a broadcast action still by merging five burst frames and vector tracing the badge for 100 percent legibility.
- Restored micro knit detail on a dark colorway hoodie using selective frequency preservation and tone mapping.
- Automated shadow generation for footwear so all product listings used identical contact shadow geometry across variants.
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