**Introducing ARKS Spen: A Revolutionary Photography Tool**

When it comes to product photography, having the right tools can make all the difference. Recently, I had the opportunity to try out ARKS Spen, a new photography software that is changing the game for photographers and brands alike. In this article, we'll take a closer look at what makes ARKS Spen so special and how it can be used to elevate your product photography.

**Easy-to-Use Spin Functionality**

One of the standout features of ARKS Spen is its easy-to-use spin functionality. With just one click, you can create a seamless spin that showcases your product from multiple angles. The camera's spin function allows you to capture a 360-degree view of your product in real-time, making it perfect for e-commerce websites and social media platforms. I was impressed by how seamless the spin was - it really is that easy to use.

**Advanced Settings and Editing Options**

But what sets ARKS Spen apart from other photography software is its advanced settings and editing options. Under "advanced settings," you can control parameters such as the black point, contrast, and more. This means you have fine-grained control over the final image, allowing for precise adjustments to achieve the perfect look. Additionally, there are painting tools available, including a paintbrush tool that allows you to remove unwanted objects or blemishes from your images.

**Real-Time Rendering and Updating**

Another feature I was impressed by was ARKS Spen's real-time rendering and updating capabilities. Once you're happy with your spin, you can title it, caption it, and save it as a copy to the server. This means that your final image is rendered in real-time, and then re-uploaded as a copy to the server, making it easy to share and distribute across multiple platforms.

**Recommendation for Photographers**

As someone who shoots product photography regularly, I highly recommend ARKS Spen to anyone looking to upgrade their workflow. The software is incredibly intuitive and seamless, making it perfect for clients who may not have extensive experience with photography editing software. With its affordable pricing plan starting at $80 a month (Pro Plan), which includes unlimited spins and unbranded viewers, this tool is an absolute steal.

**Free Account Options**

If you're just starting out or want to practice without committing to the Pro Plan, ARKS Spen offers a free account option that allows you to capture up to five spins. This gives you a chance to try out the software and get familiar with its features before investing in the paid plan.

**Embedding Spins on Websites**

Finally, one of my favorite features of ARKS Spen is its ability to embed your spin directly into websites using an easy-to-use code snippet. With just a few clicks, you can share your spin with others and showcase it on your website without any hassle.

**Conclusion**

In conclusion, I'm thoroughly impressed with ARKS Spen and believe it has the potential to revolutionize product photography for brands and photographers alike. Its seamless spin functionality, advanced settings and editing options, real-time rendering and updating capabilities make it an absolute game-changer in the world of photography. If you're interested in trying out ARKS Spen, I recommend signing up for a free account to get started. And don't forget to use my exclusive offer code "ted20" to save 20% on your initial order!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enfor all right so you guys are probably wondering uh what this is here that I've got and I got a call I guess about a month ago from a company called Arpin and what they do is they produce uh this online software that allows you to do 360 interactive images of let's say products for instance so in anything that you want to be able to put online be able to click drag and rotate that's what Arpin does and so they asked if I would uh be interested in checking this product out I said absolutely and they said well we also make um accessories that go with the service and you can use your own rotating device it's basically electronic Lazy Susan or they also have some so I said well send me one and I'll try it out and they said well which one do you want well of course I wanted the biggest one because apparently it is capable of holding up to 300 lb you can spend people on here whatever it is you want to spend and uh I'll show you as we get into this here uh how easy this is to use so this is the backside here and the interface on their Lazy Susan here is pretty easy you just simply plug it in and then there's a power on power off and as soon as I turn the power on you will notice that the top starts rotating and you can pretty much spin anything that'll fit on here and this is kind of a nice convenience to have of course this is an optional accessory you don't have to have it any kind of lazy SU type thing will work and so what I'm going to do here is we're actually going to try a spin and I'm going to show you how their service and product works so you can see you know if I take my Sony ARX 100 markv pop it on the top and indeed it is spinning and so the idea with what Arc spin does is as I mentioned earlier it's web- based and rather than doing Stills and stitching them together is kind of a QuickTime VR sort of thing it's not QuickTime VR they have their own proprietary technology for it but theidea aide is that you can shoot video of this and then upload the video and edit it from there and we'll take a look at how that works so this means that you can use an iPhone you can use a uh bigger professional camera you know like a Canon 5D or whatever it is that you want to use to do this and essentially what you do is you start recording and as soon as you get a full 360 rotation uh then you've got it now this is where the optional accessory that they have uh with this big electronic spinner comes in very handy because uh you know you want something that's going to be consistent in the video you don't want it to speed up or slow down and you want it to stay fairly consistent as you go so what we're going to do is I'm going to reconfigure a little bit here and we're going to go ahead and try a couple spins using different things I want to try their iPhone app and we'll also use a DSLR for this as well and see how that goes if I were're doing this professionally we'll see what happens when we upload it but you know just principles of Photography if you're doing product shots um this isn't the optimal situation here because I'm in a studio with a pych wall but I've got this as leveled to the camera as possible and so you do see the corner of the of the spinner in there and you do see a color difference between this light and what's reflecting off the cyc wall but for our purposes here of testing I want to test this and try it out and uh just see how this goes so let me go ahead and rig it up to the tripod and we're going to create our first Spin and uh it moves pretty quick and then what it does is actually processes this pretty quick too in fact I don't think I can show you yep progress bar is gone and we have created our first Spin and you can see that you know I've got some color issues with the light back there but there the RX100 is indeed spinning and uh you can also start and stop this with your thumb and drag it to rotate and click it around okay so for the next test I'm going to do the same thing but instead of using the iPhone I'm going to use the Canon 5D Mark II and then we'll upload it to the website and uh see how that works okay I think we've got all our spins together so uh let's go back to my office here and let's uh upload the video and see what it looks like Arc spin is web-based software so what this means is it's not something that you install on your computer or you're going to have to serve on your own host it's kind of an all-in-one solution for doing these 360 spins having said that it is very good and I'm very impressed with what they've got so when you use the phone and you use the app you can upload straight from the app and if you're doing your own videos and I'm going to show you how to do this you can upload from your computer so if we go over to the arks spin website here you can see that here's the initial two tests that I did and these literally guys were the first test I'd ever done with Arpin and having said that it's pretty cool if I go in and edit spin you can see in here they have an online editor all of the errors in here are clearly mine um you can see as I mentioned earlier there's a color difference between my py wall light and my main light but these are things I can go fix and this would be something that you could very easily set up a studio for doing product shots where you could do these 360 spins and be able to kind of manipulate and fix that a little bit I think having that edge of the of the spinner is not that big of a deal because you can go into this online editor and it's all in HTML it's all within the web browser and you can make your adjustments let me show you um kind of how that works I went and redid this after I did the initial stuff so we could have a slightly better uh spin that went down here but let's go back to the shared spins and if you want to add a new Spin U what I'm going to do is say import spins from photos or videos or photos you can title it and capture it in here I'm going to save and do that later but let's go and say upload and I'm going to grab this spin test 2 and I cheated a little bit I just raised the angle of view and did another spin uh this is using the Canon 5D again but this one's a little easier to work with and like I said if you mess with your lighting and got your room just right on top of the spinner um this would not really be an issue and it would be really easy to do um what it's going to do here is it's going to start to Loop um is upload to the server the server is going to process it and so what it's doing is it's taking the video file and separating it up into those Stills but what's also cool is it finds the start and end point so you do have a seamless spin when all is said and done that is very cool and it only takes a few seconds it's already done we can go to edit Spin and I'll show you a couple things you can do here okay so if this is for product photography essentially your in product is going to be a square so the first thing you might want to do is crop that down and I think it's so cool that all this is just within the web browser um that way you don't have software to update or anything they keep track of everything in the cloud and I'm just going to drag this around till it looks like I'm pretty much in the clear here looks good just want to make sure it's not rotating and hitting the edges and let's go ahead and say done uh close enough for what we're doing here now this is cool too you can go and set your white and black points so if I go set my white point it look it took that background and set pretty much to White um and I can also set a black point point if I want to do that with the camera might be a little too dark so it might be a little too contrasty but you can you can look and see so and you can reset those at any time as well and you can see here I have a very seamless spin going on it really is that easy uh if you go under advanced settings there's a couple other things you can control and if you do have something in here that got into frame there is a paintbrush tool where you can actually go in with white or black and paint that out there's also an eraser if you make a mistake you can control the brush radius a lot of this is just like Photoshop um and you have curves adjustments too which is really nice so it noticed that when I set my black point it crushed a little too much and so I can go in here and actually bring some of those Shadows up a little bit so I get my Reflections back and I am so impressed that it does all this in real time um this is pretty amazing I think once you're happy with it and you're done you can title it and caption it I'm going to say save a copy and what it's going to do is it's going to go in here and actually render a little more and then re-upload as a copy to the server and then that's really all there is to it while this is rendering and updating I want to talk just a little bit about whether or not this is something I would recommend to you guys um arks Spen did not sponsor this episode they just simply I talked to them and they said would you like to try it and I said absolutely so they sent me one of their Spinners to use and this is me trying their software um I do recommend it and here's why I think just because it is so seamless and so easy to use uh I think this would be a very natural service that you could offer to clients and if I were doing product photography right now for clients I definitely would offer this as a service um and we're going to talk about the price point in a minute if you want to get in here and just play around there is a free account so you just go sign up for an account and you get the free account the app is free to download and the fact that you can just capture this from your iPhone even is pretty amazing the free account allows you to do up to five spins and so if you Max that out and you have five spins in there you can add more you just need to delete some so it gives a great way of practicing and getting some stuff down um the difference is is on the free plan you do have uh if you go to embed it you do have the arpan Arpin brand on the player and it's not a big deal if if that's something you're looking to do the Pro Plan starts at $80 a month and that sounds a little high but if you consider that you could do this for clients and that does include the unbranded viewers so there's no branding for AR spin on there and you do get unlimited spins at that tier I think 80 bucks a month is a pretty good deal and considering how easy this is and like I said you could set up a little Studio and just basically move stuff in and out and these become really easy to do at that point and once you have it set up right the first time there's probably very little post-processing to do on that end anyway this is probably done so I want to go ahead and show you real quick if you go let's go back to our shared spins here and there it is our spin test 2 I can go in and you can view it if I want to embed it I'm just going to click embed and you cut and paste that code and you go paste it into your website and you're done and then you can share your spin with everybody else and it's it's really pretty easy and very cool um it's wonderful technology everything is lightweight quick fast easy to use intuitive and I give arks spin a double thumbs up on this and if you guys if any of you shoot product photography I seriously recommend you look into this I can save you some money they did give me um an offer code for you guys if you want to save 20% on your initial order you can use the code it's ted20 I'll put that in the show notes as well so special thanks to arks benen for helping us out today with a show and lending us their stuff to use and uh I'm very impressed with this if you guys enjoyed this episode please remember to like it and share it with your friends and as always subscribe to the Art of Photography so you'll always be up to date on all the latest and greatest videos we do here once again guys I'll see you all in the next video later\n"