--- title: Photography and Stock Photos date: 2019-10-08T05:30:00-04:00 author: Sean Smith canonical_url: "https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-02/episode-9/photography-and-stock-photos/" section: Podcast --- <!\[CDATA\[YII-BLOCK-BODY-BEGIN\]\]>[Skip to main content](#main-content)Season 02 Episode 9 – Oct 08, 2019 48:03 [Show Notes](#show-notes) ## Photography and Stock Photos  0:00 0:00 1.0x 0.75x1.0x1.25x1.5x2x [](//dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/website101podcast.com/uploads/mp3/season-02/S02-E09-Photography-and-Stock-Photos-Master3.mp3) In this episode Sean and Mike discuss the ins and outs of photography and stock photos for your website. How to choose imagery, where to find it, how to edit it and more. ### Show Notes - How to choose the correct image - style of photo - illustration? black and white? bright? dark? mood? - Be aware of authenticity - cropping photos - Where to find images or photos - Tips for taking your own photos - licensing and model releases - comments from Lyndon Johnson, John Morton, and Ben Parizek - how to edit photos - How to use some native tools on your Windows or Mac computer to make basic edits to a photo. - The rule of thirds - focal points and cropping ### Show Links - [Headset Hotties](http://www.headsethotties.com/) - [Sean's Photo Blog](https://sean-smith.net) - [Istock Photo (paid)](https://www.istockphoto.com) - [123 RF (paid)](https://www.123rf.com/) - [Adobe Stock Photos (paid)](https://stock.adobe.com) - [Unsplash](https://stock.adobe.com) - [Burst Shopify](https://burst.shopify.com/) - [Pixabay](https://pixabay.com/) - [Public Domain Archive](https://www.publicdomainarchive.com/) - [Pic Jumbo](https://picjumbo.com/) - [Pexels](https://www.pexels.com/) - [Flat Icon](https://www.flaticon.com/) - [Streamline Icons](https://streamlineicons.com/ux/) - [Undraw](https://undraw.co/illustrations) - [Envato](https://envato.com/) - [Vecteezy](https://www.vecteezy.com/) - [Vexels](https://www.vexels.com/) - [Flickr](https://www.flickr.com/) - [Sean's Company Blog](https://caffeinecreations.ca/blog) - [Photoshop](https://www.adobe.com/ca/products/photoshopfamily.html) - [Affinity Photo](https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/photo/) - [On1 Photo Raw](https://www.on1.com/) - [Improve Your Composition With the Rule of Thirds](https://expertphotography.com/iThe%20Rule%20of%20Thirdsmprove-your-composition-the-rule-of-thirds/) - [Canva (paid)](https://www.canva.com/) - [Pixlr](https://pixlr.com/) - [Thomas Yu](http://thomasyu.ca/) Powered Transcript Accuracy of transcript is dependant on AI technology. **\[00:00\]** **Mike:** Hello, and welcome. Once again to the website 101 podcast. I am one of your hosts, Mike Mella, and with me as always is my co-host, Sean Smith. Sean, how's it going? **\[00:10\]** **Sean:** It's going great, Mike. Glad to be here. **\[00:13\]** **Mike:** Good, good. And what's our topic today? **\[00:17\]** **Sean:** Our topic is the Raptors are the champions. **\[00:21\]** **Mike:** I just gotta say that. I can't believe it. What an awesome game that was. **\[00:27\]** **Sean:** All right, but as always we don't do a lot of idle chitchat we go right into the meat of the matter **\[00:33\]** **Mike:** Let's get into our topic for today. Let's do it. Let's do it. All right, so our topic we'll go ahead Mike Yeah, good. Okay. Sorry. I was gonna say yeah our topic today is about imagery and photography and illustrations and all that kind of stuff that you Might use to convey some kind of idea on your website, right? Yeah exactly **\[00:54\]** **Sean:** So we're going to talk about how to choose imagery, where to find it, how to edit it, and other different things that you may not know about, or maybe struggling with. **\[01:09\]** **Mike:** So there's always, you know, even whether you're hiring someone to develop your website and design it and what not, chances are you're always adding new content to your site, be of news or blog or whatever. So there's a very good chance that you're going to require imagery of some kind and you'll have to source that yourself. So we're going to talk a little bit today about where to find it and what to do with it once you get it, right? Exactly. So Mike, why don't we **\[01:41\]** **Sean:** start off with talking about tips for choosing the right imagery, like what kinds and how do we know that this is the best image for my blog post or my services page or whatever I'm talking about on that particular page. **\[01:56\]** **Mike:** Yeah, well, I guess the thing to remember is whenever you include imagery on your site, it's to assist, you know, it's to help you to convey whatever message you're trying to convey in the article that you're posting. So your chances are you're not, unless you're a photographer I suppose, you're probably not talking about an image as the entire focus of whatever it is that you're posting. Right. It's probably conveying some other message you're talking about a campaign or something. **\[02:31\]** **Sean:** It's there to enhance or make a visual representation of what you're talking about. **\[02:37\]** **Mike:** Right. Exactly. To that end, you need to make sure that you find the right imagery to represent that content. For example, depending on the site that you have and the kind of personality that the site has and the objectives you have for it, you may require more of an illustration-type thing where you're actually getting drawings, think the New Yorker and things like that, where it presents a certain kind of feeling to the reader or to the visitor based on the illustrations that you have or the imagery you have. But in other cases, you might benefit more from actual photography. So you need to consider things like that, first of all, what is the kind of imagery that would best represent the content that we're promoting? **\[03:23\]** **Sean:** What if my business is a service, and I don't actually have products to share in my, on my website, do I still need photography? **\[03:34\]** **Mike:** I mean, I really feel like imagery or whatever be it photographs or illustrations can really help to present content the way you want it without requiring the visitor to do a lot of reading. So it's a good way to make things, to kind of break up content. If you have just a page of text and nothing but text, the visitor can often kind of get overwhelmed or just get bored. And maybe they just... **\[04:01\]** **Sean:** There's some fatigue with long blocks of text. It's best to break it up with things like a photo, or pull quote, or headlines. It helps provide guideposts for your reader. **\[04:15\]** **Mike:** Yeah, and like I said, you don't have to actually address the photo itself. You don't have to talk about it. It could just be a background image somewhere in the page that helps convey a particular idea. **\[04:27\]** **Sean:** Exactly. OK. So what about choosing a photo that has a particular color or black and white, or how can a photo enhance the mood or feeling that I want to convey? **\[04:46\]** **Mike:** Yeah, this is another thing that you might want to consider for your site, if, you know, sometimes black and white imagery can really put forth know, put forth a particular message or emotion that a color image wouldn't really be able to capture. So consider your content, and it doesn't have to be a sight wide thing. You wouldn't have to say we're only using black and white photos on this site. It could be just on a case-by-case basis. But that's another thing. You'd want to consider not only should it be a photo or an illustration, but also should to be black and white, should have a lot of color, should it be bright and vibrant? What kind of mood is presented in the photo? So like, let's say you have a picture of a family smiling in a park or something, that converts a conveys a very different idea to some kind of a, I don't know, like a war scene or something where there's refugees in the background or whatever. So it has to support the content that you have. Whatever is in the photo has to support your message. **\[05:51\]** **Sean:** Right. So an article on a lawyer's website talking about divorce is not going to have a photo of a happy family at the park on the picnic. **\[06:01\]** **Mike:** Well, I guess it less the divorce lawyer is specialized in putting people back together. I don't know. But yeah, you're right. Yeah, it has to, it has to fit whatever the, you know, whatever your website is promoting. Right. And by the way, another sort of angle of this that I often come, come across with my non-profit clients is the idea of authenticity in photographs. So I've had clients where they do sort of medical related things and you can find on the web, and we're going to get to later where you find images. But you can find all kinds of photography that show a doctor in a lab coat with a stethoscope around his neck. And he's probably really good looking because he's actually a model. He's not really a doctor. And when you're choosing photography, it's very easy to get caught up in the stock photo You know, this is just what you're looking for, you know, and you just use it. And people recognize that kind of phoniness, and you want to avoid that chance. It's not a chance. Especially headset hotties. Yeah, that's another one. Ladies eating salad and smiling, I think that's a big thing. **\[07:08\]** **Sean:** Well, headset hotties actually has a website where it's a website with screenshots of other websites using stock photos of a woman with a headset on the contact page or whatever, we will link to that. Don't be a cliche. **\[07:26\]** **Mike:** Exactly, yeah. Make sure that if you're gonna use them, make sure that they look authentic and they look like that you put some plot into it. **\[07:34\]** **Sean:** And they support your message. Yes, absolutely. Okay, so let's talk about cropping a photo, right? So you found a photo that you like, But maybe the focus of the photo is not exactly what you want. There might be too much background or some distracting aspect of it. You will want to crop your photo so that you can bring in the subject a little bit closer. And you may also need to crop it to fit the container that you're using on your website. like the block that it's going to use, whether that's the hero image across the top of the page, or maybe a smaller image further down in the text. **\[08:28\]** **Mike:** Yeah, that's right. And this is something that is important to consider. Oftentimes you'll find that the lower quality images that usually they tend to be the free ones. If you think about, if you want to crop them, oftentimes it can be difficult to achieve that because say there might be a lot of subjects around the edges of the photo. So maybe someone's head is kind of cut off on the top because they've reached the top of the photo, and then all of a sudden you're, okay, well I'm kind of stuck with that. I can't really crop it down to this other area of the photo because I'm going to cut that guy's head off. So I've encountered that issue before where the image just by the way that it's present, it's, you know, what's the word I'm looking for? the way that it's composed, the composition of the photo, the way that it's composed requires that you sort of keep everything, otherwise it ends up looking weird. And that is something you always want to consider as like if you get a good quality image, you don't have to use it exactly as it's presented. You could cut some things out if there's a tree over here, you don't need to show, you could cut that out. And it just draws the focus to whatever you want people to see in the photo. **\[09:39\]** **Sean:** And I actually do that a lot on my own website, on my blog. I'll find some stock photos or I'll use some of the my own photos that I've taken and I'll crop it specifically to a certain look to convey what I'm looking for. **\[09:57\]** **Mike:** We should mention that you Sean is a kind of amateur photographer himself on the side and does a lot of his own photography work so he really knows what he's talking about. **\[10:05\]** **Sean:** Well I don't know about that but yeah I photography is my big side hobby it gets me out of the house. I'll include a link to my photo blog so you can go check it out. Okay, so we've talked a lot about how to choose imagery but what we need to do now is talk about where to find the images. So you can take a photo yourself using yourself or if you're lucky enough and you have a DSLR, like a professional level camera, you can take a photo yourself. But a lot of times when you take the photo yourself, the lighting might be off, you might not be working with models, and the people you're using may not stand the way you want them to, or you might not have a studio where you can get the proper lighting to get everything up. So So an easy way to do things is to use stock photography websites. There's a large number of them. Some of them have free stock photos and we've got lots of those to talk about and there are other websites where you can buy a photo one-off or you can get a subscription. The subscription would be more useful for an agency or a large corporation that uses a lot of stock photography because, you know, like Microsoft or whatever they're mass if they need the photography for their advertising budget or whatever. But for the average small business, the free stock photo sites or buying a one-off photo to use for a particular thing because you can't find a better image anywhere else, that's **\[11:54\]** **Mike:** the way to go. So there's just a, you want to mention a few of these sites where people **\[12:02\]** **Sean:** can can source some photos. Yeah, absolutely. And we'll include links to all of these on the, in the show notes. In the show notes. All right. So a couple of the more popular Your paid ones are istockfoto.com and 123RF.com. And there's a number of other ones, but these are the big ones for paid stock photos. **\[12:29\]** **Mike:** Yeah, Adobe has their own stock photo thing too. I think Adobe who makes Photoshop and everything. And also what's the one, I can't remember, I'll find it and put it in the show notes. There's one that's really known for all of its imagery and stuff that I can't remember **\[12:46\]** **Sean:** now. Right. So I'm going to talk about some free ones just in a second, but all of the free ones, they often include ads to the paid stock photo sites at the top and the bottom of your search results. So I usually start my search on the free ones, and if I can't find what I want, I'll click through and maybe buy it from a paid search one. So where I usually start is I will start at unsplash.com or burst.shopify.com or pixabay. And then there's a couple other ones that a little bit less that I'll look at is public domain archive and pick jumbo.com. All of these websites have a lot of great stock photography, but you'll find that the search engines may or may not help you out, so you'll want to hit up multiple ones of these. Another one that I forgot to include in the notes before the show is pexels.com, P-E-X-E-L-S, and I actually really like that one a lot. Anything else that you use for the free stock photography? **\[14:08\]** **Mike:** I think you named pretty much all the ones I use. I know unsplash is a popular one. And these generally, you can go to these sites, you could, there's a search box, you can type in children's smiling or what children playing. And then they'll just shoot a bunch of photos at you that feature that subject matter because it's been tagged that way. So that's kind of how it works. So it's pretty, like Sean said, if you go through a lot of these sites and run that same search, you'll probably have a lot of options to choose from. **\[14:37\]** **Sean:** Right, and in the same vein, there's more than just stock photography. You can be getting a vector art or icons and illustrations that you need for your website. Now, a lot of time for icons, your web developers probably gonna be doing that, but if you're a DIY person, you may want to add in a different icon then the theme of your website has by stock. So you could go to place like flat icon.com. I find a lot of the icons I use for my clients and myself there, I really like that one. Streamline icons and undraw.co. These are all great sites. **\[15:22\]** **Mike:** I sometimes use Envato, I think it's pronounced Envato. I don't think they have one. They have some free material and some paid, but it's pretty good resources there too, especially for icons. **\[15:36\]** **Sean:** And two other websites that I've bookmarked for Vector are vectiz.com and Vexels. **\[15:45\]** **Mike:** Wow, you got the Alice. You really have a lot of resources for this material. This is good. I'm going to be using this show notes list quite a bit now. **\[15:54\]** **Sean:** Well, every time I find a new source, I save it in a folder on my desktop, so it's all really helpful for me. **\[16:05\]** **Mike:** And I wanted to just, if I can jump in here, so. Yeah, go ahead. For a lot of, we talked about taking your own photos, and a lot of people have really decent smartphones and they have good cameras, and you could take your own photography if you wanted to. If you choose to go that route, like very often I find that it's really a great idea. I have clients, for example, who are nonprofits and they have offices all over the world, and they might do work in, you know, I don't know, Beirut or wherever, and they get access to people and communities that are to buy a stock photo that looks like that if you could even find it it tends to be very expensive so in their case they can just get their staff to take some photos of the people that they're working with and in that case you get authentic photos that is original photography by your organization so if you can do that and I suppose it's more of a non-profit thing than a you know for companies but if you get it done it can be really valuable I agree with that but **\[17:12\]** **Sean:** But I would caution that the quality of your photo will probably be much lower than the stock photography because unless the person that takes it is a really good amateur or a professional photographer themselves, it's going to end up looking like a snapshot. And there's a big difference between a snapshot and a photo. **\[17:36\]** **Mike:** That's a great point. And also there are some guidelines you might want to follow if you're going to go that route And that is, for example, hold your phone in landscape orientation. Don't hold it up like you're checking Facebook up and down portrait, because that's not how, so far, there are still people who you visit websites on computers, which are horizontal, not vertical. So make sure you do it horizontal. And then if you want to, you can later crop it for the smartphone. **\[18:05\]** **Sean:** Nothing makes me cringe more than a vertical profile video. **\[18:10\]** **Mike:** Yeah, I know. It seems like it might be going if I wouldn't be surprised if it went to the direction in the near future that that's sort of the default because so many people are using are viewing it on their smartphone, but yeah, it's always better. It's becoming start from the desktop. **\[18:24\]** **Sean:** It's becoming much more common. I actually saw an article that talked about a TV coming out of Japan that by default you're supposed to watch it in portrait. Is that right? I don't have a link to it, I saw it a couple of months ago, but it's definitely coming. One last resource for photos, if you can't find what you want in everything else that we listed, I would suggest going to Flickr. Now Flickr is really great, but the thing with Flickr is you need to filter by license because When a lot of filter is amateur or professional or semi-professional photographers then all of them will have their photos up there with different licenses. For example, I have a flicker account and I put all of my photos up there as all rights reserved, copyright, the year I took the picture. I don't want some business using my photo. It's against what I want. If you want to use my photo, pay me. But there are a lot of photographers up there and they will put up their photos as commercial use allowed or commercial used with modifications allowed. So what you would do is you'll go into Flickr and say you're searching for cooking photos. So you search for cooking or roast beef or chicken pie or whatever you want to get a picture And then you go to the, once you do that, there will be a little advanced search option. You click on that and you can choose the license that you want it to be. And you can also filter by the size of the photo. And so the size of the photo is really important. You need a high resolution source photo. Even if you're the final photo that you're going to be using on your website is smaller, you You need to start with a large size photo that you can then later crop or resize smaller to fit the spot. And the reason this is is if you start with a smaller photo and you try to make it larger, it will look pixelated. It will look like garbage. So start larger and go smaller. You cannot go small and move up without horrendously losing quality of your photo. **\[20:54\]** **Mike:** Yeah, that effect that you see in cop shows where they get a picture of someone's license plate and then someone says, hey, can you clean that up a bit and all of a sudden all the pixels vanish and it's perfectly crystal clear? That doesn't work with photos on the web. **\[21:09\]** **Sean:** Don't do that. It does not work at all. So those are a large number of websites where you can find some great photography and we just talked about starting off with high resolution and we touched a little bit on licenses and this is kind of important and why you're going to be using a stock photo website in the first place. Hey, thank you for listening to this episode. I hope you're enjoying it. We're always looking for topic suggestions. So if there's a topic that you would like us to discuss, please let us know. **\[21:49\]** **Mike:** Yes, and we're also looking for guest suggestions. Is there someone you'd like to have on the show and have interviewed? Is there someone who's been on the show that you'd like to have back? Do you think you would make a good guest? Visit website 101podcast.com slash contact to get in touch. **\[22:06\]** **Sean:** So if your photos have pictures of people in them and you're using them for commercial use, you need a model release. The person in the photo needs to release their rights to be used on your website or on your product and so all the stock photography sites, if the photo has a person in it, the model releases, they can't upload those photos without the model released. So this is one thing you don't have to worry about. So you know, I mean, if I take a picture of my son and I use a picture of my son on my my website problem. I'm in control of his rights. But if you take that photo and you use it, or you take a photo of some random person walking down the street, you can't use it on your website to support your product. You can share that photo on Facebook because they're in a public location, it's possible to take pictures of them. You just can't use them to support your product without a model release? **\[23:13\]** **Mike:** Yeah, and my example earlier of if you're, as I said, if you're working with a nonprofit and you take your custom imagery on site, that's a great example of some time of a case where you have to get sign-off an authorization from everyone who's in the photo in order to use that material because they're not a professional model, it's just someone that you're working with, and you need to get their permission to include them on your site in the imagery. **\[23:40\]** **Sean:** Right. And if you have any questions about this, talk to a lawyer. This is not legal advice. That's right. That's a good point. I mean, this is my interpretation of it, and best practices, and what I understand as an amateur photographer. So I mean, if you're going to use pictures with people in them, your stock photos that you get from these free or paid stock photo sites are perfectly legit. If it's photos that you've taken or acquired somewhere else, you might want to be careful about talking to a lawyer and making sure that the photo is good and that you have no chance of getting sued or somebody complaining about what you've done. **\[24:26\]** **Mike:** Right, and you may also want to be wary of exactly what the license says. So just because a photo says, you know, you can use it for commercial purposes doesn't necessarily mean that you can take it and do with what you want with it. It might have rules in there that says you can use it but you're not allowed to modify it. In other words, you can't, you know, you might not be able to crop it in a certain way. You may not be able to add any kind of imagery on top of it. And it might also have, I've seen, as we talked about this before the show, I've seen cases where it says the photo can be used for commercial purposes or non-commercial, but only in one instance. For example, you could use it on your website, but that doesn't mean that you could suddenly take that and paste it all over every truck in your company's fleet, and that's now one of your official photography branding elements. That may not be allowed. You may need a second license to do something like that, so take a good look at the license and find out exactly what you're allowed to do. **\[25:32\]** **Sean:** Right, yeah, I mean, it is very common further to be restrictions on the usage that you're allowed to do. So, yeah, you can't go and put that photo on like a coffee cup and a t-shirt and then open up a web shop that's re-sells your stuff. I mean, if you took the picture yourself, you can do whatever you want. Unless there's a person in it, you'll need a model release. **\[26:01\]** **Mike:** And in a good example, that's not an unheard of thing to do. Like if your photography may be not, but if you get, say, icons or some kind of a logo type illustration, you may actually have the idea to put it on coffee mugs and sell them. But if it's not yours, you're probably not allowed to do that. **\[26:18\]** **Sean:** Exactly. So before we started recording this episode, I posted on Facebook and some social media asking people had questions and things like that. On Facebook, Lyndon Johnson passed guest on the show in season one. I said, I'd love to know what the licenses mean in words of one syllable in sentences of less than 10 words. Lyndon, I'm sorry, we can't help you. I'm going to say common sense and if you have more specific questions. It'll oil. And John Morton on Discord, where both myself and Michael are very active for craft, he said, I think helping a client know that all photos in illustrations are not royalty free is important. Usage rights can be confusing. And I think we kind of address this? Did you have any more specific thoughts as to what John Morton said? **\[27:23\]** **Mike:** No, well I mean just that generally the sort of high level thing you want to look for is is an image free to use just you know period free license or is it a commercial license that you know you're required to pay something if you're going to use it in certain cases and then if you find that that is the case you have to kind of drill down a little further but that's that's a **\[27:45\]** **Sean:** general idea. Yeah, I would definitely go with that. Okay. Um, so let's talk about something that Ben Perizek on craft discord said in response to the post above and I'm gonna read exactly what he said. I'd love for clients to better understand how long it takes to find good photos And then, again, how long it takes to find another photo after they don't like the one they you first chose. And then, how when you change a photo, how other design components on the page may then appear different as well. And then, how finding another photo or changing design components also takes additional time and budget. So there's a lot to unpack in what Ben said. But the TLDR, too long didn't read it or TLDL, too long didn't listen to it, is choosing your photos or changing them is a lot of work and takes a lot of time. And so this applies to whether you're working with an agency or a web developer or if you're doing it on your own. I've been writing a blog for my company website at caffeinecreations.ca-blog and I've got a lot of blog posts on there and I've got a hero image on all of them. Every time I write on a new topic I try and find a new image or I'll create a new image. I spend probably 30 to 40 minutes minimum for each blog post just looking for imagery. even writing the blog post. And sometimes it's longer. I've spent like two or three hours to find a photo. And you know, that's just me. Yeah, it can be it can be a lot longer than that. And sometimes I'll go through and I'll actually create something myself rather because I can't find what's in what I've got as a vision in my head for that blog post. Or further down the page, I want to have a supporting image and I can't find it. I'll go and create something using photo editing software. **\[30:09\]** **Mike:** Right. Yeah, and I can't agree more with Ben’s point that modifying an image that's already in a design, replacing that image with a new one will affect the feel of the design. So, and that's especially relevant when it's not always that your photo is It was just kind of plopped on to the page in a rectangle box, right? It could also be that you've got an image and you've sort of made it part of the background imagery of the site. Maybe it has a particular color or an overlay on the effect. Yeah. Right. And an effect of some kind that presents the website with a certain feel. And if you suddenly take that out and replace it with something else, it will completely change the vibe of the site. So you need to be aware of that, and it does take time for you or the designer to make a change that is appropriate. **\[31:02\]** **Sean:** Right. And it could be as simple as having different colors or hues or shades of color that are dominant in your photography that you're using, that either support or clash with the website colors. It could be the tone of the website of the image, maybe previously you had a really dark image, but now you've changed it into something that's bright and cheery, but it doesn't actually match the rest of the style of the site, or maybe not matches the right term, but it will alter the feel of what you've gone going on in the rest of the site. So you really need to be aware of how things **\[31:42\]** **Mike:** impact the subconscious. Right. Yeah, make sure it supports the message you're trying to convey. And if you replace something that's already presented that message, it's going to affect that. So Sean, you mentioned earlier, you talked about creating your own photos, editing them, modifying them, talk about that a bit more. What might someone be able to do to an existing image to sort of pull it more toward what they're looking for? **\[32:11\]** **Sean:** for. Alright, well, for editing photos, Photoshop is the gold standard, but if you don't have training in Photoshop, it's going to be very difficult to use. It's for a complex. The learning curve is very steep, so I don't think that this is for the average person who is unfamiliar with it. It's not cheap either. No, it's not cheap. You're paying like 50 US a month minimum, and it's it's a renting your software. So you can't buy it as a standalone anymore. I personally use a program called Affinity Photo or on one photo raw. Now on one photo raw is more for photographers, but Affinity Photo is like a Photoshop replacement program. It's also really robust and has a bit of a learning curve and may not be for the average person, but it is very affordable and if you're looking for something to replace Photoshop I would recommend checking out Affinity Photo. I mentioned on one photo raw that is more of a Lightroom replacement and I'm not going to go into that but it's really powerful and in my opinion it's actually better than Lightroom. But what you're back to your, the main point of your question is what can a user do to enhance their images? Well, you can use native tools on your computer, whether that's a desktop, a Windows computer or a Mac computer, there are programs that will enable you to easily crop, resize, rotate, straighten and maybe add in some basic effects, such as text or adjusting the hue or the saturation or the lighting. So you should be able to make really basic adjustments that can help enhance and improve your basic photography. So what I'd like to do is really quickly explain to a Windows user how to go through and open up a photo and make some changes. It'll take about a minute and you can follow along on your computer or include some written instructions in the show notes. So, and then after I do that, Mike is on a Mac and he'll do the same thing for a Mac user. So we're gonna help both Windows and Mac people. All right, so, right now I'm gonna open up a photo. I have on my desktop by double clicking it and I'm on Windows 10 and it opens up in a Windows photo program. looks great. Along the toolbar, I see Edit and Create. So I click that, and I get a drop down, and the options are Edit, Draw, Add 3DFX, Add Animated Text, and Create a Video with Music. Well, I'm not going to do, I'm just going to look at Edit because that's mostly what's important for you. The average user, click that. It reopens the photo, and the photo now has some handles on each corner which allow me to easily crop the photo and I can crop it by dragging and dropping it or I can look on the right hand side and see aspect ratio and I can choose a preset aspect ratio of 4, 3, square, wide screen 16, 9 which is like a cinematic crop. 3, 2, 7, 5, and 10, 8. So these are your ratios. You can drag the crop bar around. You can rotate it. And there's a little bar where you can straighten it. So maybe the horizon in your photo is not perfectly straight, which is very common. You can adjust the horizon so that it's straighter and the perspective looks done, looks good. And then you just click save, you can save a copy, or you can just save your existing file and you're done. So when you're cropping a photo, I would recommend paying attention to the rule of thirds. This is a very basic photography principle. You draw a grid, like a tiktok toe grid, across your photo, and so you'll have nine squares. You place the subject of your photo on a cross point, one of the cross points. That is a basic idea for the rule of thirds. Cool. So Mike, how would I do the same thing in a Mac? **\[36:55\]** **Mike:** Okay, so it's a similar process. If you open any, let's say, a JPEG photo that's on your machine, it will probably open in an app called Preview, which is an Apple thing that's built into the Mac machine here. at the top there's a toolbar you know zoom in zoom out all that kind of thing and there's also it's like it's all icons because it's Apple so there's an an icon a button that has an image of a pencil with a circle around it and if you click on that you get a second toolbar that's the editing one so that contains much of the same things that you just talked about Sean has you know a text thing you can add text on top of the image you can add boxes and circles of all different colors. You can have a pencil that lets you draw on it with all kinds of different thicknesses of the sort of pencil lead or textures and whatnot. You can adjust hues and colors. You can add a note. There's even a kind of a magic wand thing that's really cool. It lets you select like I'm looking to picture my kid here at the beach and I can select the sky in this photo. It just kind of like paint on it and it shows me when I've I selected the entire sky and I can then modify the color of the sky. So let's say it's a cloudy day and you want it to be a blue sky day. You can change the sky to blue if you want. Of course, if you're going to do that for your website material, make sure you do a really **\[38:15\]** **Sean:** great job because, you know, yeah, that sounds like something that would be better in a professional **\[38:20\]** **Mike:** editing program, but maybe it'll work out. Yeah, you never know. But that's just one example. But anyway, there's a lot of powerful tools here for modifying an image and yeah, as you said, it's just built right into your machine. So that's something, I mean, if you have the time and you're about to put an image into a blog post or whatever, it might be worth taking five minutes and, you know, fire this thing up and see if, like, just ask yourself, is there any way I could make this better? Do I need a brighten it? Do I need a crop it a little bit? Because the more you get used to doing that kind of thing, the more it'll benefit your website, I think. I absolutely. **\[38:54\]** **Sean:** And if you have the budget and the photography is very important, you might want to hire somebody but you know there's a lot of it's really easy to do some basic adjustments that will improve your photography yourself. We have a couple of websites that you can do this at. One of them is www.canva.com and this is a paid website with a 30 day free trial that you can check out. It does a lot of stuff. The other one that I would recommend is Pixler.com, I will include a link in the show notes. And this is free, you'll upload a photo and it gives you some basic editing tools. All the stuff that we mentioned available on the native apps for your Mac or your Windows PC. **\[39:43\]** **Mike:** And some of those tools, those online ones, it might be a little bit more powerful in the sense that let's say you're adding text on top of your image to promote a campaign or whatever, rather than just writing the text or typing it and then picking a font, it might have some options you can choose from where the text itself is designed in a certain way where it has a particular drop shadow or it has this glow effect or something. So if you were looking for something like that, you can just drop that on and then just change what the actual words are and then you get a slightly better presentation of the text, things like that. **\[40:17\]** **Sean:** Right, but to get a really, really awesome look on that, you will need to be using professional software or designer. But these are great ways to overdo it. Yeah, this is a great way for a DIY guy to do it themselves and get good results relatively simply. So the last thing I would like to talk before we wrap up is about focal points and cropping. So when you build your website, it's responsive. And this is something we've talked about before how your website will relay out as the size of the viewport changes. And that basically means on a desktop, it's nice and wide, and you shrink it down to a laptop and a tablet, it gets smaller and smaller, and then you end up on your phone, and it's tall and skinny. So what does this mean? **\[41:14\]** **Mike:** Yeah, sometimes they call it mobile friendly. **\[41:17\]** **Sean:** Yeah. What does this mean for all of your images? Well, it means they need to be at different sizes and crops. They need to look different. And almost every CMS will crop your photos for you. But most of them will crop the photo. And the crop focus will be in the very middle of your photo. And sometimes this works. But what if the focal point of your image is on the bottom right or off center and then you end up with a square crop on mobile? And what you want people to see is not in the photo. What do you do? Well, there's two options that you can do. The first option is create multiple versions of the file yourself, but that's a lot of work. And then you have to remember the exact crop sizes. I need a 320 by 400. I need a 200 by 200. I need a 1920 by 600 and oh my god, it's a lot of work. That's something that your designer would do for you for photos that aren't going to change often. But if you're creating a blog post or a new entry and you want to upload a photo for it, you're going to need to do all that work yourself. Sounds like a pain in the butt. Well, Well, most of your CMSs will allow you to upload a photo and your developer will set up the website so that, on the front end, it will auto-crop your photos. But when the auto-crops it does, based on the center and center, a quality top-end CMS will allow you to choose the focal point of your crop. Now I happen to myself and might happen to use Kraft CMS that comes out of the box with editing options in your CMS that allow you to set the focal point and even crop and straighten your photos right inside your CMS. So you can put the focal point on the person's face and then maybe that person's face is in the bottom left corner, when you crop that photo or when the website crops it square, instead of only being able to see their hair or their right eye or whatever because it looks all weird because it was cropped automatically, the website knows to crop it but put the focus on their face and things will look correct. I use this all of the time on my photo blog. I've had clients, when I show them how to do this, they're like, wow, you can do this and they love it. It is a game changer for them. **\[44:10\]** **Mike:** Yeah, you saw, you mentioned craft, does it? There's another CMS that I like to use, Statomic, that also has a built-in focal point editor. And I have an example of a case where I've used this and it's really helped. So I have a client who is a sort of a world-class amateur piano player and he travels all over the world. And so like he has an image on a blog post of him seated at his piano in front of a crowd. So there's an audience all on the left side and he's at a piano on the right side. I remember you showed me the theater. Yeah, nice theater somewhere in Africa or whatever. So on the desktop, where you see it nice and big, that looks beautiful. But if you view that same page on your phone, that image is going to be what, two inches wide maybe, and it will be shrunk down, if you just use the same image, it shrunk down so small that it's hard to make out anything in it. The people in the audience are small, the him at the piano is probably not even easy to see. So what you might do in that case, and this is what I did, is I put the focal point, I was building a craft. put the focal point on his name's Tom on Tom seated at the piano so that when it created a crop for the smartphone which was square it made sure that it didn't crop out Tom seated at the piano it just cropped out some of the audience. So now all of a sudden Tom is nice and clear even on a small two inch image that's on a smartphone you can still see him and it was just created from the same image that was uploaded for a desktop. **\[45:45\]** **Sean:** Yeah, that's a brilliant example of why you'd want to be able to do that. **\[45:50\]** **Mike:** It's a real, it's a new thing like a lot of people wouldn't be, you're not used to doing that because it's only new that websites are mobile friendly and they do require images to be cropped in different ways on different devices. It's not something that people thought of even just five years ago. They just assumed they'd use the same image on every platform and a lot of websites still do that unfortunately. Right. to do it the smarter way is to use this kind of a feature. **\[46:16\]** **Sean:** Yeah, and if you're not using Kraft or Stetamic, the two CMSs we talked about, the CMS that you're using, such as WordPress or Expression Engine or whatever, will probably have a plug-in that you can do use. Yeah, that's why we like Kraft and Stetamic is, I'm not relying on a plug-in, it comes out of the box. I don't need to worry about the support of third parties. I think that covers photography in a nutshell. We went a little bit longer than we expected. Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed this show. I'm Sean Smith, your co-host. You can find me at my company website, caffeinecreations.ca. On Twitter at C-A-F-F-E-I-N-E-C-R-E-E-8-I-O-N. On LinkedIn, my username is caffeinecreations, or you can search for Sean Smith based in Toronto. **\[47:20\]** **Mike:** You should be able to find me there. And I'm Mike Mella. You can find me at my website blikewater.ca or on LinkedIn. My username is Mike Mella. That's M-I-K-E-M-E-L-L-A and I'm on Twitter Twitter.com slash Mike Mella. **\[47:37\]** **Sean:** And don't forget to subscribe to the show and share it with your friends on social media such as Facebook or LinkedIn. You can find us on Google Play, iTunes, Stitcher or wherever **\[47:48\]** **Mike:** you subscribe to your favorite podcast. And we're always looking for a topic and guest suggestions. So if you have any, hit us up at website 101podcast.com slash contact. Excellent. Thank you so much for listening. Thanks for listening. Close Transcript Have a question for Sean, Mike, and Amanda? [Send us an email](/contact). 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