Posts Tagged ‘photography’

10 Tips To Choose and Use Photos on Your Web Site

July 14th, 2011

A critical piece of many web designs is photography. Photographs really can be worth a thousand words because they have the power to immediately convey emotions, give a sense place, describe a feature or product in detail, illustrate a concept or set a tone. All without having to read a word.

Professional photography can help make your whole brand looking more professional, while cheap, poorly shot photos can really make a bad impression.

If you cannot afford custom photography, you are probably going to rely on either royalty-free photos or the non-professional photos taken by you, your staff or your clients. Both of these options can save money, but plan to take some time to select the best images and to present them in a way that will add relevance and visual interest to your web site design.

Ten tips for using photography effectively on your web site.

Avoid cliched, overused images and ideas. Because royalty-free photos, by their nature, are not created specifically for your project or concept they tend to have very general concepts behind them: business, teamwork, global network, etc. Therefore low cost royalty free photo sites are filled with photos that are too cliched. Adding an image like that does nothing to distinguish your company, product or service from your competitors. And in many cases it really makes you look worse.
Make sure the people look real. Photographing your own team is always a great idea if it’s possible. However, you may not have the budget for a custom shoot, or you may not have the set-up to make it ideal. But if you turn to stock and royalty free photographs to represent either your own business or your clients, make sure you are realistic. Do all or your clients look like models? Do all or your employees dress like fashionistas? Probably not. There are plenty of more “everyday” looking models that are featured in photographs.
Beware of subjects smiling at the camera. Another way to help make things look a little more “real” is to avoid photos where the people are looking at, and smiling at, the camera. Once they start mugging for the camera, it takes away from the idea that you’ve caught them acting natural.
Crop images to focus on what’s important. As a graphic designer and web designer, I nearly always end up cropping a photo rather than using at exactly the size and shape that it is provided. Trimming the edges (cropping) allows you to focus on the part of the photo that’s most relevant. It cuts out any distracting background images or other parts to an image. It can also create a more unique look at the subject.
Try different shapes. Most photos come in a format that’s around 3:5. They are basically a pretty balanced rectangle. By cropping them into something different, they become more unique. You may want to try photos that are wide and panoramic, or tall and skinny, or square. You’ll need access to a photo software tool to do this.
Make sure the photos are crisp and not fuzzy or out of focus. Many small business owners use photographs that they take with their own camera or photos supplied by clients. This is a great way to have photos that are truly unique and feature your own products, people, locations, etc. However, if the photo is blurry and not in focus to begin with, it’s just not going to work. Immediately disregard photos that are out of focus because it’s nearly impossible to fix.
Do basic photo editing to clean up red eye and brighten if necessary. Poorly lit (dark) photos are also a problem when using non-professional images. Also, people can have red eyes. Both of these sometimes can be fixed with an editing program. Either fix them, or do not use them.
Make sure images are scaled correctly. There is nothing sillier than looking at photo on a web site and having it look like the people are standing in front of a fun house mirror. Sometimes, when adding a photo to a design layout there may be a predetermined size and ratio that the photo must be. If it does not fit that size and shape it is either cropped or scaled to fit. If you are working within specific sizes like this, make sure you size and crop outside of your web site’s CMS for the best results.
Keep the resolution low for faster loading. The content management system for your web site may allow you to upload a very large image file and it will scale it for you. However, the data behind that image is probably still stored with the image making it act like a very large file, even if you are seeing it small with in the web site’s design. If you are working with large images (and it can be a good practice to start with high resolution images) make sure you crop and bring the resolution down to avoid slow loading graphics.
Realize you can’t fix all photos; start with high-quality images. Many people have the mistaken notion that with digital photography and Photoshop you can just fix any image and make it look good. Unfortunately, it’s just not possible. For example, an image that is too dark and too out-of-focus to begin with probably cannot be salvaged because there is just not enough data there. Other times people want to photoshop out or photoshop in something in an image. While this is not impossible, you need to realize that you’re basically turning a photo editing job into an illustration job: you need to recreate whatever is missing in the photo. While something like some clouds and sky can be done easily, something complex like a hand would take some serious work.

Great photography can help tell the story of your brand, but poor photography just detracts from your professional image. If you decide to use photographs on your web site, make sure they are well-lit, in focus, and cropped appropriately. Also make sure they are adding to your message, not just using cliches that add nothing to your brand’s unique story.

Tags: photography, photos, royalty-free photos, stock photos, tips, Web Design, web site, web site design
Posted in Design Basics, Web Design | 1 Comment »

Small Business Owners Demand Royalty-Free Photos

April 20th, 2011

Our typical design client at Visible Logic is a small business. This could be a one-person operation (such as Cream & Sugar Bakery) or a regional bank (such as Androscoggin Bank). We don’t have any Fortune 500 clients, and we’re OK with that. We love working closely with the leadership team or owner of a small business and helping them to understand and harness the power of effective web design, branding and print marketing.

Small businesses are the majority of businesses in the U.S. and any service-based business has to learn how to work with small business owners.

Today I was thinking about the fact that there are so many business owners who have a budget-conscious, do-it-themselves mentality. This has led to the fact that we pretty much exclusively use royalty-free photos these days.

When I started in design, the idea of royalty-free photos didn’t exist. If you didn’t hire a photographer for a custom shoot, you used what was called stock photography. [Read this, if you're not sure about the difference between stock and royalty free photos.] But now, the pendulum has fully swung to the royalty-free photo side of things.

There are still times you need custom photography (you need to shoot your own location, your own product, your own people, or need something very unique). But the reality is that my clients are demanding royalty-free photos, for the following reasons:

Two reasons small business owners demand royalty-free photos

Known product. With a custom shoot you can minimize risk by working with talent you trust, art directing and showing similar photo styles, layouts, etc. but the truth is that you do not know 100% what you’ll get from any shoot. With a royalty-free photo, you can see the image in place, in the layout, before buying the photo.
Fixed costs. With royalty-free photos you buy the photo rights once and you can use it for anything. With both stock and custom work, usage rights are negotiated on a case-by-case basis.

It’s hard to argue with the two benefit listed above. However, there is a vast range of photographic talent and quality to be purchased using the royalty-free model.

Today, there are thousands of new businesses who want marketing materials, web sites and blogs, but don’t have an understanding or the money for anything but royalty-free photography. In the old days, the only people buying photos were businesses with a marketing department and budget. They were staffed by professionals who understood the risks of a custom shoot, but understood the benefits, too. Or, they were prepared for the costs of purchasing stock photo rights. These days every business needs a web site to compete and adding photos to a web site is a desirable thing to add meaning, graphic interest, etc.

Royalty-free, OK. But, let’s find some quality images

What bothers me is that there is such little value placed on purchasing the photography. Not only have business owners accepted that they’ll only purchase royalty-free photos, they only seem to accept the most cheaply purchased photos.

The stock agencies have tried to respond by moving more stock photos into the royalty-free category. This allows flexibility with usage. But business owners need to accept that photos are one of those things that you get what you pay for. It’s a good idea to look beyond the cheapest-of-the-cheap if you want to create a professional and unique brand image for your company.

If you are a business owner, what do you expect to pay for photography?

Tags: photography, royalty-free photography
Posted in Design Basics, Design Trends, Starting a Business | 5 Comments »

Royalty-Free vs. Stock Photos: Differences and Benefits

February 4th, 2010

Many people use the phrases “royalty free” and “stock” interchangeably when talking about photography but there is a difference, and it’s important to understand the difference when planning a design project.

History

It used to be that if you needed a photo, you hired a professional photographer who created a custom shot for you. There are still many times when a custom shot is the only real possibility—to take a photo of your new product, your facility, your employees, etc.

However, there are times when a photo is used more to convey a mood or set a scene. For example, a financial planning company shows a retired couple walking and laughing along the beach. This suggests a carefree retirement achieved through careful investments. These types of images, sometimes called lifestyle shots, are often generic enough that a financial planner in Maine, an insurance agent in Minnesota and a stockbroker in Florida could all use a similar photo in their promotional materials.

At some point, photographers realized they had a stock of previously shot, unused photos. Maybe they were extras from a custom shoot, or images whose usage rights had elapsed. On the other hand, a lot designers, marketers and ad agencies realized they didn’t have a the budget to fly to the Caribbean, pay a professional photographer and his assistants, and set up a custom shoot. So stock photos became a new product. Initially they were mostly bought directly from photographers, but then stock agencies compiled them together to make the research faster for designers and to help photographers with their marketing.

Stock photography

Stock photography is generally priced the same way a custom shoot is—the fee is based on usage. Obviously with stock images, there are no direct costs of getting the shot made. The fee is determined on where the photo will be used and for how long. For example, it could be running on the front cover of a catalog that is distributed across the U.S. during one holiday season. Or, it could be running inside a book at postage-stamp size on an educational flyer distributed only in the State of New York. When you buy a stock photo, you are only supposed to use it for that usage, so if you love the front cover of your catalog and decide to use the same image on your web site and your other marketing materials, you need to negotiate and pay for more usage rights.

Royalty free photography

By contrast, royalty-free photography allows you to pay one flat fee and you can use the image as much as you like. Generally, there are different costs depending on the resolution of an image. A low-res file that would only work as a small web site image costs less than a large-scale, high resolution image that could be used in both print and web. If you are thinking about building a marketing campaign around a key photo, it is appealing to just pay one fee. Once you’ve paid for it, you can use an image in any new circumstance that arises. However, there is a downside to royalty-free images.

Exclusivity

Another distinction between royalty-free and stock photos is that royalty-free images can be purchased over and over by people everywhere. The photo you’ve chosen for the front page of your web site may be the exact photo your competitors have chosen for their web site. As a designer, I’ve definitely see photos I’ve worked with, used in other places.

Traditionally, with stock photography, because you bought a photo for a certain usage, the stock agency could tell you who else was using the image. They would also tell you if there were restrictions. For example, an insurance agency in Maine could buy the rights to a stock image in a way that does not allow any other insurance companies in New England to use the image.

However, it seems like this information is not as readily available because of internet purchasing. When you go online to purchase a stock photo, you are required to give detailed information about the usage (this is not required for royalty free images). Therefore, that data is probably available on request, but it’s easy to just slide over those details and buy the image. Therefore, even though you are paying the higher price for stock photos we are often not getting the full benefit of exclusivity.

Quality and price

As I just mentioned, stock photos tend to be more expensive. The economics is that a photographer is controlling your usage with stock, so he or she can only resell that image a limited number of times. With royalty-free the creator of an image could potentially resell an image hundreds or thousands of times. Therefore they are less expensive.

But it is more than that. If you sort through the online catalogs of a stock agency like Getty, it’s hard to ignore that the quality is considerably higher than a low-cost, royalty-free source like iStock or Shutterstock. However, these two competitors are creeping closer together as Getty continues to add royalty-free options and iStock’s quality improves.

Conclusion

It’s important to understand the benefits and true costs of each type of file.

Royalty-free photos are definitely the most economical because they are less costly to begin with, and you can use the image any way you like. However, your competitors may be using the exact same image you are, because there is no way to control usage.

Stock images cost more upfront and any additional usages must be paid for separately. However the quality tends to be higher and you can pay for exclusive usage. Even if you don’t pay for exclusive rights, a stock image is less likely to be seen repeatedly because of the cost limitations for some clients.

Coming up the next post: How to design using low-cost images.

Tags: photography, royalty-free, stock
Posted in Design Basics, Design Trends | 1 Comment »

Color Photography: Why It Never Looks as Good as You Imagined

November 5th, 2009

As we look around our world, we enjoy an amazing spectrum of colors. But it seems like when it gets translated to the web or printed media, something suffers. Why does this happen, and how can you improve this?

In a typical graphic design project we decide to take a picture of something to be part of a web site, brochure, book cover, or presentation. It may be a picture of a new product, or it may be a lifestyle shot that expresses the warm & fuzzy benefit of a service. Then we take that image and use it on the web or in printed form. Here’s what’s happening.

Real life, real color

When you look around you, you see so much visual information. Depending on your eyesight and the conditions, you’re taking in shades of color, textures, details and nuances in lighting. When you snap a photo with a digital camera, you’ve instantly cut out lots and lots of visual information.

Cropping. By cropping the picture, you eliminate everything outside the frame of the photo. Sometimes it is the context of something that makes it look a particular way. For example, a pale yellow shirt against a bright white background will look yellow, but if the white is taken away, it may just look dingy or off in color.

RGB digital image. By taking a digital photo, you’ve also translated it to the red/green/blue world of digital images. While rgb is remarkable in its ability to display a wide spectrum of color, it’s still a conversion that changes and alters colors. Some colors and images suffer more than others. Depending on your equipment and skills, the change from what you saw through your eyes and what you see on screen can be huge.

You’ve chosen one depth of field. Without even noticing it, we are often switching from big picture view to upclose view when we scan our environment. When you take a photo, it fixes the depth of field. Sometimes this can create a dramatic effect that shows things in a way we rarely seem them as humans, but other times it just drops out details. Unlike how they show it in movies like Mission Impossible, you generally cannot just zoom in more and more on a digital photo and find more and more detail revealed.

Removing context. Often we are unable to crop our minds as fully as the camera crops an image. In fact, we are planting information, even subconsciously. Here’s an example. It’s a beautiful sunny day and you take a photo of a wonderful panoramic view. In your mind, it’s a clear day therefore the sky is blazing blue. When you view your photo later you see that the sky was not a rich blue. It was clear, it was not overcast, but it was not particularly blue. Look through some of your scenic vacation photos and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Putting images on the web

The next step for your images may be the web. When you move your digital photos from the raw format on your computer to the web a couple of things happen.

Compressing files. Usually, we compress files so they are not too large and slow to download. We reduce the resolution and the number of colors before creating a web image. Converting to jpeg, gif or png reduces the number of colors that are used to build the image. Depending on how small you want to make the image (or how much you reduced it from the original) you may see a lot detail and nuance gets lost.

Different monitors have different settings. Once you post an image on the web, you cannot control how it looks on someone else’s computer. The viewer may have the brightness/contrast much lighter or darker than you do. They may have an old monitor that puts a blue cast over everything. They may be using their laptop outside where it’s hard to see anything on the screen.

Printing photographs

You may also be using photographs in printed form, especially for brochures, flyers or catalogs. And again, the image quality can really suffer.

Four-color separation. When using images in print, we are able to use large, high-resolution files. However, traditional offset printing uses CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black) ink colors to recreate the entire spectrum of colors. And while it does an amazing job at this, there are certains type of colors that never can be replicated using four-color process. Depending on what you’ve photographed, you need to understand that certain very bright or very subtle colors are hard to duplicate.

On paper vs. on screen. When you view images on a computer you get a backlit type of effect from the monitor. This can really make certain photographs pop. When you translate this to paper, that glowing feel is greatly diminished.

Paper quality and printing matters. When you print a photograph using offset printing, the quality of the paper stock can be a big factor in how good things look. When photos are critical (such as clothing catalog where people want to see what they’re getting) you need to use high-quality, bright-white, coated paper. You can imagine that something like an ivory color paper would give an ivory-hue to any photos printed on it.

How to work effectively with color in photos

Here are some pointers to get the best color reproduction out of your images:

Start with crisp, high-quality, well-lit photos. It’s difficult to make it look great when it started as a blurry, grainy, poorly lit photo from your cell phone.
Convert it to the correct color system you’ll be using for your final output: rgb for web projects or cmyk for print. You may need to adjust each version slightly for the best final look.
Always go back to the highest-resolution, raw file. Do not repeatedly resize, resave and convert the color format or image type. Each of these changes has a way of losing visual information. When you need a new version, go back to the original.
For print projects, work with a printer who understands and cares about color accuracy. Demand a contract-quality color proof and make adjustments during the proofing stage, before going on press. When you are in the pre-press phase you can still adjust photos individually, once you are on press you would be making an overall change (such as decreasing the black) which may have negative effects elsewhere.

Tags: cmyk, color, photography, rgb
Posted in Design Basics | No Comments »

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