HOW TO...
Make Money Selling Your Photos - Part 2

This is Part 2 of our article "How To Make Money Selling Your Photos.  To get to Part 1, Click HERE.

© 2010, Stephen J. Kristof
all rights reserved

 

Steps 6-10 in Selling Your Photos to Stock Photo Agencies:

6. About Editing

Be careful about how much you edit your images using Photoshop or similar photo editing software. Go ahead and correct slight issues with brightness, contrast and color tone, but be careful about over-doing the contrast!

Brightness usually needs to be toned-down a bit in digital images, but contrast is tricky. The human brain loves to see highly contrasted images, but designers and photo buyers do not. As we hype the contrast to progressively higher levels, we are reluctant to settle for something less contrasty, even though the less contrasty verion is usually both technically and stylistically a better image.

Bottom line is to et the buyer do the adjustments they want.

CROPPING is a necessity if you need to improve yourcomposition or remove a distracting elemnt. However, be careful about removing too much of the original resolution. Do not "rezz-up" the resolution unless you have professional software that is designed expressly for this purpose. (ie. if you started with a 10MP file, then due to cropping it gets sized down ot 4MP, do not simply raise the resolution back to 10MP. This does not fool the well-trained eye!)


7. Model Releases

This is an absolute must! If there are ANY recognizable human faces, a standard model release must be signed, scanned, uploaded with each associated image of that person and kept on file. Do not even consider using an image of any human subject for commercial sale if you do not have a legal and valid model release!


8. Copyright and Trademarks

Avoid showing in your images any logos, recognizable products or brand names, publications, protected architectural works, artwork, sculptures or other forms of intellectual property to which other individuals or companies may own copyright or trademark.


9.Keywords and Categories

Customers browsing for images must be able to find yourimages! Include plenty of keywords for each image and ensure that they are geared to a combination of what sells and what is most honestly descriptive of your images. Categories should be named according to the most relevant group or sub-group.


10. Stick to One Category at a Time

Avoid the temptation to go out and begin shooting all types and manner of different subject matter in order to get a good portfolio of images. Stick with one theme, content type or category ntil you have a good collection in that genrel; then and only then – move on to something else.

 

 

 

next interesting HOW-TO photography article:
"How to Win Photography Contests"

MORE PHOTOGRAPHY LINKS:


HOME     PHOTO TIPS INDEX     FULL COURSE INDEX     "HOW TO" INDEX     PHOTO FORUM

SITE SEARCH    CONTRIBUTOR'S GALLERY    CAMERA & GEAR STORE    FREE DIGITAL IMAGES
 

© FreePhotoCourse.com.  All rights reserved.  Reproduction, storage, copying, publishing, manipulation, digitizing or selling of any of the text or photos on this website is strictly prohibited.  Under no circumstances shall any part of the content on this website be plagiarized or referenced as the work of an author or photographer.  Re-selling of any of the content on this site is strictly prohibited.  The lessons on this website were provided free of charge for individual home users; if you paid for any of this you have been cheated.  Please report any misuse, sale or plagiarism of this material here OR E-MAIL US AT: CONTACT@FREEPHOTOCOURSE.COM

Browse, learn, purchase and explore with confidence. 
Certified  virus-free, malware-free, spyware-free, scam-free and spam-free

Associate-Sponsor Disclosure        Content Download & Terms of Use        Privacy Policy         Contact Us        Contributor's Gallery Terms of Use        Forum Terms of Use