Where to Find Amazing Images for Authors

1. Introduction: Hi, everybody. My name is Jeremy Deegan, and in this course I am going to show you some popular websites for finding royalty free images for your books and your E books. Now, on these websites, you are going to see some images that are for free and some that you have to pay for. But these air some of the best sites for finding high quality images that you can use as an author. Now, at the beginning, I'm going to go ahead and explain to you the different types of licenses so that whenever you are downloading these images, you make sure that you can use them commercially if you're selling your book or e book, and that you are also giving attribution. If you need to do that to whoever is providing that image after that, I'll go through and show you some of the top sites. I'll also show you a couple extra Web sites that I use when trying to find images and even one of the image editing programs that has images directly built into it, so that you can even create an e book in this program and also use images from their database. Now, if you like this class, you will see a recommendation to either recommend this to other students by saying yes or no or giving a thumbs up or thumbs down. I would appreciate it if you would definitely review the class so that other authors can check this class out and get some ideas of where they confined some stock photography on their own and definitely leave a discussion if you have any questions or want to Nome or information and then at the very end, I encourage you to get on one of these platforms, download an image and then upload it as a project that ways I can just see that you're going through the class. You're retaining the information you know about the licenses. And I also just like to see what people find visually appealing. Eso whether it be an image for a cover or just a Nimitz that you like. Go ahead and upload that to the class at the end as a project. So let's go ahead and get started 2. Understanding Licenses for Your Images: one of the main things that you will use for your book cover is going to be an image. So it's important that you kind of brush up on your knowledge as far as copyrights go when using images for your book cover. One of the best places to find this information is the Creative Commons website, where you can find information on licensing and royalty free type of artwork. So if you go to creative commons dot org's, it will bring this main page up for you, where you can do a lot of extensive research. Now. I am not a lawyer, and I do not provide any type of lawyer ah, feedback or any type of, ah, legal information. But I do just want to show you where you can find some information and kind of what to look for. But I do suggest that when doing any type of design, whether it be book covers, graphic design or anything that you plan on using for sale, you should definitely study on the laws and regulations of each individual country and especially things such as trademarks and copyrights. You don't want to go through the whole process of getting a book sent out to a publishing platform to later find out that you are not allowed to use that artwork. So if you go to this website creative commons dot org's and you go to the top, there's a licenses button that you can click on, and we can click on about the licenses when I select that it's going to bring up the licenses page, and it's going to give you some basic information. What we want to look at for right now is down here at the bottom these air symbols that are used within different websites to show you what you can do with different types of copyright licenses. So this is a good resource toe have handy and to look at often, so the 1st 1 is what's called attribution. So you see the CC symbol and then the slow picture of a guy it says attribution. This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak and build upon your work even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered, so basically this is the one that we're really going to want to look for cause. What it is saying is that you can use these images in commercial work and you can tweak and edit them, which is what you're going to be doing a lot of changing the colors, cutting things out, moving it around. So this is really the one that you want to pay attention to. The next one is attribution Share like and this is basically saying that the license lets others remix, tweak and build upon your work, even for commercial purposes, as long as it they credit you and license their new creations under identical terms. So this is saying that you can, you can tweak and uses for commercial purposes. But whenever you redistribute the image, you have to make sure that you are allowing to use the same type of licence for other people. So it's basically saying if if someone uses your work, they are allowed to also add it and tweak that information based on the share like attribution. Then we have the attribution, no derivatives, and this says this license allows for redistribution commercial and non commercial, as long as it's passed along unchanged in whole with credit to you. So this is not really going to be beneficial to us because we're going to be editing our images. And this is basically saying you cannot do that because you're not allowed to change the image. And then we have noncommercial licenses, which we definitely won't be able to use because we are most likely going to be using these books for print and for selling and for commercial purposes. So we have the noncommercial licenses here, So this is a good place to read up on these. Have this handy if you are looking around at images and and so on. And this is a good Web site. Like I said to check out this information. Okay, so where do we find images? There are a lot of websites where you can find images, and one thing that you can do is you can go to Google and type in royalty free images, and these were going to be images that you are going to be allowed to use whether you pay for them or their free, and you have to give attribution to them. So this is one way that you can search, and there are hundreds and thousands of different types of websites that offer royalty free images 3. Website #1: the 1st 1 is the Wikipedia Commons website. So if we go here or we type in commons dot wickham media dot org's, it'll bring up the Wikimedia Commons website That has a lot of role to free images that you can use and they always have a picture of the day and you can also do some searching. So let's just say that we were doing maybe a thriller and we wanted to maybe have a picture of an axe on our cover so I would type in acts and it will bring up different images within the Wikimedia Commons Free Media repository that we can actually use. So let's just say we like this splitting axe here shows you the image and we have more details and down here the bottom. I'm going to click on that and it's going to give me all the information about this Father has been upload, so it shows our resolution. So you do want to pick a high resolution image even if you have to crop it or cut it down. You generally want to pick the highest resolution so that it looks the best and not pixelated or compressed. I'm going to go down and you can see the license information. So here we have the description when it was uploaded and the author if you're giving attribution. These is the author name that you would want to use may be in the front or back of your cover of your book. You would, you know, like to say I found images. Um and these are the authors. Typically, this information is in the back of a book, but here is the actual copyright information. So as you can see, this is an basic attribution license. So you're free to share and to remix this work as long as you attribute the work and the manner specified by the author and you do a share light. So if you're redistributing and edited, you also have to give the same type of licenses so other people can edit it also. But basically it gives their information, um and and the author down here at the bottom so you could give them the attribution in your book for the image that you used. And this is if you use other images in your book also. So the Wikimedia Commons is a very great website because most of the stuff in here it's free to use. Ah, and a lot of them. You don't even have to give attribution to They just allow you to just use it. Um most of them, though, will allow you to use them as long as you are giving attribution to the original author. 4. Website #2: another great site for using images is flicker. So let's just search for, um Se Dragon Here we have, ah, some different pictures of some dragons that we might want to use again. I apologize. The Finney images pop up that are not suitable for Children within these search results. But I must say we pick something like this little emblem here. Okay? And here is a picture of the image. And if you scroll down, I'll show you the information how it was taken, what kind of camera? And then you can see the different types of copyright symbols that are being used. So this is attribution. But it is non commercial, so we would not be able to use this image. It's type in tree here, and then you can also search by different licenses within flick or so you can come over here and you can click on any license and we can you click on commercial use and modifications allowed. So when we click on that, it's on Lee going to give us images that we are actually allowed to modify and use commercially. So that is one setting that you're going to want to keep on. So go ahead and click on this image here. And when we scroll down and you look at the information, there are no types of attribution or any type of licenses for this photo, so you can definitely use this now. It all is always good practice if it doesn't say specifically to still give the original author credit because, you know, they took the time to take this picture and put it up for free. So I would suggest you, um, giving credit where credit is due. 5. Extra Websites: some other sites that you can look at his picks obey picks. Obey is great. It has a lot of free images. Um, they also have some sponsorship through shutter stock. So when you do a search, you might see some images at the top. That's a shutter stock that you need to pay for. It will redirect you to their site so you can see these at the top here, Um, but then there are some free images that you can use down below so we can click on one of these and you can see the license here. Free for commercial use, no attribution required. You can download this image and multiple resolutions. Then there's the shutter stock website, and here is an actual paid for site where you can buy images and then you can actually have the means to edit them and do whatever you would like with, Um, and you can see the different pricing plans here. You can do it by image or any type of recurring monthly fees. There's Istock. Photo is another great website. Photo. Dune, which is through the in Vado market, allows you to also by images. Some of them are dollar 6. Using Canva's Photo Database: And then, of course, you can buy images within Camba for dollar to use. So if we dio, um, elements and we click on photos, you can see that some of them images in here are free for you to use. And then some of them do cost a dollar for you to buy and use within your covers. So here's a free image. I can click on that and pops it in there for me. And if I scroll down a little bit and get past these free ones, you can see some of the ones they'll say $1 us. So I click on that, and it's got the copyright, um, watermarks on them until you actually down the your cover design, and they'll ask you to pay for that. So camera has an extensive resource of images that you can also use within their database, so that is how you can add some images to your designs. Make sure that you learn about copyrights and you're doing everything legally. Like I said, the worst thing that you can do is have that book go out to print or be published on a platform, and then later find out that you are in some serious trouble for using artwork, graphics or images that are copyrighted