Transcripts
1. Introduction: My name is Jenn Reiner. I'm a Marketing Manager PicMonkey.com. PicMonkey is an online photo editor, a collage maker and a designing tool. It's your image editing center. People that find a lot of value in using PicMonkey are going to be small business owners, bloggers, entrepreneurs, anybody who's using images to promote their products and their businesses. So, today we're going to be talking about photo editing. We're going to be talking about how to optimize the images that you're already using all across the web. Specifically today, we're going to be talking about getting your profile picture ready for your social channels. We're also going to talk about setting up your product photos and best practices for editing those. We're also going to talk about creating great header images. These are the images that you see at the top of your blog, websites, or on your social media channels. The last thing we'll touch on is watermarking and how to claim, brand your images, and we'll also touch on some best practices for social media. To take this class, you don't need to be a professional photographer or a professional photo editor. I'll walk you through the steps to get you to some amazing images. Photo editing isn't cheating. It doesn't have to be cheesy, it doesn't have to be over the top. I just want to show you how easy and subtle and natural a little bit of photo editing can be and how it can transform your good photos into something amazing. So, the project for this class is to edit a photo that showcases your brand. You can do this multiple ways. You can edit your profile picture, a product shot, or a header image. To get started with this project, gather together your the images that you already have or take a few product shots. You're also going to need some photo editing software, use whatever you have at your fingertips. I'll be demonstrating today's in PicMonkey. Give yourself about a half an hour for this project so you can give yourself some time to play and experiment with some different looks. Be sure to share your photos in your project workspace. Share your before and afters, your questions, and anything you've learned in the process.
2. Why edit?: Before I show you the tips and tricks of photo editing, I'll give you a little bit of background about why you should photo edit. A lot of people think that photo editing is kind of like cheating, think you're over edited photoshopped cover girl, airbrushed 40 pounds lighter, blemish remove, all of those things, and photo editing doesn't have to be that. A lot of other people think that photo editing is kind of like choosing up your photo, you know you've seen the the images with seven different fonts on it, sparkles, glitter, unicorns, it's just a color explosion, and photo editing doesn't have to be that either. In fact, the best photo editing is something that you wouldn't even notice. People have been photo editing since the advent of the darkroom. It's just something that any photographer will tell you is part of their photo taking process. The human eye has an amazing capacity to pick up lights, and edges, and shadows in a way that the camera lens oftentimes can't do. So the goal of basic photo editing is just to be simple, to actually put back what the camera takes out, or what the camera doesn't pick up. Photo editing is really going to help you build a consistent look and feel to your images, so that your branded images do have a tying thread from place to place. So, I would say photo editing is definitely a way of visually communicating. A lot of people use a consistent look to their images. It's a way for people to come to your Facebook page, or go to your website and to say, this is the same brand, this is the same business as I see on their website, it's a unifying thread. It tells your user whether you have a clean look and feel to your brand, or whether you have some fun, you can add fun with your photo editing. On the other end, as someone who's being visually communicated with, you probably see this quite a bit as you're scrolling through Facebook, looking at blogs, scrolling through Instagram. If you follow brands, you tend to pick up on the message that they're trying to convey, and you definitely pick up on the type of brand that they are through the images that they're using to represent themselves. In this class, you'll need a headshot, product images, your business name or a logo if you already have one created, and it's always a good idea to have just a list of image sizes that you'll need. So just get those dimensions at the ready. We're going to show you specific examples that you can edit, but feel free to use this in the way that it works for your business, images that you would use on your site. A lot of the principles that we'll talk about today can be transferable from image to image. You don't necessarily have to follow the styling that we use today, find your own style, so that you can tap into your own brand, image, voice. So the photos I'll be using today come from a friend of ours, Mico. She owns a jewelry business, Jewelry by Mico. She takes some amazing product photography. Her jewelry is really delicate, it's really fine, it can be a really big challenge to shoot her jewelry, but it can also be a challenge to edit it in a nice way that doesn't distract from the jewelry itself. Another challenge for someone like Mico who is a small business owner and doesn't have a lot of resources on hand, is getting a good headshot, a good profile picture. She's a talented photographer herself, but it can be challenging for her to get the shot just right without an extra pair of helping hands. There are some things that she can do to enhance her profile picture and get it ready for places like LinkedIn versus Facebook. The image that you present of yourself in these places might be a bit different from place to place. So as we're editing Mico's photos today, the goal is to help her drive impact to create a consistent look and feel to her images across all platforms. As you're moving to the class today, use the equipment that you have on hand, that's really what's going to bring out the best photos, using the equipment that you're comfortable with, whether it is your DSLR or your phone. The trick is, and what we're going to show you today, is that you can edit these photos no matter where they come from to make really beautiful representations of your work. I'll be demoing these edits in PicMonkey, but you can do this in any of your software, using any of your headshots that you have available.
3. Shooting Tips: Before we get into this demo, I'd like to take you through a few guiding principles for getting your headshots ready. So the first thing when you're shooting your photos, you just want to check your environment. What's behind you, what's in front of you, you want to make sure that the frame isn't too busy. Just keep it simple. You can always crop things out later, but it's just a good idea to take a look at things beforehand. The second thing is to freshen up. Just make sure you're looking, don't have to be your best, but make sure you're looking camera-ready. This is a picture that you're going to be presenting to your customers and to the world, make sure you're looking pretty good. Another great tip is to remember to show your personality. This is you representing your brand, so make it fun. Make sure that you have a great smile. So, the next tip is don't over-edit. People can tell when you over- edit your photos. So, our rule of thumb is definitely use touch up tools, effects, things like that, but scale them back. Make sure that they're simple, make sure that they're very subtle. So, the last tip would be, just to keep in mind where your headshot is going to live. Something that lives in Linkedin might be a little bit more professional. Something that you post on a dating site might be a little more friendlym approachable. So, just before you get into editing your images, just keep in mind where they're going to live and how you want to represent yourself on each platform. So, another tip just like you would keep in mind your background and your environment, you also want to keep in mind what you're wearing. You want to wear colors that compliment your skin tone. You don't want to wear fabrics that are too busy. Also ditch the bright whites, they're going to dry out your skin tone and potentially overexpose your photo.
4. Profile Pictures (Headshots): So, now I'll walk you through some headshot edits with Niko's profile picture. We have Niko's head chat right here. She's got a great smile. She's got a great presentation and we're just going to do some few subtle edits here. If you do nothing else to your photos I always recommend just jumping in and doing a quick exposure adjust. You can use our auto-adjust button here and I think that actually does a pretty nice job. But if you notice that you need some more highlights or you need to turn down some shadows anything like that, we do have these sliders here where you can fine tune things. So we'll apply that edit. So, now we'll jump into the touch-up features. The first thing we'll do here is touch on this blemish fix. So, Niko has just a tiny, tiny, tiny blemish hair on her cheek. So, we'll increase the brush size just a little bit and we'll get that baby gone and apply that. So, another thing I noticed is and I don't know if it's the glasses that's doing this but her eyes just are a little bit dull. I know that she has some bright popen eyes. So, we just want to use the eye brighten tool. I'll increase my breas size just a little bit here and you just go in and paint it on. It just helps to make her eyes pop. It really brings out the aliveness in her eyes. So, we'll go ahead and apply that edit. So, the next edit will do is a little teeth whitened. So, you come into the tool you want to get your brush size to be just about the size of the teeth so that the effect isn't running over. Then, go ahead and paint it on to the teeth and it should be subtle you don't want it to look insanely white but just to brighten things up a little and go ahead and apply that. So, the next tool I'll show you is our hairbrushed tool. I'm not suggesting you go overboard here just a little bit goes a long way so we'll go ahead and decrease our brush size. Think of this as more of like your conceal or or your foundation. So, we'll go ahead and start applying it. Just a little bit here and there. It should be very very subtle you shouldn't really notice it incredibly, if you do notice it then you're probably going too far. So just a little bit, there we go and we apply that. So, another great tool if you are using a flash or if you get some shine on your face when you're photographing, you can use the shine reduce tool. So again, adjust your brush size to match the size of the spot and then hone in on it. We see Niko has just a little bit of shine from her lip gloss there. So, we'll just decrease that and apply it. This can also be if you a little bit of oily skin stuff like that. I can zap out that away really easily. Then, just to add a little bit of healthy flavor to the face will throw in a little blush boost. So again, this is super-duper subtle. I'll go ahead and decrease the brush size. Put a little on the cheeks. We do have several different hues to use. So, you can find the one that works the best with your skin tone. Place it on the cheeks, a little on the chin and a little on the forehead. Another good trick is just to place a little bit under the eyes. So, I'll decrease the brush size for that and we'll paint it on. Then another really fun great tool to use is the mascara. Again it's another little thing that can help just make your eyes really stand out. So, we'll decrease the brush size here to match her eyelash line, size and decrease the strength because we don't want to be too invasive and go ahead and just paint it on. So, if you ever want to check to see how your editings going, if you've used touch up too much or if there's something that you're missing, we do have a before and after tool so you can just click on this button at the top.. You can see the before image here and here's the after and I think we're actually doing pretty good so we'll stick with it. Then maybe a little top secret we you can use the wrinkle or mover to get rid of some blemishes. So, we do see that Niko has a little bit of hair frizzy going on here. So, you can actually swoop in with the wrinkle remover and get rid of a little bit of these stray hairs that just helps to clean up the line of the headshot. Of course, you can use wrinkle remover for other things but in this picture and I Niko needs it. So, another fun tool you can use is our lip tint tool. So, you go ahead and open that up. You want to try to get a brush size close to the size of Niko's lips here. But we also have an eraser tool so you can go back and get rid of your mistakes. So, go ahead and use this default color here. But we do have quite an extensive color palette. You want to decrease the hardness a little bit? Just so that it is not a drawn online there is some less intensity. So, we'll go ahead and just start painting it on. Initially it's going to look like way too much. But we'll go ahead and touch it up here. We'll erase parts that we don't want here. Just to tap. You can go ahead and zoom into picture as well, Its too dark, it's go lighter. Increase or decrease the intensity until you find just the right. So, that's super subtle I think we'll stick with that. I think we're done touching up the photos. So, I'll go ahead and save that. You want to save to probably your largest file size just so that it doesn't compress too much and you don't lose quality and save it to your computer. We've walked through touch up but you may want to use this first certain platforms that have specific proportions. Or you may want to crop out part of your image. So, we'll demonstrate their crop tool really quick. So we'll go into crop and let's just say that we're loading this into Facebook and we need a square proportion. Go ahead and select that you can adjust the size of your square here or enter in your pixel sizes here. Also when you're cropping you want to make sure that you still have a good portion of your body left in the frame. Otherwise, you risk looking like a floating head here. So, we have Niko, I'll center her there and apply that crop and I think that looks pretty good. We can also jump over to the effects tab and apply a one-click effect. So great one-click effect to use is always to apply your black and white. If you have a noisy background or if you have a lot of colors going on, a lot of color contrast going on you want to use black and white to insert similar things down to make it a little bit more subtle and to make you the focal point of the image. So, we'll go ahead and apply that black and white. On the other hand you may not use black and white in places like Facebook, where you want to come off as warm and approachable. You may want some bright light colors to show off your brand and your personality. So, there are bunch of one-click effects and pick monkey that you can choose from. One of our favorites is urbane. It's going to add a little bit of darkness to your edges and bring out a little bit of the color within the image. So, it applies pretty intensely so you definitely want to play with the fade slider here. So, we'll take it down and just make it quite subtle at 65 percent paid and apply that. So, I really love what the photo editing we did for Niko, did for the image. The before image was a great shot of Niko, we started off we had a very strong picture. Her face was lit up. She looks very happy. She looks very friendly. These are all great qualities of head shot. But the coloring around her face, especially with the color shirt she's wearing photo editing can really help to bring out a little bit of a healthier, a vibrant vibe to the picture. So, I think what ended up happening with our edit is we have a great Square proportion she's cropped. She's framed really nicely within the new crop and just those tiny little bits of things that we did in the touch-up tool really helped to just give her a really vibrant appearance. Before you edit your headshot it's always a good idea to just take a minute or two to analyze the picture. Make sure it's the one that you want to use and when you land on the one, take a look at how things appear in the image. I would say be extra critical, find the blemishes in the picture. Find the stray hairs. You really want to make sure that you see the image as it is and then you can walk into the edit knowing the things that you need to fix. A question we get here a lot is, are your tub features applicable to everybody? Yes, absolutely. We consider our touch-up features to be pretty gender-neutral. They may have names that seem pretty cosmetic but all of the touch-up features will enhance a head shot but you just made fine tune it depending on the subject that you're working with. So, you can't really overstate the importance of a head shot. I mean it's going to be people's first impression of you. It does help build trust within your community of customers, knowing that there's a warm friendly face behind the products that they're purchasing may bring them back for more business.
5. Product Images: Up to now, we've talked about head shots. Now we're going to skip over to product shots. So this is what you're trying to sell to the world and there's a bit of an artistry to getting them right. Keep in mind that even if you aren't selling a product and if you're selling a service and instead of something like that, you're still going to be taking images around the office or at your home, in your workshop, things like that, and people want to see these images, and so you're going to want to edit those as well. So here are a couple of things to keep in mind about products shots. Just like with head shots, lighting is pretty much king. You'll want to use as much natural light as possible, use reflectors if you can. Another thing that you can use if you have it around is a light box. Those are also handy for small products. Just a very light space that you can use to really bring out your product. So another tip is to try to mix it up and vary the way that you're photographing your product. A lot of people use overhead photography and those are great but it's kinda fun to play around with it. Maybe getting an angle from the side, or sideways, just play around with how your product exists in its environment and I think you can find some really fun ways to shoot it. Another thing, and this is especially true in Mico's case, is to showcase your product in use. Show it being worn if it's a garment or jewelry or anything like that. It helps to provide your customers a little more understanding about what they're buying, how big it is, how it interacts with the human body, those types of things. And the last tip is don't be afraid of props. Definitely don't let the props get in the way of your product. You don't want to distract from your inventory. Some simple props can really help you be playful with your images and it can actually be a reflection of your brand also. In the case of jewelry by Mico, she oftentimes hangs earrings off of bowls, she'll drape a necklace over a cheese play, things like that. Just bringing in some very simple props to just showcase how your jewelry or how your product place. So as you're shooting your products, you probably have a ton of shots and so there are some things to look out for if you're trying to pick the cream of the crop. So the shot that we have here is of a lovely necklace that she made but there wasn't a lot of thought put into the styling of the photo. You definitely want to make sure that you're showcasing your product in a really lovely way. This just looks like the necklace was strewn on the table. If you're trying to get an interesting chat and you're using props that distract from the product, like this one, you'll see that the background is a little too busy. You'll notice that Mico's jewelry is very very fine, it's delicate. And so even a background that's slightly muted can conflict with the jewelry that she's trying to showcase. So this is a great shot of Mico's earrings but one thing I would say about this image is probably one too many props, and maybe even two too many props. The vase that the earrings are sitting on is lovely but it's kind of lovely in its own right and it does detract from the product that she's trying to show. Again, this image, there's some great styling going on. She showcasing a necklace with some earrings. But it's on a plate that's lovely and stands apart and it doesn't enhance her product very well because it steals the show. So here's a shot I love. This is a photo of a necklace, it's contextual you can see what it will look like once you buy it, how long it drapes down the neck, and it's got some great natural light. This is a shot I would definitely work with. So this is another great contextual shot. You can see how the bracelet fits on the wrist. There isn't too much in the frame, it is really focused on the brace. So I would definitely use us and maybe just crop it out a little bit, add a couple of edits and it'd be good to go. So this shot of Mico's is really lovely. It's a necklace draed over a cheese plate, she uses props really lovely in this image, doesn't detract from the jewelry. But there are some obvious edits, it could definitely use some exposure adjusting and we could definitely crop out that class, among other things. So this product shot is lovely, it definitely gives you a little bit of a behind the scenes that feels like she's showcasing several pieces but there's definitely one piece that takes the cake, this blue necklace right in the frontier. It's lovely because you get to see some of her other work and she uses the props really well. You don't actually get to see the entire prop itself which is kind of intriguing. This is a product shot I would definitely work with. Somebody to take this one product shot that we love to Mico's and show you a few edits that you could do to something like this. This can translate to many other images. You don't have to do this with just product shots obviously. Works well for images you have in office, family photos, anything like that. So we'll jump into the basic edits here and the first thing that we always do with images is just jump into the exposure or adjust the tool, and always just try out that auto-adjust button, usually it can do, it can at least lead you in the right direction of where you might want to make some changes, and then Mico does have a specific style to her images. She likes to have really light, really bright airy imagery and so we'll go ahead and try to mimic her style a bit by upping the brightness to maybe about 15 and then increase the highlights 20 feels like a pretty good place, and then decrease the shadows I think to about zero. The next place we're going to go is to colors. So this image is actually really good with colors, but we're just going to take the temperature down just a little bit. It'll take a little bit of the warmth out of the image and really highlight the blue jewels that she has there and a little goes a long way with the temperature tool. So you can see if you crank it down really far, it's going to really bring out the blues of your image. So I would say stay somewhere around the four to five range for an image like this. We'll jump over into the effects tools and all the way at the bottom are some advanced features. Levels is a really great powerful tool. So again, a little goes a long way with all of these features. So the first thing we're going to do is try to decrease the intensity of the shadows here. So just drag this up just a little bit and watch your image to see how it looks. We'll ratchet it back just a little bit here and that feels pretty good. And then we might want to play around a little bit with our mid tones. So bring this up a little and you can see that really helps to lighten very subtly the image. I'll apply that. And again to highlight Mico's style, we want to find effects that are really going to bring out the light in the image. So a great tool for that is Orton. So if you go all the way to the top here of our effects lists. It's going to initially apply sort of a fuzzy whew, it's going to brighten up the photo, it's really going to bring out the colors. What I'm actually going to do is turn the bloom all the way down so it's going to actually take away all that fuzziness because we want to keep her image in focus. And the default setting for the brightness is lovely but I think I would take it back down just a little bit just to add a little subtlety and apply that. An obvious edit that you would make on this image is to crop out the class peers. So we're going to come back to the basic edits, figure out the proportions that you want to use. So definitely think about where you're going to be using this image ahead of time. I'll go for a square proportion here. Again, you can increase or decrease your crop size, figure out where you want the focus of your image to fall and then apply that crop. And I think we're good to go. We'll save that. So I think this photo turned out really great. We really enhance the lightness of the image already had and we really brought out the blues of the jewelry that Mico is trying to sell. So regardless of where you're editing your images, a good thing to keep in mind is to keep a consistent look and feel. If your images are an extension of your branding. If you're going for consistently light bright look, make sure that you try to achieve that in all the images that you put out there. For product shots in particular, you want to kind of keep a same field to the props and the backgrounds that you're using, you don't want to stray too far so that you stay on brand. A couple of the most common mistakes I see with product shots is one not keeping the focus on your product, getting too distracting by putting too much in the frame. And another is over editing. It's simple to stay subtle and people oftentimes just want to go the extra mile but it can detract from your product. If you don't have your product shots ready, now is a great time to get your phone and just start shooting.
6. Headers and Collages: So, now that you have all your products shots, let's put them in context and make a header for your Website, your blog or your social channel. So, a header is something that you're going to work with in multiple channels; it can live on your Etsy site, it can live on your Website, on your blog, it's your Facebook cover or your Twitter cover, it can even be your email image. Header is also a really great place to showcase your products. You can think of it as your digital storefront. In this lesson, I'll show you two different ways to make a header. One is to make a collage and another is just with a single product photo. So, we'll start by going to the layout section here and select the Facebook cover. I think this one will play out nicely. So this preset automatically gives you the dimensions that you'll need for your Facebook cover. You can adjust the dimensions here, so you can make it versatile, it can work for your blog, your Website, or your email. So, I'll just drag and drop the images into the collage here. We can play around with the collage once they're placed. We have four images, but there are five cells here, so we can just go ahead and remove a cell here. So, we'll go ahead and edit these a little bit, there's a little edit button there for you. I'm going to go ahead and make this image a little bit more of the centerpiece of the cell. I'm going to increase the size pretty drastically and that'll allow me to move it within the cell. Then in this cell, we're just going to move it around, make sure it showcases all of the pieces, not everything has to be within each frame, just so that people get a sense of what products you provide. So, by default, you'll get these large spaces between images, but I'm just going to bring this back down a bit to about eight. Now, we have a pretty great header that we can use in our Facebook page. So, these images are already edited, we edited them before we jumped into the collage here. But you do have the opportunity to edit images right in flow, so you can come to click on this edit button here. If the effects aren't here that you want, you can open the image right into the Editor and apply the feature that you like. Then you take it back into the collage. You want the images to still look consistent, so if you do apply one effect to one image, I would recommend probably doing the same with the rest of the images in your collage. Another option, if you don't want to do it one by one, you can just click this Edit button in the top here, it takes your entire collage back into the Editor, and then you can apply one effect over the entire image. You can add text if you need. So, when you do have it in the Editor, I would just come over, find an effect you like and it applies to the entire collage. A couple of quick tips about spacing between images in a collage. If you have really busy images, you definitely want to increase the spacing between images. If you have really simple fine images like Mikos, you might want to decrease the spacing. Either way you go, definitely keep it simple and take a long look at it once you get it done. Another thing to consider when you're throwing you images together into a collage, you want your images to show variety. You want them to show various products that you have, maybe with just slightly different perspectives. It makes for more interesting collage if you do think about that ahead of time. So, really take advantage of the collage to showcase the breadth of your brand. So, collage is really a great place for you to be able to play around with your imagery. You can definitely play around with the coloring in the background. You definitely don't have to use a certain number of images, whatever works for you. Okay. So, we showed you how to work with a collage. Now, we're just going to show you a couple of quick tips for using a single image for a header. So, we have this simple image open here, it's a picture of Mikos earrings. It's very light, it's very simple, it's a great image for a header. So, the first thing we're going to do is hop over into the effects tool again and apply Orton to just bring out the light in an image. Because we want this image to match the rest of Mikos' stylized products photography. We'll just do some of the same edits that we've done previously. So, decrease the bloom and then I'll just increase the brightness a bit. That looks pretty good so we'll go ahead and apply that. So, this looks pretty good we'll go ahead and take it back into the basic edits and I think the only thing left to do in this one is to find your crop. So, you'll want to have your dimensions ready before you get started editing. So, you can just type in the dimensions here or select from a list of dropdowns. When you're thinking about your crop, think about where you want your focal point. We want Mikos earrings to lie within the center of the image but think about the rule of thirds. Just take a step back and think about the composition, where do you want your product to lie within the crop. This looks pretty good here so we'll go ahead and save it. So, here we have a really simple finished single image header. I really like the simple edits that we did. I think it ties together with Mikos brand, the lightness and it also brings the earrings to the focal point. I think our cropping really helped out. So, we walked through making a collage header and a single image header. But before we close here, I just want to give you a few tips. Work with clean and simple imagery and keep in mind how your header it's going to play with your profile pictures. For instance, if you're working with a really bright profile picture, you wan't to keep in mind the colors that you use for your header so that they're not clashing. There's also this thing called banner blindness. We're inundated with images all day long, make a customer step back and question what they're looking at and another thing that we can't emphasize enough is just being sure that you stay on brand. Keep your look and feel really consistent. This also applies to your header and the last thing to keep in mind is just to keep your header fresh. Feel free to change it up. You can change it up seasonally if you'd like or if you have new products to show off.
7. Watermarks: I also want to quickly touch on watermarking. Watermarks are sort of those transparent designs or logos, that you see in the bottom corner of an image. There are three reasons you might want to use a watermark. The first one is just to claim your images. In today's Internet, people are scrolling around and they find images and they think they can claim them, but you want to put your watermark on it to claim it as yours so that people know that it's not free for the taking. Another reason is it provides another opportunity to brand your images, it'll provide consistency across all of your images, and the last reason is that it's free and easy marketing. With all the sharing happening in social places, a watermark easily brings a customer back to your business. Many photo editors offer the ability for you to add text or graphics to your image, so find out how you can do that with your software. Today, I'm going show you two ways to add a watermark to images using PicMonkey. So, if you already have a logo, it's easy to add it to your images and PicMonkey. All you have to do is jump over to the Overlay section. Select the Your Own button, you're going to need to work with a PNG file with a transparent background, and find your logo file. Open the logo onto your image, resize it the way you like it, and find a nice place for it. A true watermark has a little fade to it, you don't want it to stand out too much in your image, it's not meant to be the focal point of the image, so we are going to fade this back of it, it looks pretty good. So when you are thinking about where to place your watermark, it's a good idea to think about where it plays with the other objects in your image. In this example, we chose the corner because it sort of tucks it away, and it doesn't become the focal point of the image. If you don't have a logo, go ahead and add it with whatever text tool you're using. In PicMonkey, you'll go to the text tool here, we have several fonts to choose from. Nickos branded font is the scripted pro, so we'll go ahead and add that to the image. Type in the name, you can change the font color three ways, you can either select a color from within this color palette. If you select this bar it gives you an eyedropper, you can choose a color from within the image. We'll go with this nice golden brown. The third way to select a color is just by typing in the hex code here at the top. So, we'll place the logo down here in the corner just like we had before, I'm going to fade it out a bit, so that it doesn't become the focal point. I'll go ahead and center it, and there we go. Both of these ways of Watermarking are great, if you're using your branded logo, it's going to keep a consistency to all of your images, it will help to maintain your brand across your images. If your logo is too busy or if you just want a simple solution typing your text in is a great alternative.
8. Content Tips for Social Media: So, up to now we've covered some ground. We've talked about editing your head shots, we've talked about working with individual product shots, we've talked about coalescing all of these images into a collage. Now, we're gonna give you some tips on using these images across your social media channels. It's a good thing to remember that you don't have to be in all the social places. There are tons of social channels these days, be where your community is. A good thing to keep in mind, is to bring a fresh perspective to your images, brainstorm with your team about how you can capture things in a different way. Don't post the same images over and over and over, or the same types of images over and over and over, it can get stale, so just put a fresh tilt on it. So, one great thing about social media is that you can bring your customers in. You don't have to just show them the finished products, show them the work-in-progress. Another great thing with social media is that it doesn't always have to be your content that's being shared, feel free to branch out, share relevant content that's being created by people that you admire, or people in relevant fields. In the case of Mico, she might want to share her favorite jewelers blog posts every now and then. It gives her customers a little insight into what she gets inspired by. Of course, you always want to credit where your images and where the content comes from. So, your image types and content types might change based on the social channel. For instance, in Facebook, you might post things that are really product oriented, really business oriented, and share other relevant content. Pinterest is a great place to share imagery that informs your customers about what you create, and educate them on your process. When you're working on Facebook your images are going to be key. You want your images to be pretty product-focused, and a good rule of thumb is to have less than 20 percent of the image covered in text, and all of the image editing tips that we've talked about today definitely apply to Facebook. You'd want to add your watermark to your images, you'd want to have a great fresh header, and you want to have a clean warm, friendly profile picture. If you happen to have a Pinterest presence, this is a great place to show off your products with collage because you do have a little bit more real estate with the longer dimensions. It's a good idea to use text on your pins, because of that longer dimension you have the space to explain your process. So, that real estate and adding text to your images is one of the biggest differences that you'll see when you're using images, when you post your images to Pinterest versus Facebook. If you're in Twitter, that space has become more and more visual, and I would recommend always including an image with every link you share. Last is Instagram, if you're using Instagram, this is a great place for product shots because of the instant nature of Instagram, it's also a good place to share those behind the scenes, in progress shots. So, a good thing to keep in mind when you're placing all your images in all these social places is to have fun, to stay on brand, and to not over edit. Keep your images natural.
9. Final Thoughts: So, here we are at the end, we've covered taking and editing great head shots for your profile pictures, we've talked about creating headers out of collages or single images, we've talked about editing your individual product shots, and we've talked about placing watermarks on your images. All these assets together combine to visually communicate your brand, and help it grow. I think the biggest takeaway today, is acknowledging the power of photo editing. A little bit goes a long way, it doesn't have to be crazy but you can get creative with it, you can have fun with it, and it can transform your images.
10. Explore Photo Classes on Skillshare:
Jenn Reiner, Marketing Manager at PicMonkey
