Actionable Tips & Tools on Image Editing

There’s no doubt that imagery can be a powerful communication method. There are countless places where imagery can be leveraged to incredible effect, differentiating your content from others. In a world where websites are becoming heavily templated and commoditized, imagery is one way to differentiate your business to some degree.

In this article, I just wanted to share some actionable tips and tools that I personally use to produce great imagery for presentations, websites, and social media. I'm no expert in this space, and there is tons of other tools and sources out there, but these are my common routes that I thought others may benefit from.

Professional Mock Ups

A common need for various platforms, particularly presentations, product pages or case studies is producing visuals that enable you to showcase products or parts of your website on multiple devices. For this, I tend to use a couple of tools to speed up this process.

The first one is Smart Mock Ups. This product provides a ton of ready-made mock-ups in various settings. You can either upload an image [like I did below] and have it placed within the mock-up, or request the tool to fetch and render a URL.

The second tool I regularly use is Screen Peek. Unlike the previous tool, Screen Peek is focused on doing 1 thing very well, which is fetching and rendering web pages into a range of common devices [iPhone, iPad, MacBook and iMac]. Here is one I quickly generated of the Screen Peek homepage on MacBook.

Its quick, easy to use, and produces very good quality image output which can then be downloaded and leveraged as required. The pro version is required to generate mock-ups on iPad, MacBook and iMac, but its only like $12 for lifetime access.

The limitation with Screen Peek is that you can't upload an image, which can cause problems when the websites you are rendering have elements you'd rather not show. For example, some websites show pop-ups on first load etc, and these will always show on Screen Peek renders.

For multi device mock ups, I also tend to use Smart Mock Ups as it comes with pre-packaged layouts like the one below.

Product / Company Imagery

There are many use cases where you may also need specific images for use across your website, marketing collateral and social media. This can range from featured images, to mock ups of your products in real life settings.

Of course, in a perfect world you might hire a professional photographer and get a bunch of great photos, but that will come at a high cost and the photos might still not be exactly what you want.

The other option is to take your ‘ok’ but not great photos and engage a professional to work their magic. Now, if like me you aren’t a whizz kid on Photoshop, and simply don’t have the desire to become one, then worry not – you can find and leverage so many good quality freelancers via sites like UpWork.

This image below is taken with a bog standard camera, and its probably fair to say the photographer isn't a professional. There is countless other problems, such as the background, heavy reflections, the random hand on the top, and of course the fact someone forgot to take the blue wrapper off. All in all you might be thinking, lets scrap that photo!

 Now here is the same original image after a bit of whizz bang Photoshop work via a freelancer on Upwork - it cost about $15 USD. Not bad right?!

This kind of image is great for multi usage across a website and social media channels. Personally I think $15 well invested.

Now, its fair to say that freelancer sites such as Upwork do sometimes bring about quality issues, freelancers who pitch themselves for endless jobs without fully reading the brief, and without necessarily having the skills and experience to really deliver what you need.

There is a simple way to try and minimize these potential pitfalls, and that’s basically through using the search filters effectively and looking for common red flags. Let’s say you need someone to create some professional images such as the examples I provided in the article. This is what I would recommend as an approach:

(1)   Search for something like ‘Image Editing’.

(2)   Click on Filters next to the search button.

(3)   Select the ones highlighted below.

This is going to ensure that the freelancers that come back have logged a considerable number of jobs on the platform, and have consistently achieved over 90% job satisfaction. In my experience those kinds of data points tend to drastically reduce the odds of you working with someone who can’t deliver.

Depending on the complexity of the task, you can expect to pay somewhere between $10-25 per image. Of course some original images may be beyond rescue, but as I showed with the frame example, its amazing what can be achieved by a trained professional.

Hopefully these quick tips and tools prove useful to someone - any other suggestions or questions please feel free to share in the comments section.