A picture paints a thousand words
Fred R. Banard
We go through thousands and thousands of pictures in our lifetime, whether it be taking them, seeing them on Google images or on our daily scroll through Facebook. But no matter what, it’s a fact of life, images capture people’s attention. Don’t believe me? Here’s some science for you.
Hubspot recently collected some data that shows how imagery is a powerful communication tool:
- Content with relevant imagery gets 94% more views than content without images.
- People remember information better when it’s paired with images (10% retention of audio information vs. 65% retention of audio + visual information after three days).
- Visual content is 40 times more likely to be shared on social media.
So now you can agree imagery is power tool that you need to be using to make your marketing more memorable, effective and ultimately to stand out to your audience, after all, they see hundreds of images every day, make sure they remember yours.
These methods can be applied to all kinds of images, from your own photography or stock photos you sourced elsewhere. Using these pro tips and methods you don’t have to be a photoshop wiz, they can be done in various programs like Canva.com, GIMP, or the original Adobe Photoshop. Also with these effects, most of them can be transferred into and used in Instagram.
Crop Your Marketing Images
Cropping can remove dead space or unwanted areas or help emphasise a focal point.
Warning! If you plan on doing significant cropping, try to start out with as biggest an image possible. The more you crop the more you reduce your image quality and resolution. Pixelation can occur, especially if you then try to enlarge the cropped portion.
When cropping it’s a great to follow what’s known as the rule of thirds. This technique imagines that your photo is divided into thirds, both vertically and horizontally, with four lines (two vertical, two horizontal separated equally).
The four points where those lines would intersect form guidelines to the most important area of your image.
Blur Your Marketing Images
There will be times you’ll want to highlight images because of their featured elements , but they don’t always have to be the centre of attention. They can also work as great backgrounds.
Photos can be used for interesting backgrounds in a wide variety of ways. Lots of images these days have text on top of the background, you’ll often run into this problem: the details in the photo make the text hard to read.
What’s my solution? Apply some blurring to create a smooth, uncluttered background. With some light to moderate blurring, you can retain recognisable shapes or scenes in your background photos.
Alter The Color Intensity In Your Marketing Images
Had some professional photography done? Then the photographer would most probably adjusted the image’s saturation already.
Saturation is the level of the color intensity, so more saturated colors are bolder and brighter whereas less saturated colors are more faded and are closer to grey.
While any photo editing technique can be overdone, too much saturation can look particularly strange and unnatural. So, unless you’re after a particular effect, be careful to go easy on the saturation, or else you’ll end up with an image that has an almost glowing, neon look – like so.
Enhance Highlights and Shadows In Your Marketing Images
Increasing contrast is a good way to make your image pop and look more intense.
Upping the contrast produces lighter highlights, darker shadows — making your image look just a little better than what you’d see in real life #filter. Whereas, reducing contrast can give an image a more even tone.
As with saturation, too much contrast is not a good thing. Highlights can too bright and shadows can get too dark, which means you lose detail in those areas.
Adjust The Brightness In Your Marketing Images
Professional photographers struggle to get the correct lighting in photos.
While it’s best to start out with an image that has been correctly exposed, sometimes you’ll end up with a photo that’s just a little too dark, and you may be able to improve it by manipulating the brightness setting.
Keep in mind that editing the brightness will making everything brighter (or darker). This should be done incrementally and with attention to not creating areas that are overly bright, and you can often improve and balance your results by adjusting the contrast at the same time.
Use Colour Screens In Your Marketing Images
Need some text to pop without damaging the clarity of a photo? This method is for you. Blurring is a good way of making the text more noticeable over and image, this method keeps the images key features intact and still makes text pop.
Adding screens (or overlays) are really useful. They are blocks of colour with opacity lowered (altering the opacity determines how well the images shows, so the higher the opacity the lower visibility for the picture) so they become transparent blocks of colour over the top of your image.
An opaque screen provides a smoother surface for your text but also conceals your image, so you’ll want to find a happy balance of transparency to image ratio that suits.
Add Typography In Your Marketing Images
Images and text go hand in hand with one another. Put them together and they’re an amazing visual communication tool. Try adding relevant information to an image by placing text on top or vice versa. One thing to remember is to keep the text short.
Naturally open areas in photos like the sky or empty field provide clear spaces to add text.
