Editing Digital Photos for Your Business Website

Digital photo editing is a skill that takes a long time to learn at a very high level, but it isn’t that difficult to learn enough so you can do your own digital photo editing in a pinch. There are a couple of amazing tools that help you do this.

First of all, how do you find photos to use for your business website if you’re not shooting them yourself?

1. Stock agencies like Dreamstime.com have them for sale. You can search millions of images by keyword and buy the rights to use the image for your business for a few dollars per image. Yep, it’s that easy.

2. If you don’t even want to spend a few dollars you can get some great images for free at Flickr.com. At the bottom of Flickr pages is a link to Creative Commons photos. Go there and have a look. You’ll see groups of CC images that you can choose from, but be careful because only a couple are OK to use on your business website. I always use the “By:” attribution photos because I can edit the photos as I like too – within the limits of the license. Search the 13million + By: attributed photos and find some great shots for your website. Make sure you credit the author. I use (Photo credit: Flickr.com user, usersnamehere)

If you’ve shot images yourself and want to edit them easily you should really invest in an old version of “Paint Shop Pro”. This is a Photoshop type program that has thousands of options, but that is MUCH easier to learn than PS. It just makes a lot more sense.

Edit your image in Paint Shop Pro and save it as a .jpg or .gif file and then go get “xat.com’s JPEG Optimizer” program which will help you shrink the file size to a more internet friendly size. I’ve used JPEG optimizer Pro for about 9 years now and it’s still amazing. I use an old version so it’s free!

There are tutorials for Paint Shop Pro and JPEG Optimizer that will teach you how to do simple graphics changes.

Good luck!