Sell Photos Online: edit your pictures to make money through microstock

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Sell Photos Online: edit your pictures to make money through microstock, Steps 10-16

10 Improve skin tone
To improve the skin tones, go to Enhance>Adjust Color>Adjust Color for Skin Tone. Click the Eyedropper tool on the baby’s forehead. The tool will warm up the sampled area to create a colourful and healthy-looking skin tone, which is used throughout the image.

11 Enhance selective colours
Choose Layer>New Adjustment layer >Hue>Saturation. Set the drop-down menu to Yellows and set Saturation to +27 to enhance the yellows in the woolly hat. Pop Greens up to +43. This selective adjustment avoids over-saturating the healthy skin tones.

12 Resize as appropriate
Stock sites offer different sized images at different prices. Go to File>Save As. Call the image ‘Large’, and save it as a JPEG. Go to Image>Resize>Image Size. In Document Size set the Width drop-down menu to Percent. Reduce the Value to 50% to create a smaller image. Save it as ‘Medium’.

13 Sharpen each version
Open the Large version and zoom in to 100%. Go to Enhance>Adjust Sharpness. Set Amount to 44% and Radius to 1.7 to gently enhance fine details such as the eyelashes. Open the Medium version. As the shot is smaller, set the Adjust Sharpness Amount to 22% to avoid over-sharpening it.

14 Edit the EXIF data
No matter how well-processed your photo is, it won’t sell if customers can’t find it. Stock photography sites enable you to caption the image when you upload it and assign keywords to it that will help potential buyers narrow down and locate the image. Select File>File Info.

15 Title the image
Kick off by clicking the Description tab and adding a suitable Document Title. Make sure the  title describes the contents of the image. Search engines such as Google can explore a stock site’s database, so ‘Baby wearing woolly hat’ is a more  useful title than a vague ‘Cute baby’.

16 Create keywords
Keywords are vital for making your photo rise to the top of the search results and giving you that sale. For this image you would start with the obvious – ‘baby’, ‘hat’ – then go for specific details such as ‘looking at camera’. You can paste keywords into the site’s online form when you upload the image.

FIRST PAGE: How to edit your pictures to make money through microstock – Steps 1-9

Posted on Monday, October 29th, 2012 at 4:30 pm under Photography Tips, Sell Your Work.