Top Photography Resources for Your Ecommerce Site

By Volusion

Discover the best places to find images and get the right tools to edit them with this list of top resources.

When it comes to your site’s web design, fewer things are more powerful than images. Not only do they boost your conversion rate, but they improve usability and positive brand recall, which makes finding (or creating) the right images so critical to your store’s success.

To help with that, here’s our list of the top photography and image resources for your online store.

Stock photography

Stock photography can be a great asset for ecommerce sites, especially newer, smaller businesses. With the variety of images these free and paid stock photography resources provide, any ecommerce site can find the images it needs.

Important: Be sure to review the licensing terms of images before using them.

Free

• Stock.XCHNG: A popular resource chock-full of free photographs.
• New Old Stock: A curated collection of vintage photos, completely free of licensing.
• Free Range Stock: Another large collection of free images. Requires you to sign-up for an account before downloading.
• Pic Jumbo: An organized assortment of free photos for commercial and personal work.

Paid

• iStock: The web’s original source for royalty-free stock images. Featuring an enormous selection of photographs and illustrations, iStock is a powerful asset for finding the perfect photos to use on your website.
• Shutterstock: iStock’s biggest competitor featuring over 32 million images, operating in 150 countries and complete with a very user-friendly image search.

Crowdsourced

Scoop Shot is an exciting new platform that allows you to ask photographers from across the globe to shoot photos for you.

Free image editors

When people think image editing, they think Adobe Photoshop. But there a number of powerful image editors available for FREE that work just as well.

• GIMP: A popular image editor is available for both Windows and Mac users, but it’s highly recommended for use only on Windows computers.
• Seashore: An open source project built solely for Mac OS. It’s based on GIMP’s technology and even uses the same file format.
• Pixlr: The world’s most popular online image editor. Users familiar with Instagram will feel right at home with Pixlr’s easy-to-use interface. Pixlr is also available for mobile devices.
• Photoscape: A fun and easy image editor meant for fixing and enhancing photos. Previously only available for Windows users, Photoscape has recently released Photoscape X, a Mac OS alternative with the same features.

Photo effects

Now that you have your photos, it’s time to make them stand out. Instagram has become widely popular for creating fun image effects, but how can you replicate those effects on your website? The following Photoshop actions make it extremely easy to apply cool filters to your images.

Photoshop Actions

Photoshop actions are a series of recorded steps by designers that allow you to add exciting and dramatic filters to your photos, all at the click of a button. Instagram meets Photoshop. Not familiar with Photoshop actions, watch this video for a brief tutorial to get you started.

Here are two websites with a total of 80 actions for you to download for free:

• 35 Fresh Photoshop Actions to Download
• 45 Amazing and Free Photoshop Actions

GIMP

Don’t have Photoshop but want to add fun filters to your pictures? The following free resources are perfect for GIMP users that want to add special effects to their images. While Photoshop calls these actions, GIMP refers to them as scripts.

• GIMP Scripts
• GIMP Scripts from JFotography
• GIMP Actions from DeviantArt

Tutorials

In case you’re looking to study up on image editing, there are plenty of tutorials and how-to’s to help you. Here are some of our favorites:

Photoshop

Photoshop is an incredibly powerful tool and can be daunting to get started. LifeHacker provides an amazing resource to help get you started with the Basics of Photoshop: Color Correction, Touch Ups, and Enhancements.

GIMP

LifeHacker doesn’t discriminate against those without Photoshop by providing an extremely helpful list of the Top 10 Photoshop Tricks You Can Use Without Buying Photoshop.

Pixlr

If you’re a Pixlr user, the following Pinterest Board has a large collection of essential Pixlr Video Tutorials.

Happy selling!
-Joey Bacon, Volusion

Visit Volusion’s Ecommerce Authority blog for everything you need to cultivate a successful online business. Visit www.Volusion.com to experience the world’s best ecommerce software solution for online businesses.

Via: Volusion Online Business