If you’ve been following the site for a while, you’ll know that we’ve shared quite a few places to download free stock photos. Stock photos are great, but then there’s the problem where you’ve used the same photo as someone else and it’s difficult to tell who wrote each post!
Add text
Adding text to your stock photo is probably the best way to make sure people know it’s yours – with our stock images, we like to add the title of the blog post on there, but you could add something else or maybe create images for Pinterest and Instagram. Keeping the text styles the same on the images will create a stronger brand for your site as well, so that’s something to take into consideration when creating your image.
Add colour
Adding colour can also tie your images to your brand even more. With our stock images, we add a white bar to put the text on and change the opacity to about 40-50% so you can still see the image behind it. This is a really simple way to add your brand colours into an image.
You could also change the image into black and white, or add colour into the photo – you may want to check what the terms of the stock image is before amending it too much though!
Crop image
This is probably the easiest way to get more than one image out of a stock photo. If the photo is busy enough (e.g. a flatlay of a desk), you could crop in certain areas to get different looks.
Assuming the original image is a high quality one, then you can zoom into certain areas to crop the image as well to focus on certain items.
Add images
Depending on the type of stock image being used, and what you’re using it for, you could add in additional images to make it look different – e.g. if you were wanting to show screenshots of other websites, you could use a stock image of a laptop and paste the screenshots as if they were loaded on the laptop
You could also use stock images in combination with your own photos or other stock images in a collage – PicMonkey is really good for creating collages and is free to use.
Other amendments
Flipping and rotating images can help to make a stock image look different, but this is best used with other amendments listed above. Below is an example of how an image was rotated for a different look on the same image.
If you use the same look each time for your header images (e.g. you have a specific way of overlaying your text) and you use Photoshop, then you could create a template file where all you would need to do is amend the text and replace the background image – this would really help to speed up your blog post creation.
Adding other elements like a frame or changing the shape of the image (e.g using an overlay so you focus on a circle from the image) is a good way to make an image stand out
Of course, you could be creating your own stock images so no one else is going to have them but these tips can still be used to get more than one image out of a photo!
How do you amend stock images for your blog?
