Design Tips for Amateurs Part II: Photos

Behold, part two of the series you wish you had read before you had that amateur atrocious 8 page 4-color flyer to the tune of 2,500 printed (Hey, cheaper to print in bulk, right?) Oh, well, c’est la vie. You can’t turn back time. But you can keep one copy to use as an example of what not to do, and perhaps build a sweet bonfire with the rest.

If you didn’t catch the first part of the series, I give a brief yet thorough instruction in the usage of type (yawn.) Time to liven up things a bit with photos.

If I had to break down photos into just two categories, I would classify them as such – professional and well, not professional. Professional photographers use nice cameras, lighting techniques, and equipment that looks like it came off the mother ship. Also they talk about things we don’t understand, like shutter speed, and they shoot from interesting angles and perspectives.

Probably 99.9% of the time, a photo would look better taken by a professional. But, unless you know a photographer that works pro bono or on the cheap, you may want to make a go of it yourself.

The first thing you want to do is invest in a decent digital camera. I am no expert on cameras, nor do I pretend to be. But there’s a web out there, and it’s world wide. Do a little research. Why a digital camera? Simply because you can screw up as many shots as you can delete, and the odds are in your favor that you have at least one decent photo. Another reason is that the digital photo cuts out the most laborious step in the process – scanning. Anyone who enjoys scanning photos probably also finds it diverting to peel off wallpaper or fill up a fifty-gallon tank with gas.

Before I proceed to tell you what to do with your (hopefully) digital photo, I want to take a moment to speak to resolution. No, not as in you making a resolution to obligingly dispose of the disposable camera (although not a bad idea.) I’m talking about screen resolution versus print resolution.

I am now going to pick on anyone who thought it was an ingenious idea to save a picture off the web to use in a printed piece. Besides breaking copyright laws, you also more than likely committed another foul crime – the pixelated picture. The three letters you need to remember are dpi, which stands for dots per inch.

If you look really really closely at a printed piece, you will see that the colors are made up of little bitty dots. A picture that is printed at 300 dpi fits 300 of those little dots inside one square inch, which makes the color look connected, like you would expect to see. That same picture at 72 dpi, which happens to be screen resolution, only has 72 dots per inch, which results in holes that the printer tries to fill in, thus creating the “pixelated” look. The moral here is to never use a picture from the internet in a printed piece, unless you know without uncertainty that it is a high resolution (hi-res) photo. How do you know this? Open the picture in a photo editor.

The best photo editor out there is Adobe Photoshop, no question. But unless you’re planning on spending a lot of time editing photos or creating multi-layered designs that kick butt, the high price of Photoshop is probably not worth it. Adobe also makes a program called Photoshop Elements which is like Photoshop junior for a more junior price. Your new digital camera may also come with photo editing software that can crop, resize, and color correct.

I won’t spend too much more time on photo size, except to say that dpi and photo size are somewhat interchangeable. For instance, if you get a picture off of your camera that is 20”x 25” at 72 dpi, you should safely be able to convert it to something more along the lines of a 4”x 5” at 300 dpi.

Perhaps the better way to further discuss how to use photos is to tell you what screams “Amateur!”

Offense: The Date Stamp

Unless your brochure is going to be submitted as evidence in a court of law, there is no reason for anyone to know on which date you took the picture. Not only is it tacky, but the date stamp might as well accompany an audio microchip that informs everyone that you do not know how to turn the date feature off your camera. If your photo is perfect in every way less the date stamp, you either need to crop it or clone/airbrush over it. Cropping would probably be the easiest option.

Offense: Out of focus

If you can succeed at making an artistic statement with an unfocused picture, then more power to you. Just don’t confuse out of focus with soft focus. One’s a technique. The other is a botch. Is your photo slightly out of focus? “Nobody will notice,” you might think, or “Good enough.” Just remember – your marketing materials are a reflection of your company! Do you want to change your slogan to “Good enough”? I didn’t think so.

Offense: “Hey I’m down here!”

There are always exceptions to the rule, but as an amateur photographer you would do best to center the picture around your subject matter. If you’re taking a picture of your staff in front of your store, zoom in on faces. Nobody’s interested in a shot that consists two thirds of a brick building and one third of a line of unrecognizable people. After all, the sentiment behind the photo is usually something like, “Look at all the friendly folk ready to serve you.” So let’s see more smiles and less masonry.

Offense: The color nightmare

Whether the subject of your photo is washed out or too dark, nothing says amateur photographer like color and contrast issues. Many potential problems can be warded off just by paying attention when taking the photo. For example, if you take a picture of someone standing in front of a bright light, you can expect the person to come out too dark. If the light is shining directly on him, then he will look washed out. Go for even lighting, like you would find on a cloudy day. Again, I must admit that I’m no expert here on taking pictures. But I have tried to edit plenty of photos taken in bad lighting, and it is no easy task.

One last thing about photos, which is in relation to placing them in a brochure or other marketing piece. Do something interesting with them, for crying out loud. Rotate them a little, or cut out the some of the background in a photo editing program. Give them a border or a drop shadow. (However, I wouldn’t recommend trying to lay text over them. That can cause a whole new set of problems.)

So the good news is that, although your photos still may not be “picture perfect”, you may think twice before snapping shots out of a moving car (out of focus) on a sunny day while leaving your date stamp on. The bad news is, of course, you will have to devote more time and effort to making your pictures the best possible representation of your company.

Do you have tips for anyone trying to use photos in their marketing photos? If so, email me your ideas.