hey everybody, it's me again, and this is my new video on how to sell your photos online. in my previous video i was talking about things that you have to keep in mind while creating photography for sale. i mentioned nine things. let's see one more time what those things were. number 1. file format and size. number 2,
photo composition. number 3, sharpness. number 4, overfiltering. number 5, white balance. number 6, noise. number 7, copyright. number 8, model and property release, and number 9, no spamming. today i want to divide this list into two groups. the first group are the things that you might, or might not have to do while creating stock
photography, because it really depends on the quality of the original photo if these actions are needed or not. the things that belong to the first group are: photo composition, sharpness, overfiltering, white balance, and noise. the rest of the things in the list belong to the second group, and those are: file format and size,
copyright, model and property release, and no spamming in metadate. always keep in mind the things in the second group. they are really important if you want to sell your photos online. let's see now how do we go through this group of things on one example. this photo is seven years old, these are my son and my nephew planting
onions in the garden, helping my parents, so i used the moment to grab the camera and take a picture of them. and this is actually a pretty good seller. first, i'm gonna be talking about the copyright, because the process of removing logos and brand names from the image is the process that takes place during the image editing. so, we have to do
that before we save the image, of course. so, this image for example, had a logo on one of the shoes. it was not really prominent, but i had to remove it anyway. the logo was here and i'm going to zoom there so you can see that better. as you can see now there is no logo there but if i turn off this top layer the logo will show up. there you
go. so, i had to remove that because i didn't want the image to be rejected because of that. i'm going to turn on the top layer again, and the logo disappears. that was the only logo on this image, but you always have to be careful with logos on the clothes, on the buildings, brand names and that stuff. you always have to be sure to remove that, because the
image is going to get rejected. then you have to correct that later and resubmit the image, and if you don't want to go through that hassle just be careful the first time you edit the image. and now, let's check the image mode, the image color mode. so, i'm gonna go here to the image menu, click on it, go to mode, and as you can see the check
mark is already at rgb color mode and that's how it should be. if the check mark is at any other place please put it here and confirm. as i mentioned before, all today's cameras already save their images in this mode, so you probably don't have to think about it much, but it's good to know where this information is. there is
another check mark over here, it says 8 bits per channel and that's where the checkmark should be. it's not important now to know what that is, but be sure to put the check mark there if it's not. now, when we're done with checking the color mode, let's put some metadata to this image. so, i'm gonna go here, click file, go to file info, and photoshop opens this new
dialogue. it has few tabs on the left, it has some empty fields on the right, and the tab that we're gonna be using is the first one, or basic tab. the first field on the top is called "document title", and that's where we have to put a couple of words, or a few words that are really relevant to the image. not all agencies read this title. some of the
agencies just read the description, but we still have to put it because of those agencies that do. so i'm just going to put boys planting onions. english language has rules about capitalizing certain words in the title. so, i put the link in the description that shows you how to do it and what kind of words should be capitalized. that's not really
important for the search engine, but it just looks nice and professional, so when the customers find your image the title will look professional, which is also important sometimes. in this second box where it says author, just put your name, and author title is not really important. but, the description box is important, because some of the websites, as i
mentioned, don't read the title. they just read the description. in this box we have to put more details about the image, but still, avoid using spammy words because your account might be banned if you use spammy words in the description. so, there is one rule about the description. some of the websites don't accept descriptions that are shorter than seven words. so, you
have to be sure to put at least seven words in the description. so, i'm just going to put two boys planting onions in the garden and that's already seven words. 1,2,3,4,5,6,7. yes. now, of course, you can extend this and put more details, but still, use just
words that are relevant to the image. search engines look for this description, and they will be ranking your image better if the description contains relevant keywords. i'm going to extend this and say two boys playing and planting onions in the garden on a sunny day for example. or, we can add the word springtime, or
spring for example. in spring... the next important box is the keywords box. you can put keywords there, of course, keywords that are, again, relevant to the image, and divide them with comma, but you have to think about enough keywords if you want your image to be found. also, you don't want to go overboard and write 200 keywords, because most of the agencies
except maximum of 50 keywords. i never use photoshop to keyword my images, because it can be really time consuming to find even these 50 keywords that are relevant to the image, especially if you're not very good at english. there is a free software that helps you with this a lot, and the software is called xpiks, and i'm going to show you how it works in a
minute. so, for now, we're just gonna skip this box. we're not going to save keyword information with the image in photoshop, and we're going to move to the copyright information. the copyright information is usually set to unknown, but you just have to set it at copyrighted, and put your
name over here, or your alias. i usually use my alias, so i'm going to put dreamframer here, and now when we have all this information, we are ready to save the image. so, i'm just going to click ok, go to file, and save the file as it is, in photoshop format, because if i need to edit it later, and we submit the image,
all the information is going to be saved and i can just re-edit the image and upload again. so, i'm just gonna click save, and the image is saved along with the information that we just entered, and the picture is saved as a project, as a photoshop project in psd format. we can't sell the image like this. we have to save it as jpg to be uploaded, and i'm going to
show you how to do that. however, before doing that, i want to point out something about the size of the image. i mentioned before that different agencies have different rules about the minimum size of the image they accept, but all agencies except images that are 6.3 megapixels or larger. there is a reason i'm talking about the size of the image
and the reason is the price. at most agencies, not everywhere though, the larger the image - the higher the price. however, there is a higher chance for the image to be rejected if it's not super sharp, or if there is some noise in the shadows. so, you basically have to decide, either you're goinna be uploading full size images and risk that some of the
images are going to be rejected, or you're gonna shrink the images to the minimum acceptable size and have higher acceptance rate, eventually end up with more images in your portfolio, and earn more money this way. i decided to shrink all my images to close to 6.3 - 6.4 megapixels last year, and i really noticed that my acceptance rate
went up, and my sales also went up, even though my images were not extra-large. some people say that if your acceptance rate is high, the search engine will rank your images higher, and i truly believe that. so, i'm going to show you how to shrink the image the right size. i'm gonna check the image size by going to the image menu and clicking image
size over here. in this dialogue it's important to notice a couple of things. first width and height, and they are connected. be sure that the connection between these two is active, because when i turn it off like this, if i change the width, the height is going to stay the same, so the image will be stretched. so, you want to be sure that this here is
active. so, when you change the width, the height changes accordingly. the units are the next important information. right now it says pixels. if it says anything else like inches, or centimeters, or points, just click pixels and leave it like that, because you need to know how big the picture is in megapixels. and for that we have to
multiply the width in pixels width the height in pixels. so, i'm going to pull out the calculator, and i'm going to multiply the width and height. unfortunately, photoshop doesn't have the tool to do this. the calculator says that this image is 11 million 7 hundred 12 thousand 400 pixels big, which is basically 11.7,
megapixels which is almost 12 megapixels. so, i want to shrink this image to the size that is close to 6.3 megapixels or a little bit more than that. so, i'm going to click here to delete this, and type let's say 3400 pixels, and as you can see the height is also changed accordingly. so, i'm going to pull out the calculator, multiply these two numbers now. the
picture is still kind of big. it's 7.7 megapixels, so i'm going to shrink it a little bit more. i'm going to try with 3100 and now multiply again, and this is this is about perfect. 6.4 megapixels. so, i'm going to accept that and leave the height and the width to 3,100 and 2075, but before the shrinking we have a couple of resampling options.
right now here it says bicubic smooth gradients. there are few other methods to shrink or enlarge the image, but you're going to be using only two. one of these two is a bicubic smooth gradients, the one that's already chosen, and that one is good for both enlarging and shrinking. and the other one is bicubic sharper, which is good for reduction of the size,
because it makes the picture a little sharper. so, i'm going to use this one in this case, and i'm just gonna click ok. now, when the image is shrunk to the size that i wanted it to be, i'm just going to zoom and check the image at 100% again, to be sure that everything is fine, because this is the level of zoom that reviewers are going to be
using to review the image. so, if you're happy with the result just go ahead click file, click save as, choose jpg instead of psd, and just click save. now we have this dialogue where photoshop asks about the quality of the image. the higher the quality - the larger the file. for the pictures to be accepted the quality has to be between
10 and 12. there is no really visual difference between 10 and 12. the only difference is the size of the file. level 10 will give you much smaller file, but if you don't have problems with your internet connection, if you have fast internet just save the image at maximum quality, just in case.
so, i'm going to click ok, and now our image is saved as jpg, and all the information that we entered, as author name, and description, and copyright, is inside the image. i'm opening now that free software that i mentioned before. the software is called xpiks, and i posted the link in the description for you to download it.
so, i'm just going to click add files here, find my image, and xpiks is going to ask me to import existing metadata. existing metadata is the information that we entered in photoshop, so i'm just going to click start import, and as you can see there is our description here, there is the title. all the other information is there, but it's not
visible, so you don't worry. your copyright information and name is not deleted. so, let's find keywords now. to find keywords i'm going to click this suggests button here, and the new dialog opens. on the right side you can tell the software where to look for keywords. there are three major agencies listed over there, and i always use shutterstock,
and that's my bestseller anyway. so, i'm just gonna leave it like it was before. over here in this field i have to type a couple of keywords that are relevant to my image. in this case, the keywords would be for example boys planting onions. when i click search, the software searches for similar images on shutterstock, and as you can
see my image is there as one of the best sellers for these keywords. so, i'm gonna choose two or three images that are similar to my image, let's click mine too it doesn't matter. now, as you can see, the software already extracted all the keywords from my image, and added them to this box. so, i'm going to add a couple of more pictures, for example this one, the
boy already has a hat, and this one. now, in this upper box where it says suggested keywords, we have keywords that are overlapping between these three images, and we have a lower box that says other keywords. we just need to go through the top box and make sure that all these keywords are relevant to our image. so, let's see: boy, gardening, plant,
garden, spring, nature, onions, soil, vegetable, organic, growing, nutrition, grround, green, cultivating, male, working, outdoor, child. okay, all these keywords are relevant. we have 19 of them. at this point we can leave it like this, or we can add more keywords. adding keywords is easy. you just have to go to this lower box and click this little plus sign over
here, and the chosen keyword will go to the upper box. so, let's see: landscape, adorable, they are not really toddlers, agriculture, little, gardener, farmer, helping, brothers, grow, kid, bulb, springtime, growth, farming, farms, natural, cultivation, care, healthy, sunny, brother, family, worker, agriculture.
now we have 43 words, and that's enough, especially for this tutorial. i'm not gonna torture you with finding more keywords. so, i'm just going to click add suggested keywords, and close this dialog. xpiks saves one file next to our image, and that file contains all this information that we just entered, but we have to save it first. so, to save this
information with the image we just need to click this check mark over here, and click save, confirm, start export, and the image is saved with all the metadata that we entered, and all stock photo agencies will be able to read this information when you upload the picture, so you don't have to enter the same information over and over again at every
single photo agency where you want to sell the photo. since we're done with this we can turn off xpiks, and the image is ready to be uploaded. now let's talk about the model release, because this picture requires a signed model release to be accepted for sale in the first place. what is a model release? a model release
is a paper, a legal document, signed by people who are in the photo, or their legal guardians, parents for example if the people in the photo are minors. this paper basically serves as as a permission to sell the photo with these people in. when you start taking pictures of people, for sale, it's always easier to start with your
family, friends, and cousins, because it's going to be easy to ask them to sign a model release for you. when they do that this just scan paper, or take a picture of it, and upload it along with a photo in th special section of the website that sells photos online. later on, when you gain some experience, you can start hiring models. you will still have to ask
them to sign a model release for you even though they are professionals. and you can even sometimes ask strangers on the street to sign a model release if you really took an interesting picture of them. and that will be all for this video, i hope you liked it, if you did press that like button, make a comment, subscribe to my channel. i'm gonna be
uploading videos weekly, i'm going to cover all the details about selling photos online and making money that way. i also have another playlist that is called photoshop tutorials, and i have some very very exciting things to show you guys, so i hope we're going to keep in touc! see you! bye!
Just got my check for $500
Sometimes people don't believe me when I tell them about how much you can make taking paid surveys online...
So I took a video of myself actually getting paid $500 for paid surveys to finally set the record straight.
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