Color Enhancement:
The displayed photo was taken with a Canon EOS Rebel DSLR. If you happen to have your own high end camera working with RAW images is best when color correcting the base image. But what if you don't have access to the RAW file? Much is the case with stock photography or when working with other designers and production houses. Often you will only get a jpg and if you are lucky the photographer will have made those corrections for you.
But as a designer you may need to color correct your images to match each other, or you may want to take artistic license with your images and create monotones, or you may want to make minor adjustments to the shadows. Whatever the case Adobe Photoshop has dozens of ways to achieve the results you want.
In the case of the displayed images a series of Layer Effects were used followed by further adjustments with Selective Color and verified the color information with the Color Info palette in Adobe Photoshop.
But as a designer you may need to color correct your images to match each other, or you may want to take artistic license with your images and create monotones, or you may want to make minor adjustments to the shadows. Whatever the case Adobe Photoshop has dozens of ways to achieve the results you want.
In the case of the displayed images a series of Layer Effects were used followed by further adjustments with Selective Color and verified the color information with the Color Info palette in Adobe Photoshop.
click image to view larger
Stock Photography:
The key to good design is good photography. People respond to good work and notice more quickly than ever when something is bad. When something is designed well it holds the viewers attention and if branded well the design will sell a product. There is an argument that stock photography is not original but it's what you do with stock photography that makes it original. One could spend hundreds of dollars working with photographers to achieve an original design and there will always be a call for custom photography but there is something to be said for the effect of design by way of stock photography.
Licensing restrictions to images are limited but there are plenty of great images for use with open licensing. There are many free stock photography sites to use but you get what you pay for and the quality of the image will almost always be less than desirable. As a result it is better to stay with sites like Getty Images, Shutterstock, etc. The wide variety of stock photos available assures that you can pull off a gorgeous design for a reasonable amount of money. Displayed are examples of images from 123RF.com used in some of the work shown on this blog:
Licensing restrictions to images are limited but there are plenty of great images for use with open licensing. There are many free stock photography sites to use but you get what you pay for and the quality of the image will almost always be less than desirable. As a result it is better to stay with sites like Getty Images, Shutterstock, etc. The wide variety of stock photos available assures that you can pull off a gorgeous design for a reasonable amount of money. Displayed are examples of images from 123RF.com used in some of the work shown on this blog:
click image to view larger