Selling Stock Photos - Tips & Tricks

Higher ISO settings on your camera will make it more sensitive to light, making low light shooting easier, due to shorter shutter times and decreasing the chance of blurring. During daylight shooting this will help you freeze the action. But there are drawbacks. Raising the ISO setting will increase the amount of noise. At low ISO settings (amount will vary according to camera) the noise will be subtle, but at higher settings noise will become distracting—especially in flat areas like blue skies, or smooth skin tones.

There are a few reasons why you might want to close crop a photograph. You may want to pace an image from one photograph into another, or simply remove unwanted background clutter. If you are a designer, clipping paths are used to bring an image into a page layout program without bringing the background. It is also useful for flowing type around the object.

One of the worst things you can do is to simply use your paintbrush tool and paint over the background. Well now that I think about it, the Magic Wand tool is worse. However, paths are vector-based; therefore, they have hard edges. Gradated shadows, transparent clothing, soft focused edges or the dreaded FRIZZY HAIR-- these are not good candidates for close cropping with the pen tool. We will discuss those in a different tutorial.