You've got some photos that you think might sell. This page is all about showing you some simple, quick techniques that you can use to improve the look of them, to give them the best possible chance of selling. This is important for two reasons. First, a little correction of levels and colour can make a huge difference to whether it sells in the first place, and the number of sales you'll get with it. Second, think of how many photos you may have already rejected because they're not quite up to standard. Maybe, with a few minutes' effort, they might be salvageable. And that means extra photos for sale. Which, if you've done a good job with them, should mean extra income. Let's look at the first example below...



Hardly fit for selling, is it? Distracting edges, squint, and with dull colours. Looks a bit like a snapshot at present. I don’t think it’s beyond redemption, though.

Let’s go through the steps. Distracting edges are easily remedied with ‘Crop’ functionality, which pretty much every photo manipulation program should have. Just select the area you want to keep, and select ‘Crop’. Because I’m going to want to correct its squint perspective shortly, I’m not going to crop it too much, in case I need a little leeway in the next step.



Now, to correct the squint angle, we need to change the perspective slightly. This isn’t a panacea for pictures that are badly off-kilter, but a little correction will be fine with this image. General rule of thumb, try it quickly and see if you think it’ll work. You’ll soon know how far you can go. To do this in Photoshop, select Edit -> Transform -> Perspective. Just draw the top left corner upwards a little until the edges of the photo look parallel in the preview. To apply the edit, just double-click the image. It should now look something like this:



Nearly there now… This next little trick is invaluable for making the best of pretty much any photo. It makes a subtle difference to almost all photos, and in itself can make the difference between a good photo selling or not. (Sorry – again, taking Photoshop as the example, but it IS the industry-standard!) Go to Image -> Adjust -> Levels. You should see a window like this appear:



The curve essentially represents the tonal range of the photo. The left-hand end is the ‘black’ end, and the right-hand end is the ‘white’ end. We can see that the curve for this image is all bunched up in the middle. In other words, it has little contrast. That’s what made it look dull in the first place! What we want to do is to drag the arrow-heads at either end of the Input Levels curve towards the ends of the curve. That is, to adjust the levels so that the darkest tone in the photo is now black, and the lightest tone is now white. Most photographers refer to this little job as ‘making the colours pop’. But, hang on. This image has quite a lot of white in it. I think I don’t want to move the right-hand arrow all the way to the edge of the curve – that would make it too bright and horrible. Instead, I’m going to stop a little further to the right, just to keep it from becoming too overblown. My levels panel now looks like this:



Now the photo looks much better, and all that is needed is a final tidy-up crop, just to frame the panel nicely…:



That's the end of this first lesson in editing your photos for sale. Hopefully, you've seen a little taste of how, with a little practice, you can clean up and improve even quite ordinary photos to make some sales out of them within only a few minutes. I'm not super-fast, but I can comfortably re-touch 30 or 40 photos in an evening. Once you get the hang of it, it's an easy and intuitive job, and with most half-decent photos, 2 or 3 minutes will be enough to make them saleable.