One very easy way to make a few bucks with very little extra work is to take photographs you have taken over the years and post them for sale on the Internet. Many people earn a small (or large) income by using stock photo sites to sell the high quality images that were previously sitting in a family photo album or in a box on a shelf. Here are some fairly easy tips to follow to get started in selling your photos online.
Selecting Photos and Preparing Them For Sale Electronically
The most important aspect of selling personal photographs on a stock photo site is to select photos that are both high quality in terms of color and clarity and also highly interesting in terms of the subject matter they have captured. A publisher or other content creator looking for an image is shopping for something that will catch the viewer’s eye and draw them in to the content on the web page or print publication. Likewise, the image must have a high enough resolution that it can be scaled to larger or smaller sizes without distortion.
Preparing a photograph for sale on the Internet requires a little bit of computer aided adjustment. Using a program such as Photoshop Elements or the free Picasa software from Google it is fairly easy to improve the depth and clarity of an image once it has been scanned into the computer. When doing the initial scan, scan it at a fairly high resolution (300dpi or higher) or if using an image directly from a digital camera, consider using the RAW setting rather than allowing the camera to compress the image into JPG format.
Less Is More When Editing Digital Photos for Sale
Use the tools supplied with the image editing program to crop out portions of the background that are not relevant or that do not add to the appeal of the photograph as a whole. Try to leave the cropped image in the same relative dimensions as the original so that it can easily be scaled to fit in a traditional photo frame. Picasa and Photoshop both provide the ability to have the computer attempt to automatically fix the photograph by adjusting color and contrast levels. Other than this, it is often not a good idea to attempt to air brush or otherwise fix individual pixels or areas of a photograph. Such retouching, unless done by a professional, often leaves obvious artifacts in the image, detracting from its value.
Once you have selected the perfect images and done some minor adjustments it is time to move on to publishing the photographs for sale on the Internet.
