Great Escape Publishing

Posted February 7th, 2013 by Bonnie Caton & filed under Travel Photography.

Eating spinach regularly will make the whites of your eyes whiter. It also lowers your risk of macular degeneration… so eat those leafy greens and wait for results. In the meantime, there’s a faster way to get whiter eyes — plus better skin, teeth, and hair, all at once: Adobe Lightroom. I can’t believe I’m showing you this “before” photo of me… but just look at what you can do: When you photograph people for stock (whether that person is you in a purple wig or someone else entirely) they need to look their best. And that means ALWAYS editing your photos before you upload them to a stock agency. Here are some quick (but dramatic) things you can do to increase the saleability of your people photos:

Whiten teeth and whites of eyes
Bring out color in irises of eyes
Make sure skin tone looks healthy
Erase blemishes
Get rid of any crumbs, threads, pet hairs, etc.

Lightroom makes editing all of these things very simple. If you haven’t tried it yet, you can get a free 30-day trial version of the program at Adobe.com.

By the way, this photo was part of a self-portrait project where I challenged myself to take one self-portrait a day for a month. I learned a TON and ended up with a few shots I could sell as stock — like this one, which is up for sale on iStock and Shutterstock. Another one, of me licking chocolate off a whisk, ended up on a blog about sugar addiction — quite fitting. Here are a couple more before and after shots from that series… Tomorrow I’ll show you some simple ways to kick up the saleability of your travel photos using Lightroom. Stay tuned!