8 Reasons to Hire a Professional Retouching Service for Your Photos
Images are everywhere, and whether you are aware of it or not, the images you see heavily impact your opinion of things. Your consumers are the same way, which means you should be leveraging high-quality images to your advantage in order to grow and improve your business. Regardless of what industry you’re in, images are extremely important.
Realtors need high-quality photos of their properties to attract buyers. Companies selling any physical products, from furniture to fashion, need attractive images of those products if they want to make sales. Even service-based companies rely on images of completed projects or of their team members to build trust with potential customers. There are countless ways in which images can be used to benefit your business, but those images must be attractive and of the highest quality in order to be effective.
With that in mind, here are 8 reasons why you should be using a professional photo retouching service for any and all images that you may use for your business.
Build Credibility and Respectability
It used to be that credibility was built through face-to-face interactions. But with so much business being conducted online these days, consumers now rely on the quality of your website in order to decide if your business is credible. While the content of your site does play a role in this, often, consumers will make quick decisions about your business based on the quality of your images. If the images are low-quality or unprofessional, they may quickly leave your site and search for a business that appear more credible.
Some business owners try to address this by using stock photos on their site. While these images are often high quality, consumers today are quite savvy at picking out stock photos. If they recognize an image as a stock photo, trust decreases. In fact, one test found that there was a 35% increase in click-through rates when a company used a recognizable image of their found, rather than a stock image.
This means that the best way to build the credibility and trust that you need to draw in consumers is to use original, high-quality images on your website, which requires professional editing. A photo retouching service can edit out imperfections, add or remove backgrounds, and adjust color and sharpness in order to make your photos appear as high-quality and professional as possible.
Highlight Your Products
If you sell physical products, high-quality images are essential to making sales. As more and more people are turning to online shopping, the number of sales you make is going to be directly impacted by the quality of your product images. Consumers want to feel like they are getting a good idea of what your product will look like, including the size, color, and quality of the item. In order to capture all of this in an online image, you need to have the right photo editor working to perfect those images.
Additionally, a photo retouching service can help to show your products in a better light in order to attract more potential buyers. For example, photographing products on a white backdrop is standard for most retail businesses. This technique allows consumers to get a good look at the product with being distracted by backdrops. But achieving that perfect white background is nearly impossible without a bit of retouching. A quality photo editing service can give you the stark white backdrop that allows your products to stand out clearly, as well as giving your ecommerce site a consistent, clean look.
On the other hand, if you wish to show your products in context (aka, placed in a room or being worn by a person), photo retouching is essential to ensure that your product is still standing out in the image. This may require careful cropping and lighting adjustment to leverage the story-telling benefits of in-context product images, while still highlighting the product itself.
Create a Strong Brand
Every brand must have a voice—something truly unique that helps them to stand out from their competitors. And that voice must be consistent throughout all of your publications. From videos shared on social media to the images and content printed in brochures, every word and every image must connect to the persona that you’ve created for your company.
The images you share are a strong part of this, whether they’re images of your team members, your office, or your products. As an example, consider a law firm that has a very professional tone throughout their website. The design is crisp and clean, and the content is formal in its style and tone. But the images of their team members are taken against what is obviously a beige office wall, with no effort at creating a more professional backdrop. Does this send the same message of stark professionalism that is communicated throughout the rest of the site?
In such a situation, a photo editor could quickly and easily remove or replace the backdrop in favor of something that is more professional, helping to maintain the company’s projected sense of professionalism and build a stronger brand.
Make It More Shareable
Images are a vital part of connecting with a consumer base that wants to receive and process information quickly—especially over social media. HubSpot recently reported that, on the social platform Twitter, images are 94% more likely to be retweeted than text-only tweets. Additionally, with image-only platforms like Pinterest and Instagram, having high-quality images for your business is a cornerstone of reaching your consumers.
Finding images to share is rather simple if you’re a product-based business. You can create Pinterest boards of your products, have clients share images of products they’ve purchased from you via Instagram, and so on. Service-based industries will have a slightly harder time finding images to share, and might rely on infographics, images of finished projects, or photos of company events in order to attract attention. Even attaching an image to a blog post that you share on Facebook increases its shareability for your audience.
But whatever images you choose to share, they must be professional, eye-catching, and high-quality if you hope to have that image go viral. Creating viral-worthy images requires experience a know-how, which you can only achieve through years of practice, or through hiring a professional photo editor.
Make Low-Quality Photos Usable
Imagine for a moment that you’ve hired a photographer to get high-quality images of your office. This is a great strategy for connecting with your audience and building that credibility mentioned earlier. But when you get the images back, they’re lackluster at best. The image quality is low, the lighting is bad, and overall, you’re just not comfortable putting those images on your website. It’s starting to look like the time and money that you invested into those photos were completely wasted.
But a professional photo retouching service can actually put that investment to work for you. With a trained eye and the right technology, experienced photo editors can turn low-quality images into usable marketing tools.
Quality Images Get More Traffic
As already mentioned, low-quality images can often deter people from clicking through your website, as it impacts your company’s credibility with the consumer. But in addition to this, high-quality images can actually drive traffic to your website—and, as any business owner knows, more traffic means more leads, and more leads mean more sales. So how do quality images bring in more traffic?
- They get shared on social media. As mentioned above, shareability is a vital part of social media marketing today, and images are a big part of that. The more an image is shared across social media, the more likely the image will draw people to your website.
- They effectively share information. Did you know that up to 90% of information processed by the brain is visual? A quality image can share essential information with your consumers that entices them to click through to your site. Additionally, as many as two-thirds of individuals are classified as visual learners, so using images to support your online communications makes it easier for these learners to understand your message.
- They attract casual browsers and busy individuals. Those who are casually browsing the internet are more likely to skip over text-only content, as they either don’t have the time or interest to read long blocks of text. But an eye-catching, high-quality image is more likely to cause a person to stop scanning and actually look at the information you’re sharing.
- They make you easier to find online. While SEO is a very content-heavy marketing strategy, the images matter as well. A high-quality image with a correctly used alt tag is more likely to be found on organic searches, and will allow your company to show up in image searches as well.
With the potential of driving more buyers to your website, high-quality images are one of the most important marketing investments you can make. Having your photos edited by a professional photo retouching service is an essential part of that, ensuring that the images you’re posting online are designed to draw attention and bring in the traffic you’re looking for.
Reduce Turnaround Time
Throughout the earlier sections, you may have thought that perhaps editing the images yourself, or hiring an on-site image editor would be sufficient to reap the above-mentioned benefits of high-quality images. But there’s one area in which a skilled on-site photo editor simply can’t measure up to a third-part professional service: reducing turnaround time.
Having one individual to edit your photos only works if you have a small handful of images to retouch without much of a rush. After all, one person can only edit one photo at a time. But many businesses—such as photography businesses, retail companies, ecommerce sites, and many other large businesses—often have large numbers of photos that must be retouched, and there is usually a strict deadline for getting those photos ready for website posting or publishing.
A third-party photo retouching service can edit your images much more quickly, as there is often an entire staff of professional photo editors working on improving your images. This greatly reduces the turnaround time on your website images so that you can have them posted, published, and shared long before an in-house photo editor would have had them done.
How Our Photo Retouching Services Can Benefit You
At Bistar Digital, we employ a team of professional photo editors to provide you with the high-quality photo editing services you need in a minimal amount of time. We offer editing services to any and all types of businesses, including:
- Photographers
- Ecommerce websites
- Retail businesses
- Print publications
- Service-based industries
- And many more
As outlined above, hiring a professional image editor like those at Bistar Digital can provide your company with incredible benefits. In addition to reducing turnaround time, driving website traffic, and building your online reputation, Bistar can also help you to cut expenses related to retouching your images. Because our image editors are trained professionals, they can edit many images in a minimal amount of time, and that means reduced costs for you.
When compared to hiring your own team, Bistar Digital’s photo retouching services offer your company the following benefits:
- Lower overall cost for editing of bulk images
- Higher-quality images and more professional edits
- Faster editing to meet important deadlines
- And more
Whether you need a large batch of product photos retouched for your ecommerce website, need edits on the wedding photos you shot this week, or just want your employee photos ready for the “About Us” page on your site as soon as possible, Bistar Digital has the experience and expertise you need. We’ll retouch your photos quickly and provide you with incredible quality, all at a price you can afford.