Photo Editing Tools – Free and Paid Options

When producing item photographs for your online store, photo editing tools become essential to ensuring your potential customers accurately size-up your items.  “One of the best ways to market your products on Etsy.com is to have more professional product photos,” says John of FotoFuze.com, a professional 3D product photography and 2D image washing service.  “When a consumer is faced with the choice of buying from a shop with good photos and buying from a shop with worse photos, the consumer always picks the better photos. Even if the product with the worse photos is a better product!“

With so many photo editing options available for handmade sellers, our HandmadeMarketing.org team looked into what sellers recommend.

Etsy seller Vidalbuttons recently shared some tips with another Etsy seller in the Etsy.com forums.

“Use a program similar to Photoshop. This programs helps a lot!! If you don’t have the money to buy it, use picnik.com or site like this. It’s a site where you can edit your pics with the editing tools similar to Photoshop.”

Picnik prides itself on being a photo editing tool that is easy to use, yet powerful enough to get the job done.   Sellers can even get creative with a wide range of available effects, fonts, shapes, and frames.  Users can use the free version of Picnik, or upgrade to a premium version if they need more options.

In another forum post, Etsy seller SecretSafeBooks shares thoughts on using Picasa for photo editing.  “I love staging my product photos, and I can’t live without Picasa to enhance my pics. With it I can put in a watermark with my shop name, pump the contrast and crop,” the seller tells others.

Picasa is an image organizer and image viewer for organizing and editing digital photos.  The site also includes an integrated photo-sharing website.  Picasa has been owned by Google since 2004.  Picasa is free to download, and Picasa Web Albums provides 1 gigabyte of free storage, which ends up being enough space for 4,000 wallpaper-size photos.

John, from FotoFuze.com, tells our team that the website is a new technology which enables online sellers to increase their attention and profit by providing high quality 360-view pictures on their sites.

FotoFuze gives users access to technology to help automate the photography process, using methods to clean up photos.  That way, handmade sellers don’t have to learn the ins and outs of a photo editing program to get great photographs for their online shop.  “On average, you will sell more products with FotoFuze’s images than without,” the company says.

“To help keep your business looking fresh and up to date,” John tells HandmadeMarketing.org, “you can add sets of photos to our website and our software will process those photos into professional looking product photography for a reasonable price or for free, which you can access from any computer, any time when you Join FotoFuze (also free!).”

Which photo editing tool or software do you use for your photos?  Which programs do you recommend?  Which tools would you tell other sellers to skip?

Share your tips for optimizing your photographs for your ArtFire, Etsy, or other handmade shop site!

Why share? Our team publishes ideas from handmade sellers, artisans, and crafters.  Don’t forget to include links to your social media sites or handmade shop site in your article.  Sellers receive free press for lending their knowledge, and both new and experienced sellers alike get new ideas.  Share with HandmadeMarketing.org here.