A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words

Using Quality Imagery In Design

​We have all heard the idiom, “ A picture is worth a thousand words”, meaning a picture can evoke more feeling and emotion and express the true essence of something more effectively than a thousand words could. This old saying holds true when it comes to design.

Don’t compromise quality for convenience. Use professional photos on your website and in your designs for marketing materials.

Your Cellphone May Not Cut It

cellphone photo of food

In my years of graphic and web design, one of the most common issues I run into is a client who wants to use grainy, blurry, cell phone pictures in their flyer or on their website. It’s quite frustrating for both me and the client when they say they have plenty of photos to be used, and I open the files to find that they are almost thumbnail sized with low resolution and can’t be used. Don’t get me wrong; there are a lot of great cell phones out there with high quality cameras. People are always raving over the new IPhone or Samsung Galaxy that’s been released two weeks after the last one (technology moves fast lol) and their photo quality. However, is the quality good enough to utilize on a professional level? It all depends. Are you using it for a head shot or thumbnail image, or a magazine cover? Don’t get me wrong, there are some cellphones that can compare, but sometimes it takes a photographer to capture the quality needed. 

More Pixels Equals Perfection

A photo is made up of several small dots called pixels. The more pixels you have, the better your resolution or clarity of your image. If the resolution is low in an image, you will loose quality as you resize it and the image will become blurry or grainy and hard to make out. Images taken with a cell phone, yes even the new IPhone, have a resolution that is lower than that of a professional DSLR camera such as the Canon EOS 5D Mark IV or the Nikon 7Z. When you take a picture on a cell phone, the image is compressed down to either a JPEG or HEIF (High Efficiency Image Format) file, depending on the type of phone you have in order to save space on your phone. With a professional camera, you can choose to shoot a high resolution JPEG or a RAW file (uncompressed file format), and because the file is so large, you are able to resize the image and retain good quality.

Go Pro or Go Home

I highly recommend having professional photos or photos shot with an actual camera. It is an investment, but it is well worth it. Good quality photos on your website display a level of professionalism and trustworthiness. Even if you cannot have photos taken on your own, utilize stock images when necessary. With design, it will actually save you money to have professional photos. When an image has low resolution, image editing will have to be done to enhance the photo so that it does not take away from the quality of the design. Having to edit several photos before they can even be used is going to cost you. Even then, some photos are too small or don’t have enough data needed to boost the resolution. Though I am not a fan of using cell phone photos for a design, if you are set on using them, try to utilize apps like Adobe’s Lightroom Mobile so that you can shoot RAW. A viewer app will be required to view these photos on your phone and they will take up more space than a regular photo. There are other things you can purchase such as lenses and lights to for your phone to upgrade the quality, but if you are going to invest you may as well get an entry level DSLR camera like a Canon EOS Rebel T6 or Nikon D3400 for under $500 that will last longer.
Remember, a picture is meant to bring a design or site to life not kill it. Using a blurry grainy picture on a beautiful site or design is like a land field under the Eifel Tower. It is distracting, unsightly, and it takes away from the beauty of its surroundings.
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