How Anyone Can Take Magazine-Quality Photos For Their Printing

If your business prints materials of any kind, be they promotional flyers or be they commercial/industry magazines, the chances are that images are going to play a big part of this. A picture as they say can tell a thousand words. So if you want to quickly communicate your point, grab attention and make your pages look professional and attractive, then using the right images is highly important.

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And the easiest way to create these images will often be to take photographs (it sure beats attempting to hand-draw your products and models anyway!). Just getting snap happy with a camera though isn’t good enough if you want to look professional – rather you need to think carefully about each shot and how you are going to make it look professional and attractive. Here we will look at how to do just that.

Consider the Context
Before you even start taking pictures you should think about where they are going to be used and how they are going to appear on the page. It’s the wrong approach to take lots of photos then think later about how you’re going to use them, because this will only result in pictures that don’t really fit onto the page. Instead think about which way round the pictures are going to face (people should face in towards any text to draw the eye to the centre of the page), think about the dimensions you want (a long narrow image with text wrapped around it, or a long banner for the top of your article?) and think about the colour palette so that the picture matches the rest of the page.

Compose Your Shot
Now when you go to take your photo you should think about the composition as a director would rather than just taking pictures head on. To make your pictures more interesting you need to think about the other elements in the shot such as borders and foreground elements. Likewise, you should also aim to use the most dramatic angles (up shots always look good) and you should think about where the eye will be drawn first and how you can create a feeling of depth. A line drawing the viewer into the mid-ground of the picture from the foreground for instance will be a great way to make your picture appear more interesting and more three dimensional.

Editing
It’s not just the way you take your picture that will ensure it looks good after the commercial printing company has put it to paper, but also the way you edit it and touch it up. These days there are a whole range of great photo editing packages available to let you improve your images from premium packages like PhotoShop to free alternatives like ‘GiMP’. Even if you don’t really know what you’re doing, just increasing the contrast on your images and blurring the background slightly out of focus can be enough to give your images a much more professional quality. Of course it’s also important to use the right hardware in the first place so make sure your images are high resolution and well lit.

David Volt is a professional photographer for a leading fashion magazine. He is a firm believer in the adage ‘A picture speaks a thousand words’ and is of the opinion that it is the pictures that are the USP of any magazine. When he isn’t busy working, he spends time blogging about different facets of his profession.