Stock Photos: Do you get what you pay for?

Typically, when I put together a design mock-ip for a client, I grab “placeholder” images from such places as MasterFile, Getty Images and so forth. Then, when the client likes the concept and the art work, I let them decide where to purchase it. Usually, that turns out pretty well, but some clients would like to have this-and-that-and-the-other tweaked (e.g., cropped, colorized, blurred, etc.), and in the end, the art work we purchased gets turned into something quite differently than the original. Yet, the client had to shell out $500 to use the photo on one-eighth of the first page of a double-sided letter-size brochure.

Annoying, ain’t it? (Especially, if the client’s purchase of the art work means less of a budget for your portion of the project.)

Good thing there is stock.xchng! Basically an open-source approach towards stock photography. You take what you need and respect the photographer’s licensing restrictions. Common courtesy is to send an e-mail message to the photographer, telling her or him how you are using the photo(s) and providing a link to (or a free copy of) the end product.

Most licensing restrictions are so lenient that I had no difficulty finding and using photos to put together a full-color, bleeding-edge brochure for a software company. As a matter of fact, the photographer whose work I chose had no licensing restrictions whatsoever. And since the photos are free for commercial and personal use, we saved a bundle, too.

Of course, not all photos are as high in quality as something you see on most established stock photography sites. However, with a little patience and a knack for entering the kind of search phrase that might lead you to the photo you’re looking for, you can probably find what you need at a decent enough quality that will be sufficient for “tweaking” in Adobe Photoshop or another professional image editing tool.