Guidelines and Considerations for Using a Premium Stock Photography

Internet now offers many instant resources for designers. Free photos, design inspiration, design resource, all can be obtained for free. You just need to type the keyword in your favorite search engine, and all the results will be displayed in a single click. From there arise a question, will this condition then make designers no longer require the premium resource providers? This article will try to answer it honestly.

The Advantages of Premium Resource Site

image credit: Muses Touch

As a provider of premium resource, there must be significant advantages to them than free competitors websites.

High Quality

The first point is that they have high quality products. This could be possible because all resources have been through the stages of the selection. There may be some poor-quality photo, but in general you will not find one whose quality is far below standard.

Provide Unique Photos

After my search, it turns out there was indeed a lot of interesting stock, and pretty hard to find for free. One is the picture spray paint, which is hard to find for free (I've found a set of free stock photos splashes of paint).

Free license

If the range of the work is not too large, for example, for a local magazine, a small website design, or for a local publication; license and copyright is no longer a problem. Moreover, some countries have not been sufficiently responsive in handling copyright issues. Some countries are not too concerned about it.

• However, if you work for clients abroad, licensing and copyright issues are always taken seriously. Errors in this issue could lead to legal problems.
• Premium Stock simplifies this matter because they already provide stringent requirements on its resource providers. For example, each photo with the model is required to include a Signed release models.
• Please note that some restrictions apply specifically for the purpose of editorial (news), and not for commercial use.

Based on my experience writing on several international sites, they will only use a free resource that explicitly state that their products can actually be used for free. Free design resource does not necessarily mean completely free. Some permit only if used in the community alone, some allow only for projects for free, some also apply attribution requirements, and so on. Licensing issues can sometimes be complicated so I opted to leave it to the editor.

Cheap, Practical, and Saves Time

Premium stock photos can be said to be cheaper than if you have to shoot yourself or hire a professional photographer. In addition, these photos are royalty free. That means you can use the photo in a variety of projects over and over again without having to pay the original owner. You also do not have to bother setting up the shooting set, the object to be photographed, waiting for the right moment, or wander to the destination. You just need a few clicks to get it. You can imagine how much preparation and sacrifice to obtain such photographs.

Useful as Design Resource

Not many people know that they not only provide stock photos but also illustrations and stock vectors that can be used for your design elements. For example splatter, vector logos, and Info graphic as below. Suppose using the following stocks, and then I can easily create designs quickly.

The Disadvantages of Premium Resource Site

Taking into account some of the points above, I consider that they can be very valuable for bloggers and designers. However, there are some things that still need to be improved.

Resources available out there can be very useful for the designer. Unfortunately, they are very limited. For example, they only provide documents as an illustration in a format EPS file basis. But, if you only need a vector forms, the standard file format is enough.

The most unpleasant is the lack of information about the fonts used in their vector illustration file. What's more, all of the text has been converted into a flat shape.

It would be great if they also provide the file in PSD format, which can be used as a design template.

I also found some stock photos of objects with a white background (limbo) and have been included along with the main path to the selected object in the photo. But unfortunately not all the photos are including this feature.

Conclusion

There are still some things that need to be addressed by providers of premium stock photos. However, their primary function as a provider of quality photo has been running very well and is very useful for designers to help their projects. And to be fair, in my next article I will discuss about the providers free stock photos.