Recently, I was approached to create a website for a new staffing & events planning company. Because the staffing/events division is brand new, they didn’t have any existing photos to demonstrate their services – the site also didn’t have a lot of content – and they needed images to help flesh out the site.

They also had barely any budget for stock photos.

I’m getting frustrated with the photos on the old standby, istockphoto.com, and decided to try an alternative. I went with bigstockphoto.com for inexpensive, royalty-free photographs for the project. I find that site easier to look at than istock, and on the surface, the quality of photograph generally seemed higher.

Well, I found the perfect image for the front page of the site. Or at least, it was perfect in my head… in reality, it needed a bit of post-production work.

I knew how I wanted the image to look, and this was the closest thing I could find to an image featuring helpful, happy, friendly and professional staffing. The price was right for my client, so I went ahead and bought the image.

I did notice a bunch of stuff once I got the high-resolution version. This photo is actually two stitched together: the pretty girl in the foreground is pasted over top the out-of-focus people background. This isn’t a problem as such, since the depth of field is faked well enough in this photographer’s work that you won’t notice it’s actually two images. However… the girl was cut out of her own photo in such a way that she’s got a white halo.

Naturally, I had to go in and fix this. Not just because I’m a perfectionist, but also because the image was going to be fairly large on the finished site, and the white outline would be visible!

Then there was the girl’s outfit. On closer inspection, she wasn’t wearing business at all… she was in a black corderoy fashion jacket with brass features, and a skirt more suitable for a nightclub.

Okay, so the skirt had to be lengthened, and that side lacing had to go. (I ran out of time, but if the project had more budget and a friendlier timeline, I’d also have fixed her salon-length fingernails and eliminate the sleeve zippers.)

Lastly, the corporate colour for this staffing agency is a businesslike royal blue, not red… so those folders had to be recoloured.

All in all, the changes made to the image were perhaps subtle to the average viewer, but they made the difference between an obvious stock photo and something harmonious with the website and the company image.

The moral of the story? Stock photography is a matter of getting what you pay for. In this case, a lower budget meant I used a photograph that needed a bit of work to bring it to an appropriate level… however, a good designer/production artist can make this happen.