How To Boost Your ROI With Photoshop (14)
When we talk about core skills for affiliates, there's one we often miss out.
We talk a lot about copywriting, and a lot about angles, and a lot about statistics. But if you look at the top affiliates, there's another skill that a lot of them - not all of them, but a lot of them - share.
It's not coding, or server maintainance, or offer selection.
It's image manipulation. Or, as we usually put it, Photoshop.
Affiliate marketing is a visual game as much as it is a text game. Humans process the emotional content of an image faster than any text you throw at them - so if you get your images polished, you can grab 'em by the subconscious.
And there are a lot of subtle things that you can do to make that emotional hit greater, in just the same way as you polish your copy to make that work better.
In this tutorial, I'm going to take you through a number of Photoshop techniques that every affiliate should know in order to boost the impact of their images.
What You'll Need To Know For This Tutorial
You'll need a copy of Photoshop! It's very cheap these days - $10 a month - and far better than any other alternative for the kinds of tasks we do.
You'll also need to be basically familiar with layers, the Photoshop UI, etc. If you don't know Photoshop, www.reddit.com/r/photoshop has some great tutorials linked, and there are tons of them on YouTube.
Although these techniques can work for any advertising space that uses images, we'll be working on an ad for Facebook Newsfeed here.
Source Image
I'm using an image from a game that I confidently expect to be turning up as an affiliate offer pretty soon - Wildstar.
Wildstar is a Massively Multiplyer Online RPG that has just announced it's going free to play soon. That means that it's very likely to be running CPA affiliate offers. It also already has a strong artistic style, which is good for us.
You can use these techniques for any vertical and any image - I've used them on dating, mobile apps, listbuilding, adult and more verticals. They'll work even better on amateur images than on the comparatively well-framed, processed image that I'm using here.
Here's the source image:
1: Shot Choice
Firstly, it's important to frame our image as well as possible.
For images designed for press use, this has probably already been done, but that doesn't mean it will work well at the size you'll be using it. The Wildstar image we're using here, for example, looks great at full screen, but if we shrink it down to the size that it'll appear in a news feed, it looks kinda crap - too busy and confused. We can see there are figures in there, but at a glance we can't see who they are or why we might care. It's just a mess of yellow, black and purple.
So we re-frame the image. In this case, I've framed it on the two left-most characters.
Shot composition is important. You can spend a lifetime learning about it, but a simple shortcut is just to use a few composition rules like the Rule Of Thirds:
A few other tips for composition:
- Remember to leave space around your key features. An image with a face filling the frame will often be less effective than one where there's space around the face.
- Don't be afraid to use weird angles, rotate the image, etc. Your goal as an affiliate is to make people look, not make a beautifully-balanced picture.
- Pay attention to where characters in the image are looking and pointing. Eyelines can be really powerful - if you can get action moving toward your CTA, people pointing or looking at it, that's very powerful.
2: Remove Extraneous Background Details
When you're picking up random images for your campaigns, particularly if they're amateur in style, you'll almost always have something inconveniently photobombing the background.
Have a look at your picture for any background details that draw the eye or make your background unnecessarily complex. If you've cropped in, you'll often find that there are random bits or pieces of things you can't quite crop out. And if you're doing dating / adult/ diet etc, you'll often find that the best pictures have an inconvenient member of the opposite sex from the one you want to focus on - i.e. the photographer's boyfriend / girlfriend!
No worries: we can remove all this.
First, use the Quick Selection tool to select the bits we want to remove. In the case of the image we're using here, I'm going to remove the third character, who is down at the bottom right of the image. We can't really see them, and it distracts the eye from the main two characters in the shot.
You can find the Quick Selection Tool under the same menu item as the Magic Wand. It's one of my favourite tools in Photoshop, having been added in the last couple of iterations of the program.
To select with the Quick Selection tool, simply scribble with it over the parts you want to select. It'll probably grab some bits you don't want too - that's OK. Just hold down ALT and scribble on them to remove them from the selection.
Once you've done this, press SHIFT+F5 to bring up the Fill menu, and choose "Content-Aware Fill". That'll intelligently sample your image and attempt to fill the bit you're replacing with what it thinks the background should be. It's kind of magic.
A lot of the time, it'll just flat-out work. In a few cases, you might end up with random bits of crap in the fill where it hasn't quite worked. That's what happens with our image here, as you can see at the bottom-right.
You can try selecting them and re-filling, or you can use the Spot Healing Tool or the Clone Brush to get rid of them. However, if you also use the next tip, provided they're not huge problems you can just leave them - the next tip will make them almost invisible.
3: Blur background
This trick is more optional than the others - it doesn't work great on all pictures, and it takes a little bit of time. But it can have a very powerful effect, and is worth testing.
Basically, what we're going to do here is blur the background to simulate a camera focused just on the subject of the picture - what photographers would refer to as 'shallow depth of field'. That does two things: it simplifies the picture, and it draws the eye to the details we want people to focus on.
Evidence shows that on dating photos in particular, people strongly prefer pictures with shallow depth of field.
So how do we simulate this on our photo? It's actually pretty easy.
First, use the Quick Selection tool to select each of our characters.
Now, cut them from the background, create a new layer, and paste them onto that layer. Use the Context-Aware Fill to fill in the areas you've cut them from on the background layer.
Now, on the background layer, choose "Lens Blur" from the Filters->Blur menu, and adjust the "Radius" until the background is soft but not totally blurred out. Aim for the same kind of shallow depth of field as you see in the link above.
One additional tip: experiment with blurring the ENTIRE image too. A lot of the time, a blurry image will intrigue viewers and make them click through to see more - particularly if it's an image of a person.
4: Use Levels to make your image "pop"
Most images, particularly amateur images, don't use the full range of brightness available to them. That's one of the major reasons for an image appearing "flat" or "dull", and it's easy to fix.
We can also use this technique to seperate out the two layers. By applying this effect to the character layer but not the background, the characters will "pop" out from the background and stand out to the eye.
Select your character layer, then press CTRL+L. You'll be presented with a box like this:
This is a histogram - a graph of the brightnesses in the scene. At the far right are the lightest colours, at the far left are the darkest colours.
By dragging the two right and left -most arrows, we can change the contrast in the picture.
As you can see in this image, there's a real drop-off at the right hand side of the image. That implies that on the character layer, there are no full-brightness bits at all, and so the image is darker than it could be.
We can fix that by dragging the right-most arrow to the left a bit: you can see the result above.
On flatter photos, the effect of using levels can be pretty dramatic. Here's a classic amateur shot before and after with Levels applied:
5: More Popping: Sharpen and Vibrance
Now we'll use another couple of tools to make things pop even more.
Firstly, let's fire up Photoshop's Vibrance tool. Vibrance makes the image more colourful - it's very similar to increasing the Saturation on an image (which can also be worth trying), but optimised to avoid making the image really ugly, as saturation often does.
It's really simple to use. First, select the layer you want to adjust - we'll adjust our background, as it's looking a bit flat and washed out. Then go to image->adjustments->vibrance. You'll see a slider appear for 'Vibrance' - push it to the right to increase Vibrance.
Secondly, particularly if your image might end up quite small on screen, it's a good idea to use the Sharpen tool. Sharpen has a bad reputation, and it can make bigger pictures look unnatural, but if your image is going to be small it's an amazing tool for making them clearer and making them stand out more.
We'll use Sharpen on our characters - no point Sharpening a background we already blurred! Go to Filter->Sharpen->Sharpen, and it'll do the job by magic! It's a pretty subtle effect on the image we have here because this gaming image already has a lot of hard lines, but will be much more dramatic on other images.
Bonus Tip: You can also use Vibrance and even Saturation on specific parts of an image. This works particularly well if you select a woman's lips and increase the Saturation to make them redder and more distinct. A secret weapon for dating, adult, diet, PUA, etc!
6: Borders!
Finally, and this one's super-simple: do test your images with a border.
A coloured border has been proven time and time again to increase clickthroughs on image ads. You can test different colours - check out a guide to color psychology to get some ideas - but the important point is to use a border to separate out the image from the background.
Ideally, a hard-edged border is best. For that, we need to use Photoshop's "stroke" tool - NOT the select->border tool, which produces a feathered, soft border.
There are a variety of ways to create a border, but the simplest way is to create a new layer, select it, hit CTRL+A to select the entire image, then go to Edit->Stroke. Select width and color, make sure it's set to location "inside", and bam - border.
Bonus tip: Instead of or as well as a border, you can try raising the image out from the page. To do that, you'll need to know the background color for the page on which your ad will appear (or use a 24-bit PNG, which isn't recommended). Create a new layer of the background color of the page you'll be advertising on, put it below your other layers, then put all your other layers in a group by selecting them and hitting CTRL+G. Now, resize that group to be slightly smaller than the eventual size of the image, so you can see a bit of your background color layer. Now right-click on the group, convert it to a Smart Object, and apply a Layer Style of Drop Shadow, plus a second layer of 35% opacity Outer Glow with blend mode Normal and color black. Bingo - raised-up image.
And that's it!
There are more advanced Photoshop tricks you can use - loads of them. Check out this tutorial from MrGreen for more. But these techniques are enough to get you started and boost the ROI of your best-performing images.
Just to sum up - here's what we started with:
And here's what we ended up with:
And here's how the image changed in each step:
Give those techniques a go on your campaigns, and if you have any questions or suggestions, let me know below!
Wow, what a detailed tutorial and guide!
this is freaking brilliant caurmen!!! thanks for all the work & sharing!
Great post caurmen!! 
Great work Caurmen!
I have a question - does this method apply for small images on landers and banners? Like 320x50 banners. or 100x100 images.
I tried these exact functions in Photoshop before and it made small images look very unnatural, corrupted.
@katim777 - Yes, it definitely does. In particular, borders, sharpness, and vibrance can be super useful in making small images stand out.
"Unnatural" isn't necessarily a problem. Some of my more successful images have been 'shopped as hell and looked pretty extreme - but they catch the eye!
Cool. The effect sharpening or increasing contrast can have some times is huge! It really makes the image 'pop'. Interesting to note I pretty much do the exact same with my Teespring campaigns.
@mateen - yeah, the great thing about these sorts of techniques is that they're nearly universally applicable. If you've got a picture you want people to notice, they'll do the job.
I'm setting up some promotion for a comic later on today, and I'll be using all the image manipulation techniques for that which I've learned from affiliate marketing!
Hmm - maybe I should do an article on techniques the film world uses on its posters that affiliates can use too...
( For those who don't know, a film's poster is pretty much its #1 selling asset - studios spend a LOT of money on them. There's some really interesting design and sales philosophy behind those things. )
Very detailed and nice tutorial. I would've thought Zeno was the OP. :P
This is honestly amazing, I need to brush up my PS skills badly
Originally Posted by caurmen
Also, when I create the layers group in order to create the shadow behind the image, how do I resize the group in order to be slightly smaller than the background?
You will excuse the dumb questions
P.
@v1r4l4adv - I'm not 100% clear on the issue you're hitting here, sorry. Can you paste a screenshot? That should help us figure out what's going wrong and how to fix it.
Awsome Caurmen you rock boss
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