Creating Quality Images For Use In Video Marketing

Whether it’s just a logo to hang from the front of your store or you’re looking to create a ten page brochure explaining your products, images play a huge role in marketing. Without images, we would just have lines and lines of boring text, with nothing flashy to catch the eye or support main selling points.

Images also play a huge role in videos for marketing. Similar to more traditional marketing mediums, images in videos can help support an idea, give extra information and help catch the consumer’s attention.

If done poorly, you’ll alienate your target market and severely damage your branding by looking really unprofessional. Doing it well can help you go toe-to-toe with larger competitors and better attract customers.

What Counts as an Image in a Video?

First, nearly anything else you see in a video outside of the actual video part is an image that had to be produced, from text on the screen, to having your logo superimposed over everything at the end, to even a background.

Premiere Pro CC Video Editing Timeline

Different kinds of images will require varying amounts of work. Want to have a image or specific color as your background? All it requires is a green screen while shooting the video so you can easily insert an image or video in, but other than that, doesn’t require too much work. Other images will require a ton of work to produce and quite a bit more work to make it look natural in the video. Some can be done directly in the video editor software while most will require photo editing software to look well done.

The Tools You’ll Need

Proper photo and video editing software is essential to making an amazing video. You are going to have a bad time if you try to make a professional video using Microsoft Paint and whatever basic level video editor your PC came with.

When it comes to editing and creating photos, most pros agree that you’ll want to pick up Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator or other competing professional software, like Luminar. At first, Photoshop and similar programs might seem daunting to use, but once you learn to use them, you can manipulate photos with ease. There are tons of tutorials online, but if you’re serious about it, consider taking a formal class teaching you the ins and outs of Photoshop.

You’ll also need a good video editing software. On this, professionals disagree on the best tool to use, but if you are already getting Photoshop and Illustrator, you might as well bundle it with Adobe Premiere and save money on the three.

Photoshop CC in action.

It’s important to know what each piece of software is used for before you start. Illustrator is great at creating images from scratch, Photoshop is powerful for editing and changing existing images, and Premiere is used to edit videos and insert images in.

Now, you don’t have to stick to the Adobe tools, there are other ones out there, but make sure whatever you do pick up has the same abilities. You’ll need something to help create images from scratch, be able to edit and manipulate existing images, and be able to edit videos at will.

What Makes a Good Image for Video?

Before you start slapping images in your videos and hoping for the best, you need to know what kinds of images work well.

Different styles of images have their own pros and cons. Pixel-based images are what make up most of the world’s images and are created with tiny little squares with a single color. If you try to increase the size of a pixel based image, all you do is make the single color squares larger, making your image look cruddy. Vector based images instead use math equations to create their image and when you resize them, they look great. The downside, though, to vector images is that they are only animated/drawn images. You can’t make a real life photo into a vector image.

A good rule of thumb is to make a vector version of your logo because it’s the one image you’ll use over and over in your videos at different sizes. When getting other images, try to get them in the exact sizes you’ll want them for the video, or larger. Shrinking a pixel based image has less of a negative effect than increasing its size.

Creating and Editing Photos

You can’t just slap a jpeg into your video, square shaped and all, and believe it looks good. Every image you put into a video is going to require some editing.

First, you’ll need to get used to cropping, tracing, the magic wand, and choosing what part of an image to go into the video. Let’s say you made an image in Illustrator, like a product logo, and are looking to add it into your promotional video. You can’t just straight transfer the image in, as it will have the white background included in the image. You’ll need to move it into Photoshop, select the actual image, cut out the background, and save it with a transparent background. That way, when you put it into the video, you don’t have the white background, just the image.

Nearly every time you’re putting an image in, you’ll need to do this process in some way or another. A popular way of editing photos in videos is to add motion or animation to them so they bring more dynamism into your edit and draw your view in.

Another common photo edit you’ll be making is matching your image’s lighting to that in the video. If your video is very bright and light and then you add in a image that’s dull or flat, it will stick out. If the video is just made up of images (not the most exciting, but if that’s what you want) make sure the lighting and coloring between images match there too.

Images Are Very Powerful, Use Them

When it comes to video quality, including well done images can take a decent video marketing campaign and make it great. The extra production time and costs images require might be an extra strain on you, but doing it well will build your branding and allow you to compete with your bigger competitors. Combine great imagery with top-tier editing and acting, and you’ve got a strong video to help boost your marketing efforts.   

Author Bio: Brooke Faulkner lives in the Pacific Northwest, where she writes advice for fellow business owners and parents. See more of her writing on twitter, @faulknercreek