With over two decades of helping people sell their antiques online, including selling his own, Mark has grown with the technology. Currently, he uses four main apps to save time when creating great photos to upload to his website and marketplaces. You can dive deeper into the details and catch some tips by watching the short video below.
Click here to check out part one of his Dealer Hacks.
Added June 2022 – While Mark uses all of the apps on this list from time to time, PhotoRoom is his current go-to app for removing backgrounds and accomplishing the professional quality photos of his pieces that he posts online. Important to note, when using this app you’ll want to pay attention to the resulting file size of the edited images, ensuring they are compatible with the guidelines your website and online marketplaces have in place for online listings.
Mark believes that using Photoshop is essential, as it does everything you need to alter your photos. He advises that you take a very short online course to understand the basics of how Photoshop works. Photoshop can do everything from correcting colors and tones to allowing you to “clone” an area from one part of an image and paint it into another part to remove dust or fingermarks.
Once you have a great image of your piece, you want it on a white background. Mark uses a website called “remove.bg” It cuts out the image and leaves it on a white background. He then uses a technique he has discovered that improves the visual appearance of the image even more. He moves the image with a white background back into Photoshop and uses the blurring tool around the very edge of the piece, very lightly, to create a little softness that really improves the overall look, especially in areas that are already out of focus as they are in the background.
For sizing his photos Mark uses an app called Kapwing, he creates a square blank canvas, drags and drops an image onto it, and drags and moves it around to ensure the right size and position. He then sets the resolution at 2048 by 2048, then downloads it, saves it, and it’s ready for upload to your shop.
Saving Time for What You Love
Mark is excited with the advances in technology that lead to a better result and can save massive amounts of time, once you are familiar with them.
At Ronati, we hope you found this brief tutorial on “The Mark Hill method” helpful. We are dedicated to helping dealers save time, so they have the freedom to do what they love!
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