Many artists today are taking the e-commerce road to market their talent. And that’s actually a great idea. Amazon, eBay and other popular online selling platforms play a pivotal role in making art reach the right customers. But what do you think attracts users most when monitoring art online. It’s true a low price is a crowd-puller, but to truly appeal the senses, an art-work needs to look absolutely stunning. The same logic applies to clothes, accessories, home décor, and pretty much everything that’s available for sale online. Something that’s low priced will never sell if its depiction or image on an e-commerce website isn’t attractive. However, an item that looks ravishing tends to sell despite a slightly steep price.

Bottom line – to sell something online, its depiction / image / photograph should be perfect. We know where you’re going – Photoshop? Nah, here’s something simpler and more reasonable – ClippingMagic.

ClippingMagic – give photos a makeover!

ClippingMagic is an online tool that lets you accomplish all the editing tasks you need to publish great images. With a few clicks, it lets you remove image background, make them transparent, adjust colors, add / drop shadows, as well as crop the images to create an eye-popping result. Of course it doesn’t have all the features of Photoshop but if editing photos to highlight your work / product online is what you’re looking for, ClippingMagic is the perfect choice.

The tool’s intuitive algorithms make complex tasks like removing image background seem like child’s play. All you have to do is mark the foreground with a green line and the background with a red line and a click later, you’ll have a great transparent image that you can post on Amazon and eBay to sell. And all that for a fraction of the hassle and cost – neat!

Here are some exciting features of ClippingMagic at a glance:

• Allows you to pan and zoom images to deep levels for inspecting details and making changes accordingly
• Auto-save and Undo-Redo options to help revert changes and save automatically
• Configurable brush size to adapt to your zoom level dynamically
• Scalpel to cut off uneven faint edges
• Tools like refine edges, dedicated hair tool, color control, color cast removal, etc give you the kind of control you want to have while editing images and making them look perfect
• Enables you to select preferred file format, DPI, color space, and JPEG quality
• Facilitates advanced lossless or lossy web optimization to minimize image file sizes
• Support for images up to 8 megapixels

With ClippingMagic you can quickly create a catalog of neat results by conveniently clipping a number if images simultaneously. The above mentioned features are just the tip of the iceberg. To find out about the complete spectrum of the tool’s features, visit its homepage (https://clippingmagic.com/).

This is how it works

To say that ClippingMagic doesn’t have a learning curve attached with it wouldn’t be wrong. Depending upon how you wish to enhance your images, you can select which feature of the tool to use and view its dedicated tutorial on the website. Each tutorial includes a series of easy to understand steps and following them really isn’t difficult.

To test how simple the tool actually is, we scrolled down the homepage to reach the link for Basics Tutorial. On clicking the link, we landed on a page where a sample image was edited to remove background. There was also an option to “Try Your Own Image”. We clicked on the button to experiment with the tool first-hand.

Here are steps we followed to remove the background from our sample photo:

1. Dragged the image into the box outline on the web-page (there are also options to browse-upload, copy-paste, or fetch from URL)
2. Once the image loaded in the tool, a number of editing options appeared in the file menu
3. We only needed to remove the background, so as mentioned on the homepage, we highlighted the foreground with green color and the background with red

The results were updated in the adjacent panel in real-time. We could see the affect of each mouse click and movement which was quite interesting. A convenient ‘undo’ button helped revert any changes we didn’t like in the result.

There was a variety of other editing options available including color changes (saturation, temperature, brightness, etc.), adding shadows, cropping, fine-tuning the edges, etc. Once all changes were done and we were satisfied, we tried downloading the image. That’s when we were required to sign-up. To download even a single edited image you’ll need to subscribe to one of the affordable plans.

Pros VS Cons

We actually found the tool to be quite useful. You can upload and edit any number of images in any way you like. But to save edited images to your system, you’ll need to subscribe. Fair enough!

As far as cons are concerned, we found only a single one. While marking image foreground and background you’ll have to be really careful. The wrong kind of marking can cut off too much or too little of the image border or background or edge. The real-time preview window will help you out with this. Come to think of it, this isn’t a con, just a precaution you’ll have to follow while using the tool.

• Make any image background transparent with a few clicks with clippingmagic.com/ via @supermonitoring

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Final Verdict

We loved the tool – less hassle, less investment and a number of great photo editing features. Thumbs-up to the creators!

Bloggers, article writers, online content writers / editors while good at writing, might not be great at clicking pictures. But that doesn’t mean they don’t use pictures to adorn their writings. After all, if you’re into creating read-worthy material, you know how much weight a photo can add to your writing. Various studies point to the same fact that as compared to a write-up full of paragraphs, a write-up with photos, infographs and charts attracts more traffic. So if you’re ready with your next brilliant article or blog post but just can’t seem to find the perfect picture to go with it, hop-in at Pexels – the amazing free stock photo collection.

Pexels – Discover and Submit beautiful pictures for free!

Pexels is a huge online photo library that allows anybody to use any of the pictures present therein in any way they want. Also, it allows people to upload awesome shots that they take and garner attention for their work. There’s no money or attribution involved anywhere. A user doesn’t need to pay for any picture, nor is a photographer paid for his submission. It all works in a mutually beneficial way – the submitter dedicates his work to the public domain and the user utilizes the work attributing the photo to the taker (if he wants to); even if the work isn’t attributed, well, it isn’t a loss for the photographer since it is eventually his work that’s circling the Internet.

Pictures in Pexels’ database are licensed under the Creative Commons Zero License that waives off all rights on the work. A user can copy, modify, and/or distribute the work even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission. All the guys running the platform ask for is your support by way of a donation or by submitting your own photos and sharing them with the world. If only all things in the world were just as beautiful!

In addition to offering free stock photos, Pexels also partners with Shutterstock to offer sponsored photos. These are pictures that are available for sale through Shutterstock. Just click on any of the sponsored photos and you’ll be redirected to Shutterstock’s page where you can buy it.

Pexels can be your best launch-pad if you’re ambitious about photography and are looking for a break. Just create an account with the platform and start submitting your master-pieces. Who knows, your inspiration just might stumble upon one of your photos and really like it?

And as a food, travel, history, business, wildlife blogger, if you’ve been waiting for a limit-less photo library where you can get as many beautiful pictures as you want with no strings attached, you need to look no further than Pexels.

All-in-all, it’s a win-win platform for everyone.

How to use Pexels

As a user

To start using Pexels just visit the tool’s website and scroll through their collection. Once you reach a picture you like, click on it to view it along with the following details about it:

• Name of the submitter
• Picture size in pixels
• Size on disk
• Aspect ratio
• The license applicable to the photo (CC0 for most)
• Other photos submitted by the same submitter

Other than this information, there are several little tricks that you can play with the tool. For example, there is a timeline displaying photos similar to the one you’re viewing; click on any to view its details.

Additionally, there are several tags applied to each photo. Click on any tag to view other photos included under it. For example, if you click on the tag “people”, you’ll be able to see all photos that have been tagged under “people”.

Moreover, another unique feature is color-specific photos. All pictures have a small color menu displayed beneath them which contains prominent colors used in the photo you’re viewing. Click on any of the color from the menu to see all images which use that color as a prominent one. Cool eh?

You can “like” photos by signing up with the tool for free. It’s simple and quick! Once you have an account, you can also directly share photos from Pexels on your Facebook and Twitter profiles.

As a photographer

If you wish to use Pexels to show off your work to the world, create a free account. Once through, you can start uploading photos. Once submitted, the Pexels team scrutinizes the photos and selects the best of the lot that are fit to be published.

Additional Features

If you thought that was all, well, here’s a little more. Pexels also offers free stock videos under the Creative Commons Zero License. Of course, the videos are typically short, but they are high definition beautiful ones that can liven up any blog-post or article. Do check out their collection of free stock video by clicking on the three dots (…) at the upper-right corner of the screen. What’s more, the tool even has an API to offer.

Didn’t they leave anything out?

Pros VS Cons

This section is actually pointless with regard to Pexels since the tool has absolutely no negative points. At least we couldn’t find any. Do let us know if you manage to.

As far as the plus points are concerned, they’re pretty evident from the tool description above.

• Unlimited free stock photos to copy, modify, or share at pexels.com/ @PexelsPhotos via @supermonitoring

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To sum it up

Sign up with Pexels as soon as you can to keep monitoring their amazing photo library if nothing else. After all, as mentioned earlier, Pexels is a win-win tool for everyone. We need more such tools/services/people out there to create the perfect world!