40 Free Resources to Help Grow Your Photography Business

Photography allows one to explore different perspectives of life captured by it. Photography is an art and it is the task of the photographer to always challenge himself to convey his thoughts, stories, and advocacies he wants to communicate only with images.

Taking a good photograph requires investment and not only in professional cameras and equipment. It also requires investment in tools, photo editors, services, and most especially, knowledge. In this list, I have various photography tips and resources that can make better photographers and deliver incredible results.

40 Free Resources for Photographers

Learning Tools

If you are an amateur photographer and own a DSLR or even a compact digital camera with a manual mode, these little online photo courses are for you. Learn to use your device. So here I have tools you can use to learn photography.

1. Allison

Through twelve modules and a final evaluation, the Alison platform will overcome your boredom. The site shares free online photography courses from Harvard University under a Creative Commons license. On the program: retouching software, how a digital camera works, reading histograms, the importance of light, color, notions of exposure, optics, and a little history of photography.

2. Lectures on Photography by Marc Levoy

A very selfless Stanford University professor had made the internet happier by posting his lessons online and opening a YouTube channel dedicated to his lessons. Considered a big name in the United States, Marc Levoy taught digital photography at the University of California from 2009 to 2014, before giving courses at Google from the beginning of 2016.

3. Professional Photographers of America

The Professional Photographers of America, meanwhile, have decided to put more than 1,000 photo courses online for free. And everything will be searchable for two weeks. To have access to all the courses of their "Education Unlocked", you must create a free account.

4. Imaginated.com

If you are a newbie photographer looking for basic information, tips and tricks Imaginated.com has a lot of resources for beginners as well as for pros. It is a hub for photography tips and insights, learning from comprehensive guides and tutorials on how to capture the perfect shots from portraits to street photography and more.

Photo Editing Tools

Improving the rendering of your photos, retouching a defect in a portrait, or even cropping an image are common operations that you may need to perform on your computer. There are indeed many free tools integrating all the necessary functions that will allow as many people as possible to retouch their photos.

5. Adobe Lightroom

Lightroom is the most well-known editing software among photo enthusiasts. Adobe Lightroom ia RAW processor to edit or organize your images. This advanced editor gives you full control on enhancing your shots. It doesn’t only allow you to retouch photos but also create engaging graphic designs.

Capture, edit, and share your photos all from one place. Lightroom can manage multiple images at a time. You can easily mark up your images by the bulk. With Adobe Lightroom CC, you’ll first have to design and save a watermark, and then you can add it to any exported material.

This software will always make photographers stay organised and on top of your game.

6. PhotoFiltre 7

Developed around the core of PhotoFiltre Studio, PhotoFiltre 7 includes all the essential functions of the software to retouch your images. Available only on Windows, it benefits from a simple interface to learn, the tools it provides are simple enough to allow you to apply basic adjustments to your images like brightness, contrast, saturation, and color balance.

7. Adobe Photoshop Express Editor

Usually, when it comes to photo editing, Photoshop, Adobe's software, is the first name that comes to mind. The photo-editing application, reserved for professionals and advanced users, is now available with a monthly subscription billed at $24, a sum that not everyone is ready to put into software used occasionally.

8. Keyshot

KeyShot is an image renderer that can create high-definition images and models. The quality of this software is so high that they look like real photographs. Within capable hands, KeyShot can work wonders and is mainly used by large companies to design their marketing tools.

Photo Editing Services

9. Ephotovn

Ephotovn is a perfect photo retouching for photographers and beginners. The list of their publishing services for photographers is very large and the number of countries they work with is impressive. If you intend to edit images with children, portraits, wedding photos, sets, real estate images, or e-commerce photographs, Ephotovn will do it for you.

10. Fiverr

It is a platform where people offer to edit photos. You can choose categories: editing, photography, post-production, etc. If you're not sure about creating your first marketing animations on your own, you can always hire professionals through Fiverr to do the job and show you how it's done without worrying about a high cost. For as little as $ 5, you can hire a freelance graphic designer and marketing expert on Fiverr to ensure you have the perfect visual content to match your brand.

Photography Website Builder

To boost your online presence, being active on social media platforms are not enough. Having your own website or creating a blog to showcase your work and photography business is essential. A website represents your brand and act as your business card where your potential clients can see your work and contact you for business directly.

11. Wix

You can set up a free photography website to showcase your portfolio using Wix. Design your own website simply using its drag and drop website builder. If you want to have your own domain, you can subscribe for a paid subscription starting at $4.90 per month.

Create your dream website, with so many template options for photographers. With a website, you can increase your online visibility, grow your network and start getting clients.

12. Format

Format is another platform to build stunning websites for photographers. They also have pre-designed templates ready to use. You can start a website only for a basic plan only for $7/month.

Related Post: 10 Stunning Website Templates for Photographers

Automation Tools

Today images are an essential element in a good content marketing strategy, and their proper use is increasingly important in blogs and websites. We've all heard that an image is worth a thousand words, now imagine what you can achieve with a perfectly optimized image!

13. Removal.AI

The most opted option, Removal.AI is the tool to create transparent backgrounds, as it instantly eliminates the background from any image you provide. When I say "instant", I mean that, as it literally takes less than a few seconds to produce a clear background version of your original image.

With this software, you can clear the background from images of people, objects, animals, cars, as well as graphics. All it takes is to upload your image and the tool will do its job automatically.

14. Canva

Canva is a very tool to use that is widely known, especially for people who struggle with design skills. It makes things a lot easier with its built-in tools and elements, which you can simply drag and drop to create something visually appealing.

15. BackgroundCut

BackgroundCut makes good use of artificial intelligence to allow easy removal of the background from even the trickiest of images. It's still in beta, but you can choose to upload or drop images, and the main part will automatically cut off in seconds. The creators of this tool regularly release new updates to improve it.

Optimization Tools

When we are working on projects we need speed, and, on many occasions, the images we have in our possession do not have enough resolution to make them look good, we need them to weigh less, remove the background from the image, etc.

16. LetsEnhance.io

This instrument boasts of having a technology based on deep convolutional neural networks for better image quality, which, according to them, perfects a photo by enlarging it with very good quality. Although it has a Premium version, you can use the free version.

17. AI Image Enlarger

Another marvel that works with deep learning and advanced AI algorithms to preserve the quality of the original image. The results are always impressive. The only problem with this tool to improve the quality of the photographs is that it does not allow uploading images larger than 1200 px.

18. Smush.it

It is a free service offered by Yahoo for web developers. It serves to eliminate unnecessary Bytes from those images that you want to optimize. It has the same functionalities as Kraken, only in this case you don't have the option of putting the size reduction before the quality of the photo.

19. Kraken.io

Kraken.io is quite an amazing tool. In addition to compressing the images, it allows you to scale them. So with this web tool, we can kill two birds with one stone by solving both the overweight and the scaling of the images, the two causes that produce a longer loading time of a web page.

Watermarking Tools

An inescapable truth of the internet is that all the photos you upload run the risk of being used without permission by other people. If you upload your creations to social networks or other types of forums, do not make things easier for other people's friends. A watermark (no matter how aesthetic it may seem) will help you protect your images.

20. PicMarkr

One way to make watermarks for a photo extremely easy is through PicMarkr. With this program, you will be able to upload five photos or more or take them from Facebook or Flickr, and then you will have the opportunity to choose between three watermark options which are: text, image, or mosaic.

21. PhotoMarks

PhotoMarks is a Windows application designed to add a watermark to multiple photos at once. This app is really easy to use thanks to the fact that it is structured like a wizard in three stages. To put a watermark on your photos you just have to add them, apply the desired changes, and choose your output format and destination folder.

Free Websites to Submit Your Work

High-quality photography websites that are free can be found online, in order to utilize them to sell content that you take to social networks, add a corporate photo for a specific use or a job for the university where you must show the great touch you have to know how to choose something visual that attracts attention.

22. Pixabay

Pixabay is the quintessential open-source photography website. You will have access to more than 490,000 images and videos for both personal and commercial use. All images on this page are under the Creative Commons CS0 license. This means they can be edited and used for commercial functions.

23. PicJumbo

Is it a quality free photography website you may not have heard about? It was made in 2013 with the impression that everyone has a wide list of photographs to choose from. In total there are 600 free high-resolution photographs of different categories.

24. Gratisography

This website offers the works of photographer Ryan McGuire. He is offering his photos completely free of charge and at a high resolution. The photos are found in different categories such as animals, objects, or nature as well as many others.

Brand Management Software

In photography, branding concerns the designing and creating of brands unique to photographers. One should not mistake it for advertising or promotion. Thus, branding should characterize the nature that you embody as a business. It can be tricky at first to recognize the unique design of the "building" of your brand.

25. Brand24

Brand24 is a digital monitoring application. The tool lets users identify and evaluate online conversations regarding their businesses, products, and rivals. Users may then follow and respond to online conversations relevant to their business.

26. Widen Collective

Widen Collective is a paid DAM software, composed of cloud architecture and developed on AWS, whose functionality goes beyond what is usually offered by centralized and shared digital resource libraries. Widen Collective users can easily distribute their content on the web here.

27. Extensis Portfolio

Extensis Portfolio is an online tool and brand asset management software that permits you to centralize all the photos, audio files, videos, and documents of your brands, clients, and projects. With Portfolio, you save time, you improve your communication, you are better organized, you reduce costs and production demands, and you deploy your brand strategies more effectively.

28. Bynder

Bynder is an easy way to work and administer digital resources in the cloud professionally. Teams can speedily locate the correct files, work together on edits and corrections in real-time, and distribute projects across an assortment of channels. With Bynder, various brands can gain full control of their identity and marketing activities through the main portal.

Studio Management Software

When it comes to managing your photography business, there are many elements that you must take into account in order for it to succeed. It is necessary to have a base structure on which to work. Below you will see the tools with which you can use to manage your business in a comfortable and organized way.

29. HoneyBook

This tool is a cloud-based studio management software made for smaller businesses. The tools assist users in managing business systems from inquiry all the way to invoicing. HoneyBook allows users to work on projects, get clients, mail invoices and deal with payments, sign contracts online. HoneyBook offers task management which allows users to see and follow the many stages of each project.

30. Dubsado

Is software allows you to manage your entire small business, especially if you’re a photographer? From customer contact to final payment. You can go through the tool to find all the email exchanges with your client, make your quotes and invoicing, do project management/monitoring with a project module shared with the client, and even receive payment by credit card.

31. ShootQ

ShootQ is a cloud-based photography studio management tool made to assist photographers and the like to digitize studio management duties. Its features include scheduling, lead tracking, invoice gathering, surveys that can be customized, reporting, client reception, etc... Since it’s a cloud-based tool, ShootQ provides users with the flexibility to work around their business all the time, anywhere, and on any device that can connect to the internet.

File Storage and Transfer

In the last year, cloud services have been consolidated. We are using more and more applications such as word processors, calendars, email services, and even photo editors. The advantage is very clear, you can access your information from anywhere with an internet connection and at any time.

32. Google Drive

Google Drive offers 5 GB of free storage associated with your Gmail account. Just go to the Photos tab to manage uploads and albums. You can upload individually or in groups and organize by albums, and the photos are available in any other Google service, such as email, Blogger, or documents.

33. Dropbox.com

One of the most popular and easiest to use, register and install services. Dropbox creates a folder on your hard drive and just drag the photos to the folder to have it also available on Dropbox. The service is very good, and it is suitable for amateurs who want a backup of some of their photos or simply share them.

34. Photoshelther

If you’re a photographer, apart from needing cloud storage, you will also need a website, and other services such as galleries for clients, image sales, marketing, and SEO. The complete solution is offered by PhotoShelter. The storage service has the ability to manage the library, add keywords, internal search, and use TinEye to locate fraudulent use of images.

35. WeTransfer

WeTransfer is known to be the simplest way to send your files. Faster way to upload and download any files. Share upto 2GB file for free. You can increase the limit upto 20 GB by subscribing for pro. If you are sending large batches of photos to your clients, this platform can be of great use for your photography business.

Marketing Tools

Marketing resources for online photographers are necessary to attract potential clients. It is also crucial to ensure that this type of business is built on a proven strategy. Also with the use of the best marketing tools for photography.

36. SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey provides photographers with an effective way to grow their photography business. The way to do it is by knowing the real needs of the clients. To do this, this marketing resource allows you to send surveys to a target audience.

37. Later

In this case, it is a marketing resource that will help you manage your social networks. Basically, you can optimize the entire process of organizing, scheduling, and managing different social media accounts.

Social Media Platforms

One of the easiest ways to expose your photographic work is to do it on social media. Below I mention 3 social networks for photographers, in which you can publish your work and spread it, as well as connect with colleagues, find out about the contest, keep an eye on the news, and so on

38. Facebook

You cannot identify this attractive social media program with photography. However, owning a Facebook page is important to building your market. The interplay on Facebook pages is not as high as on other social media sites. But the people who follow you through this site are more likely to become customers.

39. Instagram

the holy grail of social media. This application was one of the first to allow sharing photos exclusively on phones. And today, it remains one of the most popular social networking sites. You can be inspired by the best photographers on Instagram and it is the best channel to leave your mark.

40. Tumblr

This blogging site was one of the first to present the true power of images during this time of communal media. It has given photographers the opportunity to share posts that anyone can share with a single press of a button. Tumblr photography feels more whimsical and experimental compared to most social media pages/apps for photographers. This is why it has attracted many budding enthusiasts.

Your turn...

If you are just starting out, photography certainly seems complicated to you. Let us reassure you right away: this is completely normal and it's not really your fault. In reality, photography is not as complicated as it seems. It is even one of the most accessible arts in existence. In photography, you can achieve great results in just a few weeks.

If the photography seems difficult to you today, it is probably because of the explanations you have read so far. You know what I am talking about.

Anyone can learn photography, anyone can create beautiful pictures, everyone has unsuspected creative abilities. I hope that you have found my resources useful and that you can share your own photography tips and resources!