1. Find two images to be swapped. E.g. – a face swapped to another photo. Try to get the angles of the faces in similar position ( as much as possible)
2. Select the Lasso Tool by selecting L or Lasso Tool in the tool bar ¹
3. Make a selection around the face to be used for swapping on another image
4. In case of modifications, use the Alt and work the mouse to zoom in or spacebar and mouse clicks to adjust the image according to convenience.
5. It’s a wise step to name the cut out face e.g. FACE. Then pressing the option V which activates the Move Tool Click on the FACE and drag it onto Photo 2 document tab and then release it on this layer. ²
6. To size down the faces to a compatible level, the command Ctrl + T is used to click and drag the face to move the opacity level³ to a reduced value where we are able to distinguish the layer below from the FACE.
7. Try to take one particular point e.g. the inner corner of the eye as a reference and use it as the pivot point. Hold Alt and click to move the pivot point. Now hold Shift Alt and the scaling is done accordingly to match the ratios of the photos. You can scale down, line up, drag, or tilt using the pivot option
8. Once the FACE is imported successfully on the second layer, increase the opacity to 100% and press enter.
9. Next up is the command Ctrl + J for duplicating the second layer as the BODY (not the FACE).
10. Face swaps demand similar skin tone, similar color, similar texture and so on. Hold Ctrl and click on the second layer to make a selection around the face and then click IMAGE from menu bar, followed by ADJUSTMENTS, MATCH COLORS, SOURCE ( in this case the second layer picture on the layers’ thumbnail), then Background as LAYER option. Use Ctrl D to deselect.
11. There you go! Now use the transparency option followed by Filter and Blur to further enhance the liveliness of your photograph.
12. Unlock the transparency pixels. Click on the thumbnails for selection of FACE and then select the duplicated BODY and then go to SELECT from menu bar, followed by MODIFY, CONTRACT and then select 5 or 10 pixels according to suitability on the contract selection and press ok.
13. The click the body layer to remove the face from the duplicated BODY using backspace. Put the FACE layer on top of the BODY layer and increase opacity to 100%
14. Now choose EDIT, then AUTO-BLEND LAYERS which gives a panel for choosing the Blend Method. Choose PANORAMA, tick ‘Seamless tones and colors’ and click OK.

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• ¹ Notice every tool as keyboard shortcuts written beside them
• ² Cut out face must be larger than the background layer photo in order to enable and enhance better editing possibilities. This helps to avoid distortions and pixelation problems
• ³ Quick trick: For quick changes use the keyboard numbers to adjust (for e.g. 1 =10%, 2=20%, 2 & 5 quickly pressed= 25%, 0 and 0 =0% and so on…)

First thing first. Rates. If you are looking to hire someone then, obviously, you have a budget planned out. Rates differ from photographer to photographer and so do the amount of pictures they can deliver. Thus the best option would be to hire the photographer who can deliver the most photos within a given amount of time at the cheapest rate. At the interview, ask the photographers how much their rates are and how many hours they are willing to work and also how many photos they can take in the hours they work. With this information, you can calculate the price of each picture and how many pictures the photographers can take in an hour. After having interviewed all possible candidates, the best bet to hire would be the photographer who can take a reasonable amount of pictures an hour at the best price.

You definitely want someone who has professional grade equipment. The equipment shouldn’t only be limited to just cameras and lenses. Your potential photographer should have lighting equipment, stands and basically anything which would help to capture perfect images. Make sure you read up on photography equipment so that you can properly assess the photographer’s knowledge on his equipment. Ask the photographers what equipment they have and relevant questions regarding the subject matter.
Ask to see the photographer’s portfolio if you haven’t seen it yet. A strong portfolio speaks for itself. You can judge whether your job is right for the potential product photographer.

Another important factor is whether the photographer will study up on your product before the shoot. If he does not have adequate knowledge regarding the product then chances are you might get unsatisfactory results if an art director is also not present. Basically you need to know whether your guy needs to be accompanied by an additional art director or not. So ask accordingly.

Lastly, you need to know whether your photographer can edit photos. You should tend to go towards photographers who can edit the photos if needed. Nothing over the top but some simple retouching and other stuff along those lines. Be sure to ask about their experiences with photo editing software.
If you follow these simple guidelines then congratulations, you should be able to hire the perfect photographer for the job!!

Commercial photography is a broad umbrella term but for the purpose of this article we will consider any photography one is paid to do for producing photos meant to be used for commercial purposes as commercial photography.

In general, you are required to have professional equipment. You should have the right cameras, lenses, lightboxes, light tents and anything else you need to capture the perfect shot. If you are required to go to a location for shooting then make sure to be there at the agreed time and bring all the required equipment. While discussing with the client, make sure to include the time you would need to set up your equipment into the timings. If you need 30 minutes to set up all your cameras and lights then you better make sure you ask for 30 minutes extra in the contract. Most importantly, you need to rely on your creativity. Your clients will most probably give you a clear or fairly approximate idea of what they are looking for but there can be times where you need to put in suggestions or ideas which would make the shoot go better. Perhaps the lighting could be better or the composition of the subjects could be arranged differently or anything from the tiniest detail to a major aspect of the shoot could be altered.

A good thing to keep in mind is to get a clear idea of what the client wants and to set a reasonable price for your services. Accordingly set your prices to shoot for small businesses which will use the photos on their stores or on small scale purposes and for large businesses, on the other side of the spectrum, who would use the photos for billboards and such.

File size can be a real issue with photos. Usually, the higher the quality and dimensions of an image, the higher the file size and large file sizes result to slower upload and download times and take up more precious storage space. So what we want is to decrease the file size of photos and there are a number of methods we can try to do this.

First and foremost, format of the image plays a huge role in the file size. If the image is made up of geometric shapes, such as logos or texts, it is usually better to go with Vector Image format. If the image is complex, such as a photograph, then Raster image format should be preferred.

Vector images can have their file sizes reduced by using applications like ‘svgo’ which removes unnecessary information from the file.

In case of Raster images, which consist of a grid of pixels, it is usually a matter of trade off between image quality and file size. Raster Images can be compressed in Lossy or Lossless formats and image compression is usually a combination of both. If you require detailed, high resolution images then PNG format is preferred. PNG format uses only Lossless compression and that is why they have a comparatively higher file size. On the other hand, formats such as JPEG use a combination of both Lossy and Lossless compression so it is possible to obtain a middle ground where the quality of the image is acceptable and the file size is relatively small as well.

There is no specific program or tool that applies to each and every image and image format so given below are some compressors you can use to compress your photos.

Format	Program
jpegtran	optimize JPEG images
optipng	lossless PNG optimization
pngquant	lossy PNG optimization
gifsicle	create and optimize GIF images

You can mess around with the options with these programs and find what suits your need best. You could have a mildly Lossy image with a reasonable file size or a high quality image with a big file size or even a low quality image with a low file size.

Another way of optimizing raster images is removing unnecessary metadata which takes up a considerable amount of space. Resizing the image on the server to match as closely as possible the display image also reduces the chances of file size increasing.

So, Photo Optimization is basically about finding the right spot in the tradeoff between file size and image quality and if you’ve followed the steps described in this article then you should have a successfully optimized image.

The pen tool is one of the first tools in Photoshop that anyone starting out gets to learn about. It is a simple and easy to use tool that takes a short period of time to get used to.

To get started, we must select the pen tool. To do this, we can either press shift+P or select it from the tools window. There are 4 types of pen tools that you can choose from.

1. The Curvature Pen Tool

This tool lets you draw curved and straight lines and also allows you to create custom paths.

To start, first select the curvature pen tool. First click on a point with the curvature pen tool to select the first anchor point. Release the mouse button and click on a second position to create a second anchor point. Having done so will create a straight line. Clicking on a third point will create a third anchor point but this time if the mouse is dragged without releasing the click, then the lines will curve accordingly. Release the click and repeat the process to acquire the shapes you want.

2. The standard Pen Tool

The standard pen tool, similar to the curvature pen tool, also allows you to draw curved and straight paths.

After having selected the tool, click on the point you want the path to start and then click on a second point. A straight line will have appeared between the points. To create curves, click on an anchor point with the pen tool. While having clicked on the pen tool, two lines connected to the anchor will appear and by dragging those lines around, you can create a curvature in the line. Doing this on both the anchor points of the line segment, you can create a variety of curved shapes.

3. The Freeform Pen Tool

This tool allows you to draw on photoshop as if you were using a pen to draw on paper. Simply select the point you want to start and drag to continue. To get a simpler path with less anchor points, click the inverted arrow in the options bar(beside shape button) and assign a value towards 10 in a range between 0.5 and 10.

Click and drag from an unfinished path to continue drawing the path and release the click to finish. Drag the mouse whilst clicking to the first anchor point to create a closed path.

4. The Magnetic Pen Tool

This tool is somewhat of an extension of the freeform pen tool which allows you to create a path which automatically takes the shape of a predefined area in the image you are editing.

Select the magnetic pen tool from the options bar enter a value in between 1 and 256 to set the distance of the edge from the cursor which is detected.

Chose a contrast value in between 1 and 100  to establish how much contrast between pixels is needed for the section to be considered an edge. A larger value is preferred for images with low contrast.

After these, click on the image to start. The first click sets the first fastening point.  Keep drawing a freehand path by dragging the cursor along the edges you want and you will see that the path snaps onto the most prominent edge after the last fastening point.

To add a fastening point manually, click once on the image and press Delete to remove the very last fastening point.

Whilst the magnetic pen tool is selected, press Alt and drag to switch to freehand pen tool momentarily, alt and click to draw straight lines and press [ or ] key to decrease or increase the Magnetic pen width by one pixel.

To finish an open path, press enter, double click to close the path with a magnetic part or press all and double clock to close the path with a straight part.