With a wealth of soulful stock photos available at your fingertips, you might wonder, “Now what?” It’s quite easy to personalize stock photos for your business and brand. All you need is a few free tools and some imagination.

Open a Canva Account

I highly recommend you use Canva for your stock photo personalization. It’s easy to use, and even with a personal (free) account, you can easily adjust your photos. By the way, if you need workbooks, presentation slides, quote images, and more, all of the templates in the Inspired Stock Shop library open directly in Canva for your personalization needs. It really is a wonderful tool that requires zero graphic design experience.

Follow Your Brand Guidelines

Whether you design your brand or pay an expert to do it, the most essential step to personalizing stock photos for your business is to follow your brand guidelines. If you have a pro account in Canva, add your brand colors, fonts, and logo to your Brand Kit. If you use a free account, make sure you have the hex codes for your colors handy to make changes as needed.

Choose photos based on the vibe you want to communicate, and add elements such as filters, frames, or animated elements to the image. Change any element colors to your brand colors, and if you add text to the image, use one of your brand fonts – or something very close to them.

Add Yourself to the Photos

It may sound odd to add yourself to stock photos but think of them as background images. In other words, I would not try to add myself to a scene with people already in the picture. 

Using Canva or another software, remove the background from a personal photo and layer it on top of a stock photo. Add text to create a quote image with a personal touch. Think outside the box and do the same with testimonial images or photos from an event you want to promote.

Create a Collage

Combine a few stock photos to create a new collage that’s uniquely yours. You can then use these images for the hero section of your website, as a background for newsletter headers, or on your YouTube channel. A collage is also a unique element to add to personalized holiday or note cards.

Inspired Stock Shop provides authentic, soulful stock images that capture the natural beauty and humanness of life and work. We capture many of our images during rituals and ceremonies, bringing you non-staged, spiritual photos that feel entirely different from other stock photo memberships. 

Join today to experience the creative freedom that a soulful stock photo membership brings to your business.