Why you don't need Photoshop for your business?

When starting a new business, the questions around the brand image we want to give to our future customers come quickly. The visual identity of a project or a product is as important as its content, and to generate this image it is difficult to do so without digital tools.

Whether it is the creation of a visual identity, with a logo, colours or a specific font, or the global theme of the publications that will be shared on social networks, or even the simple photo retouching to highlight our product, there is a significant amount of work to be done before releasing a brand image.

Some people have made this their job, they are called Graphic Designer, Designer or Webdesigner. Each with their own specialities according to the skills they have developed according to their preferences. Calling on these visual professionals has a financial cost and can sometimes slow down the process of calling on their services, and the solution of self-training can be a viable solution.

You will need a licence to use it

Photoshop is a software created by Adobe in the 80's and is now famous all over the world. It is used by a large majority of graphic designers, web designers or simply by people interested in photo retouching or photo editing.

Like many proprietary software from the Adobe suite, to fully use this photo editing tool, you will need to subscribe to a subscription, which can be adapted according to your needs. This licence will allow you to take control of a professional, complex and complete photo editing tool.

Remember that this subscription is personal and that you will not be able to share it with other users. Only you and only you will be able to use this tool with the many features it offers.

It is heavy software

It's heavy software, and like all heavy software it requires an installation on your computer. In an age where we use our computer less and less in favour of our smartphone, starting a business with Photoshop as a tool to generate our Instagram or LinkedIn content will not be an advantage in your favour if you are away from your computer or your office.

Remember also that you will have to configure this new tool, with your shortcuts, your export folders, your favourite tools. And don't forget to save your configuration once it's set up, because if for some reason Photoshop decides to restore the default configuration, you'll have to start over.

In addition to having to manage its installation and configuration, don't forget that you will have to keep up to date with this new software. And that means downloading and reinstalling the entire software, which can be a painful process.

Its use is overkill in most cases

This is one of the points, which in my opinion, is the one that will prevent you from buying a subscription for which you may only use 5% of its features.

Photoshop is the reference in terms of photographic retouching software, and it is not those millions of daily users who will say the opposite.

However, in your case of a new business, you clearly don't need a software as complex and complete as this one to generate content on the Internet. It would be like having a Ferrari to get your bread on Sunday morning.

What you need is a tool that can help you generate images with your visual identity, your information and above all a tool that allows you to automate and industrialize the creation of this content, because the number one rule to make your product or service known is the regularity in the publication of this content.

Imagine if your business is an online shop, do you really need a tool that can generate shapes from a path drawn with a digital pen? What you need is a tool that will help you share one of the products you display in your shop every week. Thanks to this, your products will be seen by hundreds, even thousands of people whose only habit is to scroll on their smartphone, and for whom the pixel perfect publication is of little importance.

Your goal when launching a new business is to find customers, and therefore to reach as many people as possible. To do this you need to tame the content posting algorithms on social networks by giving them regular content. Your information should be clear and concise.

It requires skills to use it

Like any tool, it requires training. Learning takes time and costs you money. The time you spend educating yourself on a new subject is time you can't use in an area you know and can create value in.

Photoshop is an extremely complex and comprehensive tool with hundreds of features in one tool. Top you will say, but only if you master them. It's not for nothing that some people have made it their profession, this tool is so complex that it takes months or even years to master it. Not to mention the fact that it is constantly evolving, so you will need to keep up to date with its updates and developments and continue to allocate training time to it.

Remember that choosing a tool like this is above all a personal investment of your time that does not allow you to focus on what you have launched your business for.

The user experience is complex

When we talk about training, learning or following tutorials to learn how to use Photoshop, it is above all because it is a very technical tool, which requires a basic knowledge of geometry, mathematics or colorimetry.

It is not just a simple photo editing program where you will be guided if you want to perform a simple action, like cropping an element. You will probably have to create layers, manage the alpha channel of the layer and so on.

Photoshop is not for those who want to use it to edit only their family photos, and even less for those who want to promote themselves on social networks with simple but effective content.

It is complicated to industrialise its use

And even if you are convinced that this is the tool you need, have you calculated the time you will have to invest once trained, for its daily use? Imagine that you want to keep a rhythm of one publication per week, with a very precise template that you like. For each image generated, you will have to copy and paste the elements you want to show on your publications. This could easily take you dozens of minutes each week.

So, ten minutes here, ten minutes there, we all have them if we want. But will you really want to manage your publication images when your business starts to take off? If you look at it over the course of a year, those tens of minutes per week will turn into tens of hours wasted every year. So is the solution to hire a graphic designer to use Photoshop for you? In that case it will cost you money. Is it really worth the cost? It's up to you to see what the return on investment is and how regularly you publish on your social networks.

What are the alternatives?

Logo design

Creating a logo is one of the most important steps in the creation of a visual identity, and can sometimes take a very long time and cost you a lot of money. It is however essential in the image that you will leave in mind to the Internet users when they see you on the Internet.

It is often interesting to take inspiration from logos that have already proved their worth, such as big brands or logos that come immediately to mind. A few essential rules apply and should be the guiding principle in your thinking:

• 2 to 3 different colours maximum
• It must be simple
• It must be linked to the name of your business

A great online tool exists and can help you create a logo that suits your image, it is Logomark. With these many suggestions, all you have to do is apply your colours and make your brand known by sharing your logo.

Quick and easy, screen shots

Who has never taken a screen shot on their smartphone to share a news item? It's the easiest way to share what you've done.

However, it is sometimes necessary to know how to enhance it, like any other photo. So why not use Screely which allows you to enhance your screenshots in two clicks.

Change the background with your colours, simulate the integration in a screen, and you're done. Your screenshots will have more impact on your audience.

Remove the background from an image

How do you remove a background that you don't like on a photo without any specific software? You can use Remove.bg which is a great tool for this kind of problem.

No need to run heavy software, to use fifteen complex features to remove the unwanted background of one of the photos for your Internet showcase. You can actually do it yourself and it will take you seconds and not a penny from your pocket.

Built-in filters in native apps

Today, the gallery applications on your smartphone or computer offer many features, sometimes hidden I grant you. You can easily cut into a photo, rotate it to the angle you want, or change the colours.

So rather than going through the hassle of adjusting every colour in a photo to the nearest degree, which admittedly is hardly ever seen in the case of social networking images, you can save time by using these applications.

Even the social networking apps are getting in on the act, and allow you to gain even more productivity by adjusting the tints a few seconds before posting your content, and it's super convenient.

Try Content-LD, to industrialise content generation

And Content-LD in all this, what would it bring me in addition?

If you are present on the Internet, which I recommend to make yourself known outside of social networks (yes, not everyone is on Instagram or TikTok), you must have a web application or a showcase site. Thanks to this, in a few searches we are all able to find you and identify you. If your website is well optimised it should come up in the first results of our search. If you are a product seller, a blogger or a content creator of any kind, you have probably set up a system to feed structured data.

Thanks to this so-called structured data, you can considerably improve the presence of your creations and services in search engines, and you can find yourself at the top of many searches. So we thought, why not use this information that helps you in your SEO, to help you in your content creation. Imagine generating complete images with your text, images and design in just a few seconds, and that's infinite!

This is the promise of Content-LD, to allow you to generate images with your content, based on your structured data, and generate images galore with all your content and your image. All you have to do is copy and paste your URLs, use your favourite template that you have formatted to your image and then click on download, it's that simple.

All the time you spent lining up your texts that you had to retrieve from one page to another, and your images. You were spending an inordinate amount of time formatting images that mostly looked the same and then posting them to your favourite networks. This time may be finally solved, provided you have an account on Content-LD of course.