Can you guess how many websites there are in the world? These are around 200 million, out of which 1.13 billion as of February 2023 are deactivated, according to a report. And out of them, Google and YouTube are the most visited websites, with nearly 97 billion and 80.05 billion users, respectively.

These websites are at the top because of their high-interactive visuals & elements. If consider Google, it has superactive hyperlinks, navigation, and menu bars that work seamlessly. And for YouTube, it’s needless to mention that its motion pictures are taking it way ahead of others. People prefer photos and motions over text. This is why snapshots or images are crucial. And if they are edited commendably, no force can stop users from coming down & spending a long time there.  

It’s also the fact that images can make or break the user experience. This blog can help you think of the next level, which involves AI editing tips & tools, and edit images for a website like a pro.  

1. Choose the Right Tools

Since the advent of software, especially AI tools in Adobe Photoshop, lightroom, and freemium photo editing tools like Canva and Freepik, editing web images is no longer challenging.

These tools consist of features ranging from editing to retouching and reviving images. So, all you need to do is understand them and become familiar with their tool-kit. Exploring how to maximize output by using their functions, such as cropping, resizing, and adjusting brightness or establishing contrast, can be fruitful. 

2. Start with High-Quality Images

Websites having high-definition and error-free images attract maximum web traffic. Certainly, images have a crucial role to play in this. So, the image editor focuses on creating a stunning imagery that users would love to explore and admire. As aforesaid, artificial intelligence can introduced astonishing features to make image editing effortless. But here, you must have to choose the right photos and optimize so that they can complement your content, products, and sales pages. 

Serving these all elements provides value to users, which elevates its overall quality without putting many efforts. Additionally, your visitors stay there longer, creating a big scope for conversions and overwhelming traffic. 

Even, hiring a professional photographer can live up to these expectations, and hence provide images with high-resolution and clarity.

3. Crop and Resize Strategically

Optimized images are something that Google or any search engine loves to rank up on SERPs. To meet this requirement, many professional photo editors rely on compressing file sizes. Because of that, the visuals lose their sharpness and clarity. 

Instead, preferring cropping and resizing can be leveraging. For it, the photo editor trims unnecessary parts or elements from the image, and focuses on the main subject. While doing so, he/she ensures consistency in their sizes throughout your website. After cropping, everything looks polished, clean, and the layout appears well-balanced. 

These professional editors may introduce AI image editing or cropping tools to simplify cropping and resizing images. The machine learning algorithms are trained to assess visuals, their placement, and the focal subject automatically.

4. Optimize for Web

Before editing any image, you should have an idea about its file type. This knowledge can make the rest of the process easy. Mainly, PNG and JPEG files are used on a website, whose output can be similar but actually differ. 

Once the editor understands this difference, their optimization can be done without compromising quality. Eventually, smaller images will be easier to load, which will improve the speed of the website as a whole.

If compared, PNG images will have better quality, as these photos are larger, consisting of more colours and image data. Editing PNGs requires extensive editing, and in a few cases, it might suppress their clarity. 

On the flip side, JPEGs are relatively lower in quality but are amazing in appearance. It’s difficult to extensively edit the basic images. But, this is the fact that the quality gets down while compressing them. 

In essence, the snapshots with greater details should be saved as PNGs. To resize them, some tools like TINYPNG can be used to compress and upload light-weight pictures to your website. 

Take into account that the image files are saved with the correct file name so that search engine algorithms can scan your site effortlessly, boosting SEO practices. 

5. Enhance Colors and Contrast

Dull images lose their sheen and attraction. They can be revived by enhancing their colour and contrasts. These changes can be exaggerated by keenly attending their saturation, vibrancy, and brightness levels. This would enable editors to provide a more balanced outlook to visuals. But if it looks overdone, it won’t look appealing. Even, you can see its impact through declining engagement rate.

6. Maintain Consistent Style

Various brands and organizations have adopted their unique brand colours and a consistent style of their websites. This becomes important when you want to make it look more professional and appealing.

A polished photo editor meticulously focuses on brand colours and embeds them with visuals to create a brand identity. You, too, can follow this practice to achieve a cohesive outlook of your website. 

7. Remove Distractions with Retouching

Old images look sunken. Sometimes, unwanted elements make it look cluttered and less appealing. Technically, these are considered noises or distractions, which can be eliminated by using retouching tools.

Photo Retouch, Auto Retouch, Luminar AI, and many other tools are there available online to get rid of any unnecessary distractions. These tools can help in creating cleaner and more focused snapshots that look naturally enhanced and unaltered. 

8. Embrace Filters Thoughtfully

Filters make visuals more eye-catching. But applying them can kill their elegance. The professional photo editors should consider the essence of this point and enhance them subtly.

9. Mind Your Backgrounds

A cluttered background on your website can damage its essence. It can divert the attention of your audience from the key subject. So, you can remove this distraction by blurring the background or zooming. This technical step can help in emphasizing your focal subject. 

10. Test Across Devices
Testing of your web visuals is significantly important from the perspective of introducing responsiveness. Simply put, they should look optimized and flawless across different devices of various screen sizes. The qualified photo editors test if they are all optimized and look seamless on every screen size.

From the perspective of SEO benefits, a responsive image design also retains users on your website, providing a seamless and visually pleasing experience.

Conclusion

The aforementioned points present a comprehensive guide on how to handle photo editing technicalities, especially visuals of a website. These tips can help you optimize your visuals for better performance on search engines. Simply put, a visually stunning and highly-optimized website can reduce bounce rate and engage more audiences, which eventually results in a high conversion rate.