We know you always enjoy our tips for apps that help you save time and make life easier, so today we’ve got a double whammy for you. Two great ways to make more of your graphics and photos, and both are totally free!

Watch this to find out more…

Transcript:

Hi and welcome to another episode of BaranovTV designed to de-mystify the world of accounts and tax and to help your business grow.

This episode I’ve got two pieces of software that I thought would be really useful to introduce you to.

These are the episodes that can really make a difference and that we get some really good feedback about so I hope they’ll be useful.

The first one is www.canva.com.

It’s a graphic design package. There’s a free option and there’s a paid version, the free option is as it sounds totally free! You are limited in terms of what you can do, however, I’m able to do everything that I want to through it. The paid version I think is $12.95 per month or there is a pay up front 12 months worth for a slight reduction offer, which enables you to put your own branding colors in so you can upload your Pantone colors exactly right, your fonts that sort of thing.

You can upload your logos to the free version which is what I use and just specify which fonts you want to use. You can’t save as many of those on the free option but if you’re just using it, as I do, for small amounts of graphics here and there that I just don’t want to run through a Graphic Designer, then it’s a really good and fast way of getting something that’s visible, particularly for social media.

If you want to have an image or maybe for a blog post or something like that Canva can be a really good way just to get something set up quite quickly that will catch someone’s eye, on whatever platform you’re trying to use it.

The second one is www.remove.bg

It’s slightly different, and as you can see on the screen behind me, I’ve used it to take the background from several of our photos so that I can use them without a background. It’s not just a white background but without a background entirely, which means that they can float much more on the images and on websites and pages that you might want to use them on.

If you hang on a second I’m going to move the camera so that I can show you how quickly this works because it really is just brilliant! When I found it I went through and thought it was the best thing since sliced bread purely from the fact that it can remove the background from a whole host of images. It makes them so much easier to use.

If you follow my mouse, we’ve got a big green button, ‘select photo’. When you go to remove.bg, this is the screen that you open, so you just click on select a photo.

We’ll click on Chris LinkedIn and choose that one. It immediately just takes you to the photo and scrolls through. You get the original image which is a rather nice photo of Chris with a coloured background, and then you get the image without the background. That is how quickly it happens.

That’s what we did to get to these photos that already have. That’s Chris’s LinkedIn profile photo, the one on the right which has got the background. It looks nice on LinkedIn, but on the left is the one without the background, which I can now use on anything that I want to.

The site is totally free. I’ve downloaded probably a dozen photos in one hit and didn’t hit any usage requirements. If you’re trying to update some of the photos that you have or you’ve got them on a background that you wouldn’t want to promote, this is a brilliant way of cutting that out.

Obviously you can change the background too, so I could put Chris in the middle of the most beautiful gardens or wherever else I might want! That would be a really good one to play with if you’re trying to update some of your photos but don’t want to go through the pain or the time element of having those re-done.

So those are my two tips for making more of your graphics and photos – I’ll leave you with those, and I’ll see you all very soon.