Featured images are essentially what will make a person either click on your blog post or scroll right past it.Click to tweet<\/span><\/a><\/p><\/div>\n The average person is bombarded with content on a daily basis and definitely has enough blogs and blog posts to choose from. In most cases, what sways a person towards one specific blog post is, in fact, the post\u2019s featured image. So, if you want your blog post to be the one getting the clicks, you\u2019ll have to do your best to create the most eye-catching featured image for it. We know that the word \u201ccreate\u201d might scare all of you non-creatives, but we\u2019re not here to judge, we\u2019re here to help. In this article, we will tell you how and with what you can make the process of featured image creation a piece of cake.<\/p>\n The first step in the process is, of course, finding the right image. You can go do that using one of the following ways:<\/p>\n Stock images are great<\/a>; they are free or come at a very small price, with an abundance of them to choose from. And no, stock images aren\u2019t low-quality images of uncomfortable-looking people and boring landscapes like they once might have been, nowadays they are premium quality visuals created and submitted by talented photographers from every possible branch of photography.<\/p>\n Besides the images, the websites for finding stock images are in abundance as well, which makes it almost impossible not to find what you are looking for. The most popular stock image websites are Pixabay, Flicker, Getty Images, Creative Commons, iStock, Fotolia, and many others. Most of these sites will give you the image for absolutely free, some might charge for the licensing, others might require you to credit the owner, it all depends from site to site and even from image to image.<\/p>\n This option is for the ones that might have a knack for photography, and the ones who want everything that makes up their content to be unique, including their featured images. If you don\u2019t want to use stock images or none of them fit your liking 100%, then the best solution is to create your own unique ones. If you are talented behind the camera, great, you can take them yourself. If not, find a friend who is, or if you have the budget for it, hire a professional to do it for you. Creating your own images removes the worry of whether you have to credit the owner of the stock images, or if the image you chose has been seen plenty of times before. Your entire content is unique and your own, top to bottom.<\/p>\n Regardless if you decide on using a stock image or your own custom one, for an image to become a featured image, it requires a few tweaks to be made to it. By tweaks, we mean adjustments of contrast\/saturation\/brightness\/sharpness, putting filters, as well as resizing and cropping the images since they do need to perfectly fit dimensions of the blog post\u2019s header and thumbnail. Also, on 99% of your featured images, you will be adding an overlay, a logo, the blog post\u2019s title, a short introduction\/description, decorative frames, and other additional elements a specific featured image might require.<\/p>\n For making these tweaks, you will need an image editing tool.<\/p>\n The tools can be divided into three categories, professional\/complex tools, semi-complex tools, and simple tools.<\/p>\n In the complex category are, of course, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom, very versatile and powerful tools that do require overcoming quite a big learning curve in order to know how to use them.<\/p>\n A good representative of the semi-complex category is Canva, a cloud-based design and editing tool. It\u2019s not nearly as complex as Photoshop and Lightroom but still, a very detail-oriented tool.<\/p>\n Lastly comes the simple tools category, which is the one you should be focusing on since the edits you will be making in order to create featured images, aren\u2019t edits of much complexity.<\/p>\nFind the images<\/h2>\n
Stock images<\/h3>\n
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<\/p>\nCreate your own<\/h3>\n
Customize the images<\/h2>\n
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