It's a great time to be creating communications today because thousands of images are available to you for FREE! And this course that was just posted to our Church Communications Training School will preview 21 websites of FREE IMAGES and give you tips to make the most of them!
No matter what some paid sites may tell you, everything you need to create great-looking communications in print and online can be found without spending any money. This course not only will give you a list of sites that will give you what you need, but it will give you video tours of all the sites so you can decide if that source is useful for you before you waste time checking it out.
There are five videos previewing sites
The first one of large overview sites is the longest at about 14 minutes and the others are 5 or 6 minutes. You can download either the PDF of the course PowerPoint that lists the sites or a PDF list of the sites to make notes on what might be most useful to you. This is one of the best things about the course because instead of getting a random list of sites that may or may not be useful, you can sit back, relax, and have me preview the sites for you.
(Personal note here.....I had NO idea how long this would take to put together. What I thought would be a few hours ended up a few weeks. I've always hated the lists of sites for any recommendation of free this or that or recommended this or that and found that checking them out was always such a huge waste of time because half were useless and obviously nobody pre-screened them. Now I understand why; it'a a lot of work! But I'm committed to doing this for you and the ministry and I trust you'll find it useful.)
In addition to showing you sources for thousands of useful images, this course also has:
Introductory TIPS on images
Images are very important, but they are not THE most important thing in church communications. We'll briefly discuss why, what is most important and how to use images most effectively.
You'll also learn why captions for your images are critical and how without them images have no inherent meaning.
Guidelines and cautions
There is an overwhelming amount of fine print on image sites today. Not only is it very confusing, but as a church communicator you want to do things legally and it's hard to take time to sort through all the rights, usage agreements, and licenses involved.
This course has done all that work for you and all the sites shown are free, copyright free, attribution free, and can be used for commercial purposes (if you create a t-shirt and sell it, that's commercial).
Bonus--quick edit ideas in PicMonkey
Sometimes you want a little more from an image. You may want a different size, focal point, or color. You may wish it had a different mood or effect. A great program that can do that is PicMonkey and the overview of images ends with a short video from Pic Monkey showing how you can very quickly make changes like the ones below. The first image is the original off the site and following are is a less-than a minute change. The video has additional changes of this picture and another one.
This course is part of our All-Access Membership- for the Church Communications Training School, which is a ministry of the Effective Church Communications Site-sign up today and have easy access to thousands of FREE IMAGES for every communication project you can imagine.
