By Dan Antonelli
Posted on Friday, May 30th, 2025
Presenting your completed work is such a big part of how you market your shop. Making the photos of your signs look their best is critical to presenting your work in a more professional way.
I’m often surprised at the lack of quality photography given to us when we are doing websites for other sign companies. We all know that sometimes we’re just happy the job is done, and we may not take the time to get good photos. But how are you going to sell more of that great-looking work if the photography is poor?
Often, the typical problems we have with photos can be solved with a little help from Photoshop. Maybe it’s difficult to get a good photo of that truck without distracting background images near your shop. Or your client sends pictures of the sign afterwards, and the images have some problems. Maybe the colors are off, or the shading doesn’t work. Thankfully, I’m much better in Photoshop than I am in actual photography. Usually, I can fix a lot of these problems.
A few years ago, I hired a photographer to shoot some blank white Ford and Chevy vans, since those represent a majority of the vans that get wrapped. I’ve used them for creating comps of the jobs we propose to our clients. The majority of the work we have on our portfolio is displayed this way because often we don’t have actual photography of the completed trucks we design. The comps work well, but I think actual photos look better.
The Photoshop work
Our process for retouching photos with Photoshop generally goes like this. We isolate the van, removing the background. Then we insert a new one, retouching or recreating the ground. We then retouch the colors and saturation levels on the actual vehicle and try to get the colors as vibrant as we can.
If you don’t have the Photoshop skills to do this, there are lots of ways to learn them. Take a course online or in an adult ed program. Get a book and set aside some time to learn the steps. You may even be able to find someone in your area who does Photoshop training one-on-one.
I did a couple of articles on using Photoshop for this in SignCraft that may help you get started: “How to silhouette an image in Photoshop” [January/ February 2006] and “Enhancing a silhouetted image with Photoshop” [March/April 2006]. You can read both of them under the Archives tab at www.signcraft.com.
From a marketing perspective, it’s critically important to take the time to invest in your photo library of work. This is really what helps sell your work, and you don’t want to sell yourself short.
We hired a photographer to shoot several “blank” vehicles to use for comping purposes. We took the original background out and added in a new background and created new shadows under the van. We then reuse this to present most of our comps.
On a cold December day, this client of ours was installing new garage doors on my home. We were also doing their website, and I needed better photography of the van—and of course, I wanted a few photos for our own website. As I took the photos, I knew that I would have to change the sky to something more dramatic and remove the distracting homes in the background.
I shot it from several different angles, using a decent camera. I’ve found that taking the picture slightly angled allows for a better presentation, either from the front or rear if you want to show more of the layout for either of these.
You can see the original photo had some challenges. We could have simply retouched the colors on the truck and had a decent image, but by removing the background, inserting a new one and retouching the ground, the new image certainly has more impact. Note that I darkened the windshield glass, as well.
This article appeared in the March/April 2013 issue of SignCraft.
Dan Antonelli owns KickCharge Creative (formerly Graphic D-Signs, Inc.) in Washington, New Jersey. His latest book, Building a Big Small Business Brand, joins his Logo Design for Small Business I and II. He can be reached at dan@kickcharge. com. Dan also offers consulting and business coaching services to sign companies. For more information, visit danantonelli.com. On Instagram: @danantonelli_kickcharge.
