Design Resources: Photo Creator. Make Custom Photos to Tell Your Story

Hey, creators. Need photo content? We know how hard it is to find an image for your specific purpose. That’s why we roll out another product by the Icons8 team: Moose Photo Creator that allows you to create realistic photos in short minutes. It’s already up on Product Hunt, so we invite you to join the discussion.

Story Behind the Product: Problem of Stock Photos

What’s the typical problem of stock photos? They usually look too generic, and a photo shoot is an even bigger pain in the ass. Casting, location scouting, retouching, etc. Oh and repeat this every time you want to change something.

As for the users of stock photo resources, they often face the following problems:

• It’s hard to find a photo that reflects your specific request
• You may find the proper photo but it’s needed on a different background
• Good content is needed for social media but there is no much time for creating it
• Photographers are limited to the real world. So, people without a camera (non-photographers) are limited even more with what photographers took
• It’s hard to be creative with existing photo content
• Many creative people don’t work in graphic editors and cannot make combinations of photos even if they have a pack

Solution: Collage Photos You Create By Yourself

Everything started with an idea. Why don’t we mix the models, objects, and backgrounds into a single picture? Capturing 1K models, 1K objects, and 1K backgrounds will give us 1B combinations (instead of 4M for Shutterstock, for example).

So, we started our own studio. Last summer, Icons8 founder Ivan Braun dived deep into studio photography; we hired a crew of 10 people, from MUA to 3D, and started working. You can find our experiments in collage category on Moose Photos. Here you see the collage photos combining models, objects and environments shot at the different time, places or even continents.

Still, our photos were pre-fabricated. They felt generic; they didn’t tell your specific story. Sure, you can download the images, remove backgrounds with something like Remask (dirty AI tools are not precise enough), and compose them in Photoshop, but it’s painfully slow. Even our photoshop pros failed to produce more than 15 pictures a week.

After Moose photo stock release we see our photos in more and more designs and publications, including The Next Web that often uses them in title images for blog articles. For example, this one is from the latest designed for the article about tablets.

You see it is edited by designers for a specific story and it shows how our idea works in life: you take shots of different people, choose an environment and combine them in a custom image that reflects your specific idea.

But how could creators do it without wasting hours on Photoshop editing?

How could people who have zero experience in graphic editors use the power of photo collages for their particular projects?

Our goal was to make it fast and easy for everyone.

So, we masked the images and built a web tool for making composing quick. We call it Photo Creator (in contrast to a photo editor). Now YOU make photos work together.

How Photo Creator Works

Customizing the images is super easy. Combine models into teams or couples, change emotions, and, of course, add cats.

Remember that “now kiss” guy?

Now that could be you. Choose the photos from the big Moose photo gallery: it features a big variety of shots with people of different races, ages, and looks. As well as objects, animals, environments, etc.

Mix them as you want for your specific goal and story. Play with sizes and funny combinations.

Get a PSD file and edit it further as you want. Our friend Tyler Lastovich says it’s his favorite feature.

That’s it. No limitations, just your creativity.

All the images may be exported in JPEG and PSD. JPEGs are free for a link. PSDs are $20/month, which gives you all models and objects masked and layered.

Who Photo Creator Helps

Photo Creator is a supportive tool for all the creators that need photo content, for example:

• • Marketing and advertising specialists
  • SMM managers
  • Content managers
  • Bloggers and vloggers
  • Content writers
  • Designers
  • People that can’t take good photos but need them for effective work (teachers, students, etc.)

The tool enables all the mentioned groups to get quality photo content without special skills and costly software in minutes. What’s more, designers may tune and edit them further in Photoshop, if needed.

Break free from the limits of boring stock photography. Play with it, it’s fun. Make 10 images in 10 minutes, from office portraits to some absurd scenes with flying cats and sugar rush kids.

Don’t wait long, try it and let us know what you think. Your feedback is our way to make the product better for what users really need. Share your thoughts here in comments or join the discussion on Product Hunt.