How do you make an ad from your own photos?

For most small businesses the best ad image is one they already have on their phone. The finished job. The plated dish. The van outside the house.

The reason so few of those become ads is not the photograph. It is that putting words on top of it usually makes both worse.

The specific problem

Text over a photograph is unreadable in a way that is invisible while you are making it. You know what the headline says, so you can read it. Somebody scrolling past a bright sky with white text on it cannot.

It gets worse across placements, because the crop changes which part of the picture sits behind the words.

What fixes it

A scrim: a semi-transparent band of the ad's background colour, sitting between the photograph and the copy. Enough to guarantee contrast, not so much that the picture is lost.

Here it is added because there is a photograph, and left out when there is not — over a flat colour it would only dim the ad for no gain. When the layout changes for a new placement, the scrim is re-derived rather than moved, so it never ends up covering the wrong part of the frame.

Getting the picture in and the ad out

Upload from a phone or a laptop. The image is resized to a 1,600px longest edge and re-encoded in your browser before it goes anywhere near the document — feeds never show more than that, and a full-size phone photo would bloat the ad file to the point where things break quietly.

Then the ad exports as a PNG at the placement's real pixel size, which is the format every feed accepts. A background is painted first, because a transparent PNG turns black in some apps and white in others.

The honest bit

None of this improves the photograph. Take it in daylight, get closer than feels natural, and photograph the result rather than the process.

Related: laying one ad out for every placement and why ad text ends up unreadable.

Three photographs that work, and one that does not

The finished thing, in situ. A bathroom with the light on. A plate on a table. Not a product on a white background, which reads as a catalogue.

The work happening. A van outside a house, a hand doing the job. Motion reads as real.

The before and after, side by side. For any trade this outperforms every piece of copy you could buy, because it is evidence rather than a claim.

What does not work: a photograph of your premises from across the road. It answers a question nobody asked.

The technical minimum

Daylight, and closer than feels natural. Phone cameras are excellent and phone photographs are usually taken from too far away, which puts the subject at a third of the frame and leaves two-thirds for a scrim to sit over.

Shoot landscape and portrait of the same thing while you are there. A story is 9:16 and a feed square is 1:1, and no crop of a landscape photograph fills a story without losing the subject.