How to Use Photography to Strengthen Your Brand

At Chez Núñez, photography has always been a driving force behind our goals to grow and refine a cohesive brand that encourages a thriving community. In every image we shoot, edit, and share, we're always looking for an opportunity to reinforce and enhance our brand with our photography because we know that imagery has the power to speak for our brand. As cliché as this sounds - a picture really is worth a thousand words - and we want our pictures to say all the right words on behalf of Chez Núñez. I'm sure you want the same for your brand photography too, right?

In this post, we're going to break down exactly how we've intentionally set out to strategically use photography as a tool for strengthening our brand, and of course, how you can do the same.

1. High-quality brand photography communicates professionalism and helps establish trust.

What makes photos high quality? I'm not just talking about the use of a nice camera, although that certainly helps. I actually think that you can make quality images with just about any gear, but let’s not distract ourselves with that right now. When asking yourself if your brand's images look and feel high-quality, here's what I'm suggesting that you consider:

• Are your brand's images edited cohesively in a similar style?

• Do the photos look like they all belong to the same family?

• Do your photos look like they were taken intentionally? Are your lines straight and are your images clear? You don't have to be a professional photographer to take photos with level lines, bright natural light, and clear image quality.

• Do your brand's photos feel elevated?

• Do they highlight the good or service that you're promoting in the best way? Can someone look at a photo from your brand and understand what you're offering them?

• Does it look like someone put time, thought, and effort into planning out a photoshoot? Or does it look like the brand's photos were taken in a haphazard, rushed, or unfocused way?

By assessing all the images that exist on your brand's website, social, email marketing, etc., you can ask these types of refining questions and seek to use photography in a way that elevates your brand. Quality images establish trust with an audience because they imply that you’re putting the same amount of dedication into your business’s appearance as you’re pouring into the products or services that you offer.

2. Intentional editing can help reinforce a brand's aesthetic and enhance overall branding.

There lies a beautiful opportunity in the process of editing images to allow the style of a business's branding to flow outward from a logo, typography, and color palette and into photography. Using photos to help establish and refine a brand's style can create a more holistically well-rounded and unified brand.

Although variations in photos are typical, having a predetermined, consistent editing style means that every photo a business shares (on a website, social, print, email marketing, etc.) will likely look as though they all belong together under the same branding umbrella. Again, variety will always exist, and styles are bound to grow and evolve along with a business. Still, the goal is ultimately to pursue a cohesive brand vibe by editing images that all look cohesive. Intentional, focused editing matters in a viewer's eyes because a visually unified brand is a strong brand.

Now, that all sounds good in theory, but perhaps you might be thinking, how do I edit intentionally? Well, I've got your back with some simple, straightforward approaches to help enhance your editing process.

1. Establish a brand color palette before setting out to shoot photos.

If you haven't already, it's helpful to establish a palette of 5-6 colors for your brand that you can reference in any design decision that you make for a business. Even if your colors are subject to evolve, referencing this palette in creative decisions is extremely useful for brand consistency. (more on color palette selection in this blog post). In the case of photography, try referring to your brand's colors whenever you're planning a content shoot. This can help you tremendously when it's time to edit because the colors in the image will already align with your brand's overall look.

For example - we use a lot of mustard and soft pink from our brand colors. This means that when given the option to style a branded flat-lay with either a purple or pink background, I would of course choose the pink one because I know that it will be more likely to match our IG or website! 

Sometimes this can feel like a puzzle, but just being mindful of brand colors helps us look for opportunities to incorporate our palette into an image anytime we're working on photography!

2. Stick to editing with one or two presets (or filters).

At Chez Núñez, we prefer editing with presets in Adobe Lightroom (Desktop + the free Mobile app). Unlike a filter that just lays on top of an image, a preset is unique in that it weaves itself into the DNA of a photo - offering tons of creative control over every single highlight, shadow, color, and so on. So we love presets for that creative freedom.

That being said, we typically try to stick to the use of just one or two presets at a time when we're editing for our brand to help encourage even more consistency in our photography. I often will rotate presets in and out depending on what mood I'm in or what season it is. Still, the act of narrowing in on the use of one or two, and sticking to them while editing, can be extremely helpful in establishing a consistent style across all brand images.

If you enjoy our editing style and want to give our presets a try, CLICK here to take a look at the collections of presets we’ve developed for use in our brand over the years. We hope that these can help offer an inspiring place to begin enhancing and honing your brand's photography style.

3. When editing, use the temperature of your image to help communicate a vibe.

When editing in Lightroom or another editing app, try playing around with the temperature of your photos to help communicate different feelings on behalf of your brand. The general rule of thumb that we go by is that a warm photo often offers feelings of comfort or approachability, while cool tones tend to communicate a moodiness and sense of calm.

4. Sometimes less is more when it comes to editing.

In most scenarios, I would avoid creating extremely saturated images (where the colors feel super intense), or the photo looks over-edited (when it's evident that a heavy preset was applied) because that can sometimes convey a lack of polish or professionalism. I say this because you likely want to avoid an edit overshadowing or distracting from the product or service that you're looking to showcase. When I edit for Chez Núñez, I usually look for something that feels warm and true to our brand colors while keeping things gentle and subtle with a natural vibe.

If it helps, perhaps you could think of applying edits for your brand's photography like applying make-up. What amount of coverage feels like the best fit for the style and personality of your brand?

3. Photography has the power to communicate valuable messages to viewers on behalf of the brand.

Using Chez Núñez as an example. We're always very aware that we want our brand to be sending messages of warmth + invitation, creative empowerment, artistic inspiration, and an overall zest for the life we all get to create for ourselves. We do this by focusing the contents of our images on subjects that will allow our community to feel this from us without needing to tell them directly that we're on a mission to inspire, inform, and encourage them to live their best creative life.

For feelings of warmth + invitation, we often share images of Jesús and me, with welcoming facial expressions and body language that looks open and friendly. For creative empowerment, we like to create photos for educational products and posts that offer transparent views of our creative process, and we share blog posts like this one with intentionally styled imagery. To communicate feelings of artistic inspiration, we plan shoots with branded colors and styled, artistic flair (flay-lays are a fun way to flex this area). And to send messages of that carpe diem vibe, we love to share photos of our travels or the home we've designed for ourselves.

The point here: subject matter matters. So I recommend getting clear on the mission and messages you'd like your brand to be sending out into the world, and then consider how you can use the photos around your brand to reinforce those non-verbal vibes to an audience. Don't you love the warm, fuzzy, exciting feelings that come from interacting with your favorite brand? If you take a minute to consider it, I bet that brand photography plays a big part in your interactions with that business. When working on your own brand's imagery, try putting yourself in the shoes of your ideal clientele, and imagine how you'd like them to feel when they arrive at your brand's site. Then seek to create photos to help them feel that way.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post! We hope you found it helpful!

If you haven't yet, check out our blog posts for the photography gear that we use, or advice for making the most of our Chez Núñez presets.

Till next time! 

- Anna