10 ways to make passive money with Photoshop (that work)

So you’ve got Photoshop skills. Now what?

You know that it’s a marketable skill. In fact, the leading US employment site Glassdoor named it one of the top skills for entry-level jobs.

But what if you could be making money with Photoshop every month, without putting in the work.

It sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it?

But it’s not. It’s called passive income.

And people with Photoshop skills have every opportunity to get their hands on it.

Before we get into passive income for photoshop, let’s first get into what it is.

What is passive income:

Passive income is when your earnings are not directly related to the actions you perform. You set it up once, and money comes rolling in, without having to do anything.

Let’s compare:

Active income: when you get paid for completing a certain task. It’s a hands-on task that requires you to be actively involved in producing the output that the customer has purchased.

Example: image post-production editing

Passive income: when your clients are able to pay you for a product that does not require your active involvement.

For example: your clients are able to buy your photo editing presets, that is available 24/7 online, with an automated buying process

Now that you know that passive income is a great way to earn money while creating a product only once, here are 10 ways to earn passive income by selling your Photoshop art:

1. Create Photoshop tutorials and/or courses

When you’re a master at any skill, the obvious option to provide a product of value that people will pay for is to pass that skill on.

And Photoshop is no exception.

You can teach others by recording your tutorials or courses and uploading them to existing course markets.

For example, SkillShare and Udemy are great places to start.

If you have a devoted audience and brand, consider selling your courses on your own platform, directly to your audience.

Potential earnings: $200-3,000 /month

The SkillShare website states that new teachers earn on average $200 in their first months, with top-performing teachers making up to $3,000.

2. Create fonts and sell them online

Another great way to generate passive income is to create and sell your own fonts.

Places you can sell fonts:

Potential earnings: Varied

Very few sources disclose the amount they’ve made through creating and selling fonts. The majority of sources say that font selling can make money, though unless you sell a font to a major company, it’s very likely you won’t be making astronomical amounts. However, it is possible to make a living.

3. Sell your Photoshop presets and LUTs

When you’ve mastered the art of color grading and you’ve got your tried and true presets and LUTs, you’ve essentially got a new byproduct that can add value to other people’s’ lives.

Sell your presets online to help amateur photographers attain the same effects that your professional eye has created.

A great example of a person selling their LUTs and presets is Sorelle Amore, who uses her YouTube audience following to popularize her presets collection “Hipster AF”, and to sell on Instagram.

Potential earnings: up to $100,000 /year

Photoshop presets are in demand. This stay-at-home mom is earning over $100,000 per year by working from home in Photoshop.

Of course, this depends on the activity of your community, the attractiveness of your images, and how they are generally marketed.

4. Create and sell stock images

If you have a ton of images that are just taking up space in a hard drive, why not put them to work and offer them up as stock images?

Though these days stock photography sites, like Shutterstock and 500px, have developed higher standards and don’t just take anything, rejecting about as many images as they accept.

Pro tip: because of the high volume of stock photos being uploaded, it’s suggested to keep uploading regularly to ensure that your percentage of the market doesn’t decrease with time.

Potential earnings: up to $500 /month

Photographer James Wheeler earns approx. $500 per month with 350 stock photos (out of 750 he submitted).

Though he sells a few on 500px at $5-$50 per piece, the majority of income comes from microstock sites, where the pricing is set at $0.25-$5.00 per image. Some examples of microstock sites include Shutterstock, Getty Images, and more.

Though not enough to make a living, it certainly has the potential to be a lucrative additional income stream to support your lifestyle and diversify your income.

5. Create and sell graphics

Photoshop can be used to create all manner of graphics, not only photographs.

A great way to set up an additional stream of passive income is to sell Photoshop art – create graphics that are ready-made and sold online to anyone who may need visual elements.

Graphics can range widely:

Icons

Decorative images

Stock illustrations

Desktop/mobile wallpapers

Textures, shapes, stamps Etc.

Potential earnings: $5,000

For example, the creative collective “Offset” offers a variety of stamps, textures, shapes, image masks and even retro diagrams that buyers can use to enhance their digital images. In this article, they describe how they market their products and get the word out.

6. Create and sell website themes

With over half a million websites created every single day, it’s reasonable to assume that website design is also in demand.

With a growing amount of non-technical or design-skill-oriented individuals trying their hands at creating their own website, an entirely new industry came to be – the industry of website themes.

Website themes let you create the design for a website, and use that theme over and over again.

You’ll be able to create the website layout in Photoshop, however, to create a usable theme, you’ll need to turn the design into code. If you’re not skilled at coding, consider hiring a freelancer for the job.

You can sell them at a variety of locations:

Creative Market (Magento and other platform themes) – 30% commission Sellfy (for any platform themes) – $29 /month + 2% transaction fee

Potential earnings: varied

As with any digital goods sales, the results are varied and depend on a wide variety of factors.

The top-selling Themeforest template Avada is making upwards of $20 million, having sold over 440,000 copies of the theme for $60 per piece. That is, of course, an outlier. In fact, of the 8,000 WordPress themes on the platform, only 19 crossed the $1M threshold in 2016, and the average theme that sells over 100 licenses has taken 2.5 years to do it. Though you may not be making millions (at first, at least), a solid earning is certainly in reach.

7. Sell designs on print on demand sites

If printmaking is your thing, you might consider selling your products on print on demand (POD) sites.

The concept is simple:

You upload images of your designs to either a print on demand site or your own website.

The image is displayed as for sale on products of your choice that the POD platform offers (common products include posters, mugs, pillows, etc.). Visitors purchase the design on a product that they would like. The POD provider prints and ships the product to the customer.

There are different print on demand sites that you can make use of, many of which are very similar.

Some popular sites include:

Potential earnings:

On POD sites, you’ll be earning royalties on sold items. Most sites let you set your own profit margin that you’d like to receive, on top of the POD provider’s base price.

So your profit margin depends on you.

Artist Marc Johns sells his designs on Society6 and regularly makes over $1000 /month.

8. Create and sell document templates

When in the business of designing with Photoshop, the sky’s the limit as to what you can do.

So why not expand to creating different document templates? People often look to ready-made templates to kick their performance up a notch and look a tad more professional, put together, or thoughtful.

Here are some ideas of document templates that you can sell online to create passive income:

Resume/CV templates

Ebook templates

Email templates

Magazine layouts

Wedding, baby shower, bridal shower invitations Etc.

Potential earnings: $5,000

As with any digital product, your potential earnings have much to do with how many copies of products you sell, and what the product’s price is. A moderate example is that of Janna Hagan’s, who had sold $5,000 worth of resumes. You can get inspired by her experience and story here.

Though this may not be achievable by everyone, it certainly is not out of the question.

Consider these price points:

This wedding stationery bundle sells for $49.

As you can see from these price points, you’re able to quickly scale your income by providing services that others perceive as valuable.

Sales can be stepped up in a variety of ways – by offering more products to be sold, as well as ramping up the marketing and visibility of existing products. Take a look at our ebook for some actionable tactics to use.

9. Printable planners, journals, workbooks

Creating printable planners and journals, in a plethora of different niches, is a way to provide great value with a product that can be infinitely scaled.

If you have any other niche you’re interested in, you can put together and sell a journal or planner for your specific topic.

Say, for example, you’re passionate about organizing your workday and developing a workload to create sustainable income – a challenge that many creators may have. You can create a printable workbook that sets goals, challenges, etc.

Etsy is one marketplace where you can go to get inspired as to the different kinds of workbooks, planners and journals that are available, and at what price points.

Potential earnings: up to $2,000 /month

Selling printables is a great way to generate recurring income. Especially as they take on a life of their own. You can read how artist Michelle Rohr went from $3 /month to $4,000 per month, entirely with passive income and selling online printable worksheets.

Pro tip: Use the Sellfy “Upsell” feature to encourage buyers to supplement their workbooks and planers with add-ons.

10. Create and sell mockup images

Mockups are the potential holy grail of digital products.

There are so many cases when they’re in demand. From online sellers using print on demand to branding specialists who need to demonstrate their new-found brands to clients, to software products that have to be demonstrated on screens.

In fact, the majority of Graphic River’s best-selling items in 2018 are mockups.

Potential earnings: $500 – $30,000 /month

The team at the Creative Bloq blog has quoted that most designers make between $500 – $30,000 per month selling mockup images.

Why use Sellfy to sell your Photoshop products?

When it comes to selling digital products, Sellfy is the platform that will make it easiest for you. Created for digital product creators (here’s a list of 101 digital product ideas you can sell), you’re not required to create and maintain a website (though you can, if you want), you can focus on selling your goods.

As a Photoshop artist, you can set up your online store in 5 minutes, set a price for your products and easily create promotion strategies with Sellfy’s useful tools like Upselling, Email marketing, etc.

If you’re ready to set up your passive income streams, sign up for Sellfy’s 14-day free trial.

5 essential things everyone should know in Photoshop

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If you have been using Photoshop for a while, or you are brand new, I want to present 5 things you really should know. This will save you so much time over the long run. Of course there are more than 5, (and I cover a lot of those in our tips section), but there 5 are bread and butter.

1. How to get rid of the welcome screen.

The welcome screen is useful, we can visually open existing images or easily create new documents. Click the PS icon in the top left to go into Photoshop. But not everyone is a fan. I will show you how to hide it.

Its easy to get rid of. Go under preferences>general. See the option for auto show, the home screen. Turn that off now.

When you relaunch Photoshop, we don’t have to see that screen anymore.

2. Filling things in Photoshop

I have seen too many people waste too much time filling in Photoshop. These tips are worth committing to memory

One of the things we do a lot in Photoshop is fill. I’m going to show you several ways of filling shapes and objects.

One of the ways is to use the paint bucket tool, which, to be honest, I almost never use (The following tips will show you why) . But its under the gradient you’ll see this paint bucket.

Using this target as an example (3 rings) Choose a red color. Click with the paint bucket, to fill one shape at a time.

If you want to fill all the pixels on a layer at once, turn off contiguous and then just click to fill all the shapes at once,

Shortcuts for filling selections or objects in Photoshop

Fill with the foreground color. Option + delete on Mac , Alt + Backspace on Windows on windows .

Fill with the background color , press command + delete on Mac, control + backspace on windows.

What if you want to preserve the transparency? All we need to do is add the shift key,

Fill with foreground color (preserve Transparency) Option+Shift+Delete (Mac), Alt+Shift+Backspace on Windows.

Fill with background color (preserve Transparency) Cmd+Shift+Delete (Mac), Ctrl+Shift+Backspace on Windows.

If you want to quickly get to the fill dialog box, press shift+ delete or shift backspace on windows.

We can easily fill with with black, white, gray, a color, or Content Aware Fill or even a pattern.

3. The third thing that everyone should know inside of Photoshop is how to work with inverted layer masks

Maybe you want to do some Levels adjustments, we will use this as an example.

Create a levels adjustment layer.

Move the triangles to the left to turn up the brightness.

But I don’t want to apply it to the whole image. I just want to apply it to a little bit on this mountain. We want to invert the layer mask.

Click on the layer mask and press Ctrl/Cmd+I. The layer mask now turns Black means it’s completely hidden.

Choose a brush, select white as the forground color and paint on the mask. The adjustment is now visibale.

There is a good reason to Invert the mask and not fill with black (the video shows this).

A lot of people, fill the mask with black, rather than inverting it.

Here’s the problem. If you move the mask, we get a visible edge. If you invert you create a black mask instead of taking a white mask and just filling the visible area.

So always invert the mask to avoid these edges.

4. So the fourth thing everyone should know about Photoshop is the scratch disk.

Go under Photoshop preferences and you’ll see all the different preferences and under one of these you’ll see one called scratch disks.

If you have more than one drive, you’ll see different drives. What you want to do is take this little checkmark and turn it on to the fastest drive that you have.

Uncheck the slower drives.

Photoshop uses RAM, (Random access memory). It’s very fast, but eventually Photoshop is going to run out of RAM and starts to write to the slower hard drive. Your hard drive now is used as RAM, which is called scratch disk.

Sometimes you can use 10 times the amount of scratch disk space as your document size, so you can see why a slow drive or a cluttered drive can really slow things down.

If you have a faster drive such as the MvMe or an SSD drive, It’s a faster drive, which means that Photoshop can work faster if it uses these drives. By the way, if you ever see a message that says this is full, you can free up memory, just go up under edit>purge >all. And that will purge everything out of memory and free it up.

5. Clipping groups

Clipping groups are a non-destructive way of you putting objects inside other objects.

When you have an image and you want to put it inside the transparency of the layer underneath. Go between the two layers, hold down the alt/option key, you’ll see a little arrow.

Click and now it clips that layer within the other layer.

The other advantage is you can move it around, it’s nondestructive. So you can reposition the top layer easily without losing anything.

So I hope you found these five tips useful. Let me know in the comments!

BTW, if you came here from our you youtube channel, youtube no longer sends email notifications, so join our mailing list, so you know when I upload new tutorials!

Browse our hundreds of other free tutorials here, or search for what you are looking for in the search at the top of the page.

You can also browse by topics in the free tutorials menu.

If you are ready to get serious about Photoshop, see our full length courses here

PS Don’t forget to join our mailing list and follow me on Social Media>

(Ive been posting some fun Instagram and Facebook Stories lately)

Great to see you here at the CAFE,

Colin

14 Proven Ways to Make Money with Photoshop in 2022

Hey there! I’m Cara and even after years as a professional photographer and designer I’m still amazed by some of the stuff Photoshop can do. Plus, with the updates included in the subscription, it keeps getting better every year.

If you’ve spent any time on you’re getting an idea of all the amazing things you can do with Photoshop. Let me tell you, though, you’ve barely scratched the surface.

If you’re like me, you love exploring all that Photoshop offers as well as being creative with the software. What if you could turn that passion into profit? Is there a way to make money with Photoshop?

Grab your favorite drink and sit back because have I got a list for you! There are so many ideas out there for using Photoshop to make money. We’ll go through a bunch here and hopefully one (or some) will stand out to you.

Let’s get started!

1. Photoshop Tutorials

Let’s start with an idea that I know works. Take a spin around and you’ll see my name on a lot of articles. I’ve been writing Photoshop tutorials for over a year now and I’ve made some pretty decent money.

And I’m not the only one. Not only are there other writers on our site, but also browse YouTube or Google. You’ll see quite a few folks who are finding a lot of success teaching others how to use Photoshop.

“But isn’t the market saturated?” You might ask.

Yeah, there are a lot of teachers already out there, but Photoshop is constantly changing. Beginners need new or updated articles and videos all the time to keep up.

Plus, everyone learns a little differently. Your way of explaining will appeal to some people who might not like any of the other options out there.

2. Fonts

The font used to write a statement can completely change the tone of it. Take a look at the following as an example. The first one seems cutesy and whimsical whereas the second is much more formal.

There are many options for making or tweaking fonts. You can design new fonts in Photoshop or draw them on paper and scan them into Photoshop for the finishing touches. Then, you can sell them online to folks who are looking for specific new fonts.

3. Photoshop Actions

Photoshop is fun but nobody likes doing the same tasks over and over again. It is mind-numbing and such a waste of time.

That’s why Photoshop allows us to record our actions and run them on other images. You can record anything you do that requires a number of steps. Then you can run those actions on other images without having to go through every little step manually.

Chances are, other people would appreciate the actions you’ve created for yourself. You can then sell them on sites like Creative Market or FilterGrade.

If you’re interested in learning how to create actions or how to use them, also read:

4. Freelance Editing

Lots of people would love to enhance their photos, but don’t necessarily have the editing skills to do it. There are many sites online like Fiverr and Upwork where you can offer your editing services to these folks.

It can take a bit to get started on these platforms. Without reviews or much of a reputation, it’s tough to get hired. But if you’re willing to start slow with lower prices, you can build up to making a decent wage.

You don’t have to be an expert at all things photo editing either. You can post your skills for the certain types of editing you are good at. It helps to niche down anyways. Showing the audience that you’re an expert in your area makes them more likely to pick you over someone else.

5. Photo Restorations

Do you love the challenge of putting together the pieces of an old photo? Many people have precious photographs that have been damaged by the effects of time and would love a photo restoration service that could restore them.

Furthermore, museums, historical societies, and similar entities always need old photos to be restored. These places are a great source of ongoing work.

6. Website Themes

Did you know that you can design a website theme in Photoshop?

Every day, approximately 252,000 websites are added to the Internet and many of those website owners have no idea how to design a site. So they buy a website theme.

You can create website themes in Photoshop. To sell them as a theme, you’ll also need to know how to turn them into code. If this part of the project is outside of your skillset, you could always hire a freelancer to help.

7. Greeting Cards

You might assume that people don’t buy greeting cards anymore. However, you would be incorrect. Americans alone still spend between $7 and $8 billion on greeting cards every year. And they’re always hungry for fresh designs!

If you love coming up with snappy little phrases or poems, why not combine them with your digital art?

You can sell greeting cards online through marketplaces like Etsy or sell the designs to an established greeting card company.

8. Designs for POD

There’s a lot of work outside Photoshop for this one but it can be a lucrative income stream if you do it right. POD stands for Print on Demand. There are companies who will print your artwork/designs on hundreds of products like t-shirts, shoes, pillows, mugs, and much more.

You can list your products on Etsy or open your own eCommerce store. Then, when somebody buys it, the POD company prints the product and ships it to the customers.

It takes a lot of work to get it started, but once things are rolling you could earn a significant amount of money.

I’m in the beginning stages of this endeavor right now. I’ll let you know how it goes in a few months!

9. Mockup Images

If you dip your toes into the POD world, you’ll quickly discover the need for high-quality mockup images. These are images of products in a context that people can use to promote their eCommerce products.

The images are made in such a way that the user can drop a new design on the product and use the same image to promote multiple products. You can create these images and set them up for people to use as mockups in Photoshop. Then you can sell the mockups on Etsy.

10. Stock Images

Creating stock images is another option. I’ve dabbled in this myself but have only made a few hundred dollars. Most sites like Shutterstock or Adobe stock only pay the photographer a few cents or a few dollars depending on the type of license the customer buys.

However, I don’t investigate stock image needs and tailor my images to fit those needs. If you did that and started selling en masse, you could potentially generate a solid passive income stream.

There are stories of people making tens of thousands of dollars a year selling stock images. However, you will have to put in the work of uploading and keywording tens of thousands of images to make it to that point.

But if you love taking photos, this could be a great way to turn your passion into profit.

11. Social Media Graphics

Millions of small business owners are trying to connect with their audiences on social media. Many of them are frustrated with trying to produce a steady stream of content for their audiences to enjoy.

Thus, they buy ready-made or customizable social media graphics, memes, or templates. They can quickly customize these and post them to their accounts without wasting hours on their social media campaigns.

You can create these graphics in Photoshop and sell them on a marketplace like Etsy or Creative Market.

12. Logo Creation

All those small business owners are also looking for unique logos. You can offer your services by designing logos to make their brands stand out among the crowd.

As a bonus, social media graphics, mockups, ad designs, and other types of services are easy upsells.

13. Document Templates

People love templates because they make their jobs easier. It’s so much quicker to whip up an email, resume, magazine, ebook, or invitation from a premade template.

Plus, not everyone has the knowledge required to design amazing, professional-looking documents. But you do! And you can sell those designs in marketplaces or through your own store.

14. Printables

Creating printables is an excellent source of passive income. You can have fun in Photoshop creating printable planners, journals, workbooks, and other digital products. Then you can sell them on Etsy or in your own store.

It will take a little while to build a large enough library, but once you do, the potential earnings are impressive.

Making Money with Photoshop

Whew!

Did you keep up? Are the wheels spinning in your brain now, thinking of all the possibilities? There is a great need out there for photography and design. If you can find your little piece of real estate, you can make a good income doing something that you love.

What if you haven’t nailed down Photoshop yet the way you would like? We have a whole bunch of tutorials here on to help you improve your skills. For example, do you know how to turn a photo into a watercolor painting? Check out how here!