Last Updated on 08/18/2017 by Chris Gampat
Photo by Wesaturate user maxigladkiy
If you’ve ever struggled with finding high-quality photos for your imaging needs, there’s a new website that offers to give them to you free of charge. This is the promise of a website called Wesaturate, founded by Seattle-based photographers Kash Goudarzi and Gifton Okoronkwo, and freshly deployed just this April. The platform claims to be a place where photographers can share and download RAW and JPEG photos for free, which can be particularly useful for those who are still learning the ropes of digital photography, or looking into purchasing their first digital gear.
“It’s great for anyone looking to download free, high-quality images and especially great for photographers who want to learn how to edit photos,” Goudarzi shared with us in an e-mail. “Another popular case is photographers downloading the RAW files of a certain camera before they decide to buy it or not.”
All the photos you can find in Wesaturate are licensed under Creative Commons Zero which means you’re allowed to do whatever you want with the photos you download from the website, including commercial use. If you’re a commercial photographer who chooses to upload your photos to the website, this may be a little caveat for you. Still, one way to look at using the platform is paying things forward – you download a high-quality image for whatever purpose you require, and you give back an equally high-quality image for another budding photographer to tinker with and learn from.
A quick tour around Wesaturate shows a variety of photos already uploaded on the website, ranging from portraits, to landscapes, street snaps, and action shots. It has become an inspiration board of some sort for photographers of all levels, as they’re given a chance to do their own take on reinterpreting the images with their own edits. However, we're not sure how many photographers may want to allow their RAWs and JPEGs to be given away for free. In fact, lots of photographers won't just give away their RAW files.
Sounds interesting. Let us know how it goes if you decide to give Wesaturate a try!