I personally believe credibility at first impression has more to do with the overall polish and quality of your design than the existence of a photo.<p>Sure, adding a photo might be an easy shortcut to fabricate the illusion of quality, but it&#x27;s a shortcut that also has severe adverse effects on UX in bandwidth constrained environments, which actually has the opposite effect on perceived quality, and thus credibility, than the designer intended. This is why I believe it&#x27;s worthwhile to explore alternative designs that don&#x27;t rely on photos, at least once you&#x27;re past that MVP phase where you just want to put something together as quickly and easily as possible.<p>RE: You can&#x27;t relate to a gradient. This is true enough, but there&#x27;s no reason why you need to make users relate to a background image, when you can have them relate to something in the foreground like some kind of feature showcase of your app&#x2F;service (with screenshots and such). A busy stock photo in the background is actually detrimental to this kind of design compared to something simple like a gradient. And in my opinion, this kind of design is much more directly relatable for users because you&#x27;re presenting your value proposition to users explicitly rather than relying on your users being naive enough to fall for some subliminal mind trick.<p>Stripe&#x27;s landing page is one good example I can recall of such an approach: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stripe.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stripe.com</a>