December 11, 2011

Can the punters really tell the difference?

I get to see a lot of images from a lot of photographers. It’s one aspect of this job that I absolutely love. I love looking at the myriad ways in which people see the world. I particulalrly get a kick when two photographers have shot the same subject. The different angles, the close-ups, the treatement all add-up to make two very different sets of images. Brilliant!

Getting to see so many images, I also get to see a lot of images that simply won’t sell. And, which is often harder, images that could sell, if only they were a little better.

Most people who buy images for a living have a very critical eye. They also have a particular subject with a particular treatement in mind, when they hit a stock library like ours. And they won’t put up with second best. After all, most people that are buying images for a design, a poster, a web page or some other commercial presentation are probably putting together their design for someone else. So their dicision to choose your image reflects on them just as much as it does on you. So they won’t put their name to rubbish. Especially not someone elses rubbish!

So, how do we avoid the pitfalls of poor quality?

1. Make sure you choose the very best exposure from a series, if you have a choice. No blown highlights and esepcially no bogged-up shadows.
2. Make sure you have the colour balance right. Most of the time these days, colour correction is done by the camera software at the time of exposure, but if you have mixed lighting or the camera has got it wrong, correct your image carefully. Near enough is not good enough. Get the overall colour balance right, make sure no colour is dominating if you adjusted the balance and then make sure the overall image saturation is correct for your style of image.
3. Then we need to deal with colour space. If you’re in Adobe Photoshop you can set the colour space. There are two prime colour spaces to think about sRGB which is for bright colours on monitors and Adobe or Apple RGB for correct colour on prints. If in doubt, make it a well adjusted image that looks good in Adobe RGB. Why? Because you can easily move from Adobe RGB to sRGB but it is harder to move back because sRGB has fewer colours.
4. Then you need to crop your image. Don’t crop it tightly. Leave room. Your image buyer might need to stretch the corners of the image to fit a design, or add text, a logo or something else as an overlay. Give them room.
5. Sharpening. If you have to sharpen your image, do as little as possible. Again, leave this sort of image trickery to the buyer, if they feel they need it. It is better to give a buyer an image that they feel they can work with, rather than one that has been over worked.
6. Finally save the image a JPEG with the colour prfile attached and little compression; 8 or above as a minimum and I would prefer 12.

So, can the punters tell the difference? Well, many punters probably cannot tell you why they prefer one image over another, to them it just looks nicer. But you can be certain that when it comes down to it, their idea of ‘nicer’ is usually a perception of quality. They can see a better exposed image, good composition, well cropped, correct colour that they can see can be worked in to their design.

So to answer the the question, can the punters really tell the difference? the answer is, yes.

November 15, 2011

Good Stock Photography Blog

I’d like to gather together some ideas, website links and tip sheets here so that we can help you get maximum return for your efforts when you supply stock images to us.

First of all, I’d like to recommend a couple of websites;

Keyword Smart is a website that looks at why and how you should keyword your images. They have some great, straight-forward ideas. I would recommend that you look at this article: “10 Ways that Stock Houses can be different in their Keywording Standards“. Our response to the article is Keywording.

The second website is the Yacuri Keywording tool which is an excellent tool in the creation of a good series of keywords. In short, this tool shows you similar images to the one you are keywording and then lists words that appropriate to the image in rank order. Just a word of caution, some of the words are very simple, popular words. You may want to be a bit selective with the words you choose so that you can be a little more unique.