Alamy Frustration

[Bob Ferry]

I have been posting on alamy for about a yea now with decent sucess. Recently almost all submissions have been rejected for what they say is interpolation. his has coincided with my upgrade to a Nikon D80 with the 70-300vr lens. I go through the same process I have before with preparing my images and it dosent seem to be helping and Im not sure what else i need to do. Some hints they give you on alamy is making sure the sharpening assist in the camera is turned off and you set the iso to 100 which it is. I use PS 7.0 to upsize to 48mb @300dpi as they require. Im not sure why I am having such an issue with interpolation artifact all of a sudden. Can anyone think of anything else I can check or adjust to help reduce the number of rejects?. Worst of all they reject EVERY image is 1 is bad. so if the other 99 are good you'll never know. This has reduced me to sending 1 image at a time waiting to see if it gets accepted. Any help would be appreciated.
Bob

[David Kennedy]

I gave up on Alamy a while ago....if you've had success with sales then it's worth putting up with the b.s. of their slow turn-around.

Are you using Bicubic Smoother as your interpolation method in PS? Honestly, it's been too long and I can't remember if that was an option in PS 7 or if that came about in later versions. However, that would be the interpolation method of choice for Alamy as they do want the (rather stupid) 48mb file size.

[Bob Ferry]

David
Yes I am using Bicubic. The most frustrating part is that I do all the pictures the same and I get 2 to go through fine and then a third submission will get rejected. Then I will get a few rejections and then 1 will go through. Hard to believe anyone sends in more then one at a time. It has slowed my submissions down to a trickle. I would like to upgrade my PS version but would like to do it with sales if at all possible. "the self supporting hobby idea".

[David Kennedy]

David
Yes I am using Bicubic...

Bob,
I realize the default is Bicubic, but I was asking if you had the option--in which case you should use it whenever up-sizing--of "Bicubic Smoother." (Adobe has Bicubic, Bicubic Sharper, and Bicubic Smoother as options for interpolation.)

As for sales, have you had any luck with Alamy? Like I said, I actually have not. However, direct sales of prints and licenses can work quite well, if you know the right place--and will cater with tailored subject matter--to do it. When I was in college, I found out that photos of the college & surrounding town sold far better than my other landscapes and wildlife photography, so I increased the range of material of the college and town. If you can do things like that, you can actually get a small start, enough to pay for equipment (and software) at least.

[Bob Ferry]

Hello David,
I was just looking over your link to your book. FANTASTIC photography I must say especially the landscapes.!!. I checked in PS 7.0 and the choices I have are "Bicubic, Bilinear and Nearest Neighbor. I read somewhere prior that is what they preferred but i do not seem to get the results they desire.
As of yet I have not sold through Alamy. It would be nice to get a few sales somewhere to facilitate upgrading some equiptment and software. I have always heard getting started is the hardest part so Im staying optimistic. May I ask how and where you were able to sell images of the area in and around the school. Was it direct sales through your website?.
Thank You in Advance

[David Kennedy]

Hello David,
I was just looking over your link to your book. FANTASTIC photography I must say especially the landscapes.!!. I checked in PS 7.0 and the choices I have are "Bicubic, Bilinear and Nearest Neighbor. I read somewhere prior that is what they preferred but i do not seem to get the results they desire.
As of yet I have not sold through Alamy. It would be nice to get a few sales somewhere to facilitate upgrading some equiptment and software. I have always heard getting started is the hardest part so Im staying optimistic. May I ask how and where you were able to sell images of the area in and around the school. Was it direct sales through your website?.
Thank You in Advance

Bob,
Thank you for looking, and one of these days I'll actually get around to updating the web site more properly :eek:

You've confirmed my suspicion that Bicubic Smoother was an innovation that came after PS7. I thought that might at least be playing a role in Alamy's decision to reject images for interpolation artifacts. The other thing that you should do is ensure that you are not applying any sharpening as that could worsen any problems they perceive.

As for sales, I have had far better luck with direct print sales at brick-and-mortar storefronts. It means taking a hit with sharing the sale with the store, but if you pick up enough volume, it won't matter as much. Unfortunately, the economy is down at the moment and sales of art are going to fall accordingly, so if you decide to do something like sell prints, I would start small because whatever you invest in the project may sit on a shelf for a while before it moves.

Best of luck!

[Bob Ferry]

Thanks David,
I do not apply sharpening. I did have the camera set to "vivid" which could sharpen the image in the camera before it even makes it to the desktop which may be one of the problems. I was of the understanding that vivid was more for saturation but the more research i do I may have been mistaken. I can always add saturation once in PS7.
As far as sales I am going to stay optimistic. I have been published a few times which has motivated me to keep trying and to hone my skills. Photography as of now is not my source of income. At this point as I had said earlier it would just be nice to add a little here and there to upgrade equiptment/ software etc. Thanks again for your help. Happy Shooting.

Bob

[Leroy Laverman]

Hi Bob - If you are taking shots in RAW format (which you should for a variety of reasons) then all of those settings only effect the jpeg preview and not the image itself. White balance, sharpening, saturation are all determined at the time the sensor data is converted into an image. If you capture in raw you can change any of this later at the time of conversion. With that said it doesn't mean they are not important settings. If you like saturated images then having it set to vivid in the camera is good as your jpeg preview will be more like what you intend the final image to be. The on camera histogram reads the jpeg preview and not the actual raw data, so it's nice if the preview is what you're going for in the first place.