Hi guys! 👋 How are you? I hope everything is fine there.
I will try to share my small experience with stock photography and to share with you what lessons I learned, because of it.I hope you find it interesting and useful.
In my previous post I was writing about my wrong or even very wrong understanding about beautiful photos in the past.
Shortly, I was build entirely wrong idea about beautiful photo. It was using filters, effects, tryings to make photo look like a hdr when it was not needed, and too much other completely unnecessary post-processing.
And I didn't realize how wrong I was until I meet the stock photography.
It was something new, interesting and different for me. And I was definetely curious to give a try. And in that time with my idea for beautiful photo guess what ? ... Exactly, it wasn't an easy start.
Once, I have created an account and started to upload my photos then it comes the time "back to earth" for me. I mean like probably you guessed, I got so meany rejections. Maybe even everything.
And then was the first time that I understood something is not right and I must start from beginning my full process - from getting photo from my camera to processing it in software.
Fortunately, at least I knew from where to start because after the photo reviewing process ther reviewer usually provide you all reason for rejecting photos. In my case there was many reasons :D, meaning that I have a lot to study.
It inculudes almost everything - from composition of the main object, to exposure, focus, depth of field(DOF) and finish with my favorite one - too many post processing resulting with much of noise and pixel distortion to be because of too much post processing - over-sharpening, noise reduction, resizing, scaling, filters and others...
All these rejections actually helped me to build a useful habbits like
- to use more and to play with manual mode of my camera. To learn and try a different settings - apperture, speed, iso etc.
- have started to look 100% zoom my images/
- look more the histogram of the image.
- to not use or more rarely and more carefully effects.
- to be more careful with processing photo - especially exposure, noise removing, contrast, shadows etc...
To show difference between my works before and now to be able to see difference, I will show you some photos.
Something important first. Pleese keep in mind that I don't have intention to promote my photos from stock sites. I just want to show my works before start trying to make stock photos and when I started and keep processing nowadays.
From the previous example images it is very easy to see how much unnecessary prossing. Currently, writing this I really trying to remember why and what exactly I was liking in the past in such kind processing image. I really don't know. Images are apparantly too over processed, used too much filters and all of this causing much noise, over and under expose and more. Just terrible. Let see what happening on 100% zoom.
Terrible right. And this is only one part of the image. A small part and it is very easy to see noise, artifacts etc.. I show you on purpose what is going on in 100% zoom. I didn't knew this before, so I want to show you what bigger mistake I had done and why especially in the beggining so much of my photos were rejected.
Something similar is on the other photo too... it easy to see how much burned pixels, noise, over saturated etc...
Here you are a 100% zoom part of image to be able to compare with these of the previous images
I hope that you can see the difference. The samples from the last two images there are no so much noise, colors are more balanced. There is not so big over/under exposed pixels or strange artifacts
So, that was one of the first lessons that I learned. To look photo on 100% zoom and to be careful with processing the image. It is too tempting and easy, very easy to go over processing.
Useful things that I have learned when I tried to make stock photos:
- to be more careful about using effects and processing images at all.
- to watch my photos on 100% zoom to see if the processing images is creating noice, pixel distortion etc...
- to make minimum possible editing and to limit very much or not using effect or something additional at all. Just to provide a nice raw material for the buyers and to them possibility to apply whatever effects they want or they need.
I realise that as a stock photographer this is not into my job and it is not very good to limit their possibilities of using the image.
I want to thank you for reading my work and I really hope something of this post to be useful for you.
I appologize if I made errors or something is not fully truth. I am continue to study and to try to get better. Feel free to correct me in the comments.
Thank you
Resources
- Most of the photos I used are from my profiles in deviantart and shutterstock
- I used "reject" named photo from here, and photo about list of problems for the image