using sony a350 - alamy rejections

[minoltasonyman]

MSM,

You should also read up on hyperfocal distance if you haven't already. Just google it.

Yes, I do know about it, it still makes interesting reading though. I did a similar lens test on a 50mm and a 18-70mm zoom and they are much improved over the results of the sigma 10-20mm. It's unfortunate because it's a useful lens for landscapes, it might be worth trying a different brand I guess.

Whilst I'm on the subject of Alamy rejections, in terms of sales & revenue, how do other agencies compare? Dreamstime, istock, shutterstock, fotolia etc etc.

[David Kilpatrick]

I can't really say about all the other 'agencies' as most you mention are microstock and that amounts to more or less giving away your photography; the returns tend to be about the same as Alamy financially, and come in earlier, but only because hundreds of uses are sold for $3-5 sort of prices instead of a few uses for $50-300 prices (typically). iStock is more picky than Alamy is anything, small files are OK but you have to make them look like old Canon shots did in 2005 - sort of smooth and plastic from excess noirse reduction. They don't like any trace of noise.

Good genuine libraries including Fotolibra, based in Wales. They get decent fees and have an exceptional system for sending requests to their photographers. Great communication.

David

[Omega892]

Please excuse going off topic here, I am open to this being moved.

Or - Photoshop Elements 9, which does a fine basic conversion using the same 'engine' as Lightroom, but has the really desirable controls disabled (such as lens profiles, extended noise reduction control). David

Does that desirable controls disabled work through into the printer control with it overiding any Epson R2880 settings set up via Printer&Faxes in Windows XP?

I had this bother with Elements 8, but Elements 6 was fine. A description of this saga is found elsewhere on this forum but replies petered out see here:

http://www.photoclubalpha.com/forum/vie ... f=6&t=3762

[David Kilpatrick]

No idea. I don't use Windows XP for printing as the colour management is rubbish, I don't even have a printer connected to the Windows machine. I was able to sort out Hawick Camera Club's Windows/Epson printing problems three years ago, but only by systematically eliminating double/self-cancelling settings throughout the computer's setup.

David

[alphaomega]

Yes, David Kilpatrick wrote:

Or - Photoshop Elements 9, which does a fine basic conversion using the same 'engine' as Lightroom, but has the really desirable controls disabled (such as lens profiles, extended noise reduction control). But Elements gives you a great photo editing environment (set it to 'Professional' mode to get the AdobeRGB space needed by Alamy) and for around £60-70 is a bargain.
David

Nothing wrong with what David wrote. I would just like to add that to the best of my knowledge Elements 9 is still without any means of removing CA (Chromatic Aberrations). As I understand it the RAW module is severely curtailed compared with PS and the equivalent to the Distortion Module in PS does not have the CA removal function either. My experience indicates that for Alamy CA removal is a must. This is also my gripe gainst Sony's raw software. No CA removal. Ugh! Ugh! as Sitting Bull would say.

[Bruce Oudekerk]

I have no intention of selling my photographs to a stock agency but am VERY curious as to what they want technically, so this is a very interesting dialog to me.

Personally I develop all my RAW images in ACR (now ACR 6.2) and leave sharpening completely minimal…not at ACR default. ALL images are a tad soft no matter the lens. Then I sharpen in PS using USM at original file resolution. An acid test that I use to determine a really sharp image is to use radius 0.4, threshold 1-2 and appropriate amount to be determined by whatever the image will take. The key issue is that larger radiuses are needed on softer images. Which gets me to my point and observation: David’s rejected photo example fails this small radius test, as it does not sharpen well at 0.4 and needs a significantly larger radius to ‘pop’. The beach scene, however, does reasonably well at the small radius of 0.4.

Maybe it’s just me and my old eyes, but the differences between one of my RAW converted but unprocessed/unsharpened, but ‘really sharp’ image and a similar unprocessed ‘fairly sharp’ image like David’s examples we have been looking at here, are not always obvious to me. But I easily see a difference when my intent is to up-res and do a final sharpening for larger print sizes to, say, 360ppi for Epson printers and prepare the image for print. Then these small variations in softness become apparent in the first and certainly by the second sharpening in PS…to me at least. That is being picky…most people in the real world won’t notice these small variations, for good or ill. Most people aren’t these stock image libraries however.

Bruce

[David Kilpatrick]

Bruce, you have to be aware that the sample of the A350 shot rejected, which I posted, was upscaled already and would not be suitable for sharpening other than pre-press, which is very crude (example - 250% Radius 2 Level 4 as a standard for many magazines). It's taken from 14 megapixels up to an effective 18 megapixels.

This was a serious issue with Alamy, fortunately they have removed the requirement to enlarge any images as long as the camera is capable of 24MB final files - that is, 10 megapixels or better, in practice.

David

[Bruce Oudekerk]

Bruce, you have to be aware that the sample of the A350 shot rejected, which I posted, was upscaled already ...David

Shame on me…I thought both example details were at 100%.

My statements about USM are valid but my use of this as an example makes me look foolish. The whole scenario of my re-sharpening the image is a stretch anyway because bad things can quickly happen in the Jpeg examples depending on its PP history.

What I find really interesting is what the stock image library people are looking at for ideal sharpening. Obviously over sharpening is a huge no-no and an automatic rejection…and yet a lack of sharpening could kill chance of selection also. It took me years to get a feel for my Epson printers when sharpening for print. I suspect many of my images would be slightly over-sharpened for selection purposes as I prepare them for print. I know that I still tend to over-sharpen my web images, for whatever that’s worth. Obviously there’s a big difference between sharpening for my Epson printer and sharpening for prepress but I suppose that distinction might be lost on some photographers. Of course we are not doing either here, as we ARE doing what I consider my initial conservative sharpening and that is prior to any final sharpening that might take place after resampling for print or prepress.

Bruce

[bakubo]

Shame on me…I thought both example details were at 100%.

My statements about USM are valid but my use of this as an example makes me look foolish.

Bruce, if this is the biggest mistake you make around here then rest assured you don't look foolish. Most of us at one time or another say something to make us look much more foolish.

[Bruce Oudekerk]

Does that desirable controls disabled work through into the printer control with it overiding any Epson R2880 settings set up via Printer&Faxes in Windows XP?

I had this bother with Elements 8, but Elements 6 was fine.

David is being kind when he says Windows color management is rubbish. The apps and the operating system tend not to play nice together and everybody blames every one else. With that said, it can be made to work…maybe.

I don’t use Elements much, usually to help others and I NEVER print out of it. Assuming Adobe is somewhat consistent across apps…a foolish assumption on my part… you must let PSE handle the color management since you set the color adjustment to ‘OFF- no color adjustment’ in the printer driver. PSE is color management aware so in the printer dialog box in PSE you need to pick the appropriate media profile AND tell PSE to manage the colors. That is not to be confused with the printer dialog box in the Epson driver itself.

Where I see this falling somewhat short is that PSE does not allow softproofing. For my Epson R800 and R1900, this is VERY important with any media I generally use. Although I see less drastic modification needed on some media when using the 2880, it is important here too. As counter intuitive as it sounds, you should Softproof and tell the application what media you WILL BE printing on as you do your final tonal and color adjustments for output. This is before you ever print or even set up to print. For instance when you tweak the color of the image with softproofing turned on and set to given media profile, what you see in the screen should be eventually represented in print on that particular media and that particular printer and at that particular printer output quality. This assumes that you will be letting…say Photoshop… do the color management. This allows for true WYSIWYG…what you see is what you get or in this case…what you are going to get. All of this assumes a properly calibrated monitor or all bets are off.

As you have found out, Adobe takes great pleasure in rewording, rephrasing and changing placement of dialog boxes. It keeps us peons on our toes. The process is the same but they make it easy to make errors via assumptions that just aren’t true. I goofed up big time when making the jump from PS CS to PS CS3 and I thought I knew what I was doing. LOL For these reasons, I suggest you let the printer manage the colors when printing out of PSE, at least until you get decent output. And then see how things go by letting PSE manage the colors. My take anyway.

Bruce

[Omega892]

I suggest you let the printer manage the colors when printing out of PSE, at least until you get decent output. And then see how things go by letting PSE manage the colors. My take anyway.

Bruce

Thank you for the your time in explaining a few things.

Letting the printer manage output was one avenue tried and with this in mind the driver was set up by default in a manner suggested by Lyson for their Photo Gloss. The snag came with PSE8 overriding the Colour Controls set and Adobe RGB selected under Mode as detailed in the illustrated post at:

http://www.photoclubalpha.com/forum/vie ... f=6&t=3762

I had a live computer hook up with Tony Riley who set up to control my computer remotly and he could not get over the impasse. With PSE6, or 3 for that matter, the correct colour values were printed but PSE8 did its own thing no matter what we tried.

I had test images from Lyson and Tony dropped down a version known to him to be accurate for colour, this when printed from PSE6 on a laptop matched exactly a printed sample supplied by Lyson, but under PSE8 colours were nowhere near accurate.

To my mind Photoshop is overpriced and I hate being jacked around by software companies with their odious EULAs. If you bought a car and it would not turn corners like an earlier model from the same stable one would expect redress but it seems software companies can do as they like.

If you are into earning serious money from photography then maybe the price tag is justified but if engaged in a hobby from which one is trying to get the most on a modest budget then things look very different. Besides, health issues suggest heavy investment in expensive software may not have a long enough run to be worthwhile.

Thanks again for your time.

PS big trouble getting this post up to the Forum.

Software tells me the the latency was across

4.26.35.98 BLUEHOST-IN.edge3.NewYork.Level3.net

and

69.195.64.41 tg2-5.ar01.prov.bluehost.com

[Bruce Oudekerk]

Letting the printer manage output was one avenue tried and with this in mind the driver was set up by default in a manner suggested by Lyson for their Photo Gloss. The snag came with PSE8 overriding the Colour Controls set and Adobe RGB selected under Mode as detailed in ...

I’m over my head here because I don’t even have PSE8 but Adobe says this about: “More print options”

Color Management
Select a printer profile from the Print Space menu. The Print Space menu sets a custom printer profile to convert image colors to the printer’s color space, or turns off color conversion. If you have an ICC profile for your printer and paper combination, select it from the menu. Make sure that you turn off the printer driver’s color management. Image Space shows the color space embedded in your photo file.

This basically says what I did but it’s a somewhat hidden menu so it might be set up incorrectly for you. Just to clarify, they are saying to pick a ICC (printer media) profile and turn off color management in the printer driver or just turn off color conversion in PSE and let the printer manage the colors in the printer driver.

For the sake of simplicity I suggest you convert (not assign) the color space of your working file to sRGB. That almost always keeps you out of big trouble.

Bruce