Stock imaging

The other week Paul a stock photographer came to give us pointers about stock photography. This was because part of one of our modules we had to upload images on to Istock.
He spoke about some problems which would stop Istock or any other site from using our pictures, the problems were.

Fringing (Chromatic Abrasion)
This is most common in wide angle lenses and mainly appears as a purple or red colour. Fringing can be reduced by stopping the back light down to avoid any harsh lighting.

Moiré Removal
This is mainly apparent in fabrics and is where areas of mixed colours are visible. A tip he gave for when dressing models is to keep the fashion neutral, particularly hairstyles so the picture won’t go out of date for a good number of years.

Compression Artifacts
This occurs when an image is made larger, generally after saving image as a jpeg then reopening the image, editing it then re-saving as a jpeg again. Sometimes too much sharpening of the image can cause these artefacts also.
The advice given to avoid this is to always shoot RAW then save as Tiff's if wanting to revisit to edit.

Bonding Problems
this is common in backgrounds being out of focus, the only real solution to this is to shoot the image again.

Trademarks/Brands
take out any trademarks, making sure none are visible, preferably not wearing any as this breaches the copyright terms.

Also when taking stock images, he mentioned to leave a lot of room around the image somewhere. This is for text and advertising and the more leeway in your pictures the more chance of being accepted.

We have to take 10 images which we can upload and when paul comes back in 2 weeks time he is going to look over them, say whats good and bad and hopefully they will be accepted by Istock.