I've been extremely lucky with QC at various agencies and haven't had many rejections on batches, but I am interested about image sharpness. I religiously obey the no sharpening rule i.e. nothing in camera, nothing in ACR and nothing in CS3. I weed out shots that I don't consider sharp 'enough' at 6MP or 8MP (depending on body, D60 or 1DMark2N) and then upsize to 48-50mb.
Now it's where things get subjective. Having been captured through an AA filter, not sharpened and then greatly upsized, it seems clear to me that the resulting image will be soft, sometimes so soft that I wonder how I let it through my own 'QC'. But the agencies seem to be fine with it....so do they expect this softness and am I being 'over-perfectionist'? I wonder if I'm just being lucky? Sharpness is so hard to quantify and it's not black and white 'sharp or soft'.
Thanks for any thoughts and comments
You are right, sharpness is difficult to assess and quantify. Much of it has to do with subject matter - a small machine part or product may need to be tack sharp whereas a mature model in an outdoor scene may be less sharp and still be acceptable.
Sharpening is generally considered to be the last step of any editing process, as how much of it is necessary will be dependent on the output medium. So, in this case, whoever is using your stock images will be doing their own sharpening in the layout...probably along with cropping, color edits and any number of other things. Your photo is the negative, their final layout is the print.
Ken, you're talking about stock agencies? While none of my work is with the Getty or Corbis or Jupiter of that world, admittedly, everyone I've submitted to wants uncompressed TIFFs at most. And when buying work through a stock agency, I've yet to see one that lets the art buyer go back to the photographer for a file other than the one the agency holds in their catalog.
krieves wrote:
I'm sorry, I was talking about ad agencies and corporate art/marketing departments.
with them it was like that before, even with the chromes. Today with digital between the pre-press , color matching and conversions the advantage of in-house pre-press and retouching department has not really changed.
but I'm against the submission of the raws (but tiffs unsharpened), double spread as a standard. Then the photographer should get the final word on the final conversions.
Problem is that the color matching and the cmyk conversions need to be made by the talent and experience of the pre-press people (without any competition with the photographer who still has the responsibility of the final outcome). Togheter, in harmony.
P.S. at first I too thought that we were discussing about stocks, actually.For stocks I do sharpen, actually.
nathanlake wrote:
Someday, these agencies are going to learn they should be doing their own up-rez-ing. To have a minimum size requirement make little sense.
I couldn't agree more. Alamy is particularly silly...they want a 48MB pre-compression file, which is something like 140% up-rez from a D200. And then they'll accept it as a JPEG compressed to quality 9 from Photoshop, which is low enough to create artifacting. They're better off just taking a native TIFF file and doing the up-rez/conversions themselves, especially with as slow as their QC process is.
To have a minimum size requirement make little sense.
I'm also in agreement with this and find it a little puzzling. At Getty they accept only JPEG's 48-52MB, with absolutely no sharpening. I'm sure there's a very good reason for this and think I'll send Peter Maher an email and inquire about the file size limitations. He's generally pretty good at getting back to me.
nathanlake wrote:
Someday, these agencies are going to learn they should be doing their own up-rez-ing. To have a minimum size requirement make little sense.
I actually end up doing the resizing when a client needs a larger file of one of my stock images . Just had two images sell that the client needed a 90 mb file and I got them what they needed . I resize the raw file and there has never been a problem with it . Having a minimum file size has a lot to do with what the majority of end users want for a file size which is why they require a certain size .
Getty allowed that one converted the image to LAB color and did minimal sharpening in the luminosity channel and then reconverted the image over to RGB, at least a year or two ago, now all of a sudden they want jpgs and I'm a little surprised at that.
ericevans wrote:
I actually end up doing the resizing when a client needs a larger file of one of my stock images . Just had two images sell that the client needed a 90 mb file and I got them what they needed . I resize the raw file and there has never been a problem with it . Having a minimum file size has a lot to do with what the majority of end users want for a file size which is why they require a certain size .
Why would a client ask for a picture with a file size of 90MB? What does the file size have to do with anything?
nathanlake wrote:
Why would a client ask for a picture with a file size of 90MB? What does the file size have to do with anything?
I am also at a loss why stock agencies want files this size. I did ask the director of photography of Corbis this question in a meeting with her. She said that it was agency norm but still could not explain why the megafile requirement.
I suppose that the agency wants a certain level of quality as a minimum level, Getty has been asking for images of 48-52mb for years now, for the longest time that meant that I had to upzise the image in Photoshop from the original file but the thing is they only want that size, now with a medium format back I have to decrease the image in order for it to fit into their requirements and then they want me to destroy it with jpeg compression.
I can take a 4MP image and make it 500MB in size. The file size has nothing to do with quality without some other parameter being applied.
I am far from knowledgable about the stock/agency business, but I think they are continuing to follow some ill-advised standard that they believe somehow indicates quality.
One of my clients, John Deere, only wants Raw; they have their own photographers in the processing department and they do that themselves. The images I provide on DVD.
If the output is for print, for an ad or design company, I always capture sharpen (with appropriate masking, etc.) in ACR first so I have some input to the final look, and provide tiffs, usually on hard drive that I get back later. Note this is capture sharpening; I assume content sharpening will be done and that output sharpening will be the final process.
re. JPEGs, we have found that there is no visible difference between tiffs and level 9 JPEGS for exhibition printing (assuming that all processing has been done before conversion), and the JPEGs are much smaller—so maybe Getty are on to something there—although I do not understand the "48–52Mb" size range (I am shooting/processing book images right now, of bodies against a white background, and even 14bit capture D3 files output 16bit at native resolution won't be anything like that size if made into JPEGs). That precise range seems silly to me; as Baldur said above, that means down-rezzing for an MF back.
