I have contacted support for clarification but...

Over Easter I received an email from DT requesting that I upload my RAW file as an addition format due to a customer request. (I could have said no & will in the future)

I did this thinking that it would be an 8 credit sale. Lo and behold, 5 minutes after it is approved... the RAW file gets grabbed via subscription sale.

Credit to me?  A lousy $0.25 cents.

SUCKS!!!

Never again.

Ridiculous. No scruples.  RAW should not be available for 25 lousy cents. It would be so easy to implement 40 Subscription DLs per RAW. I never even considered giving my RAWs to a microstock agency regardless of price.

I am interested to hear what support says. Please keep us updated and thanks for the heads-up.

Special file types should get a different treatment.  I am an oponent of 25c JPEGs already, what to say about a RAW or a vector file...  Thanks for warning us.

Even SS charges more for a tiff and they are only generated from the jpeg.  Raw should be an EL.

Why would shutterstock create a tiff from a jpg then sell it for more??  Doesn't that defeat the purpose - the two files are identical, why would one cost more?

According to SS (from a thread when this was first implemented), this was a feature that was requested from buyers.

Many buyers purchase an image and then work on it over time.  As they open and close a JPG image, it degrades (because of the re-compression).

To avoid this, the first thing buyers will do when they download an image is convert it to a TIFF, so that opening and closing the image will not degrade it.

So this essentially saves them time from converting the image.  You can think of SS providing buyers a service (converting JPG to TIFF) that they are now charging for.

Quote from: leaf on April 12, 2007, 01:53

well.. sorta off topic but.  Why would shutterstock create a tiff from a jpg then sell it for more??  Doesn't that defeat the purpose - the two files are identical, why would one cost more?

Geopappas explained it but lots weren't convinced.  They made SS put a disclaimer that it was geneated from a JPEG as they thought it was misleading.

From a designers perspective, I guess the price is low compared to macro sites and most places pass costs onto clients anyway.

CJPhoto:

Thanks for adding that.  I had forgotten about that crucial piece.

Although I love SS, I sometimes wonder why they uprez images 100% and why they create a TIFF from a JPG.  They both seem pretty silly to me.

But if that is what the customer wants, then...

alamy upsizes their images too (they just have the submitter do it).  I am still in the dark why they would do it.

Fintastique,

I also received an email from FP admin about a buyer wanting a change in colors for one illustration, I did it, also waited for days, then it sold as an EL! 

Regards,
Adelaide