I'm trying to find out the best selling technique for isolation. Hope some Pros could help me with that.

I've shot an object on white background. After playing with curves I've got the object with a nice shadow, and light background.
Whould it raise the sells if I manually erase the background to uniform white (255,255,255) or get rid of the object's shadow?

Should the clipping path include just the object or the object with it's shadow?

Does including the clipping path mean that everything outside of it should be erased?

Difficult to know exactly what sells better between an isolation with shadows or a true isolation. I don't have the answer, but I personally prefer to keep the shadows, and my isolations do sell quite well 

I think that there are pros and cons to both choice.

But of course the best solution consists in keeping the shadow and adding a clipping path (without the shadow of course). It is however quite difficult to create a clipping path for complex objects.

A clipping path which includes the shadow is completely useless however.

Now, concerning the "light" background, having a pure white background all around the object is clearly preferable IMHO. The picture and the thumbnail looks better and it is easier for the designer to simply put the image over a white background.

I agree that pure white is preferable (in fact many sites check if bg is really white), but shadows are not a problem if they fit the subject well, but I can't tell if they would sell better without the shadows.

I have no experience with clipping paths (PSP7 doesn't have this), but I'm not sure it would be mandatory for a buyer to see it in an image.  Not to say that there is no guarantee the clipping path is ok - I believe an inspector may check that if you state this when you submit, but since you can write it later anyway, I believe this is no guarantee.

Regards,
Adelaide

When i started in stock some years ago i created a clipping path in my illustrations and isolated shots.
Later on, most sites started offerering different sizes at different prices, so pictures were being resized/downsampled for customers.

I decided to do a test : since i included the keywords "clipping path" in keywords and description i wanted to be sure that customers also got that clipping path in their download.  Surprisingly, every file of my own i downloaded/purchased from every site the clipping path  when checking in photoshop was no longer there.  To be sure i downloaded/purchased files of other members/photographers who included and mentioned "clipping path'... and again, not a single file had a clipping path.

My conclusion, the resizing of our images on the sites destryed the clipping paths.

I contacted every site about this issue and got a reply from SS only that they don't support clipping paths.

With all that in mind i don't take the time anymore to create one in photoshop.

Patrick.

I agree with Patrick completely - there is no evidence to suggest that including a clipping path boosts sales.

If an image is properly isolated then a clipping path is a moot point because a reversed selction of the background will provide you with the same end result as embedding the path in the image.

I always want to have some info about this.That's a very good thing to know.

Quote from: patrick1958 on November 29, 2007, 23:30
My conclusion, the resizing of our images on the sites destryed the clipping paths.

I've heard that the clipping path is included only in the largest size images. If you create it while editing, it is free anyway. However nobody so far had confirmed that it raises the sells.

So it seems, that including a clipping path means only more work for us without any real benefit? SY

Quote from: hospitalera on December 03, 2007, 12:07
So it seems, that including a clipping path means only more work for us without any real benefit? SY

Even though SS doesn't support clipping paths, they are a benefit to designers because you can re-edit the area you want to isolated.  The edges are also more clean for extraction than if you didn't use one.  That's a benefit when you want to place the object on a new background.