OK, my fourth submission to iStock has been rejected. What bothers me is that it has been rejected within 30 minutes from being submitted. The info on iStock site says there is over 20,000 images in a queue and the minimum waiting period is 3 days.

This has happened for the second time. Am I getting a "preferential" treatment, or is this some kind of automatic rejection without even looking at the images (hard for me to imagine that somehow I jumped right to to the top of the queue).

While the reasons for rejection are very questionable (overfiltering and arifacts - where there are none) - I think it is secondary for now. I know that some of the images I submitted have NOT been processed at all (except conversion from RAW with minimum adjestments and very moderate noise treatment) - so I put the reasons into "unfathomable" category and hope that the next time I will fare better.

The extremely speedy response, however, quoting reasons which are REALLY bewildering in some cases - is what worries me.

Anyone with similiar experience ?

Thanks - will do so ASAP.

It helps to remember a little about JPEG, they are a lossy file format which means even in a conversion from RAW to JPEG some detail will be lost and there is the possibility that artifacting may be introduced.

I would recommend using Lightroom as it seems to add the lease amount of artifacting or noise.

You need to check that you are outputting at the highest value 12 in Photoshop, 10 (I think) in Aperture, etc

Ideally you should be making adjustments in a RAW editor like Nikon Capture, Canon's equivalent, Lightroom (and then finally export your finished file in JPG)

Look at your images at 100% and 200%

I think iStock are fair, if they say there is artifacting there probably is

That's "Mrs. TreeOfLife" to you... "

I bought the "Noise Ninja" program and it has worked out great.  One of the things I really like about it is the "undo" noise removal tool.  The program will take out noise from the whole photo, then if you see areas that are too "soft," you can undo those areas by using an undo brush.

Last summer I took a photo of an ostrich with a point and shoot camera.  There was a good amount of sky in the photo, and a lot of noise as a result.  I ran it through Noise Ninja- it took the noise out of the sky, but left me with a soft looking ostrich face.  I then used the undo tool to put the noise back on the ostrich (to give it more sharpness) but left the sky noise-free.  The photo was accepted yesterday at SS.   Pretty good for a point and shoot camera.

When I first submitted to SS I got rejected for "overuse of noise reduction software," so make sure you don't go crazy with it too.

Ideally you should be making adjustments in a RAW editor like Nikon Capture, Canon's equivalent, Lightroom (and then finally export your finished file in JPG)

I partly agree but not totally. I do some minor tweaking in the RAW Nikon convertor, like exposure, light and vibrance. Sometimes I develop the RAW twice, once optimized for highlights, then optmized for shadows.
The result goes in a 16-bit TIFF (with layers for 2-3 developments) to Photoshop.

Whatever you do there on the TIFF is lossless. I do some final tweaking, especially the pop-up and the brand-cloning (you can't clone in the RAW editor). I save that 16-bit TIFF, because that's my master copy.

After that, I convert to 8-bit and save as JPG-12. If ever I need to redo something on the shot, I always start from the TIFF. I don't trust Lightroom really. I felt it's a quick fix for things you have better control on in the real Photoshop, something for a snapshooter that wants predigested tweaks with no worries for noise and cloning.