It doesn't really matter if the highlights are clipping or not - they are horribly exposed in the first example with a direct reflection of the lights in the coins. You could have reduced them to grey and it still would attract the eye to the highlighted area. They are basically saying that your lighting is not good.

Steve

Thanks for the input. How specifically should the coins be lit? In the setup it's been diffused and passed through a cookie to add a pattern to it. Is it more diffusion it needs to make it appear less 'exposed'?

Also, are you saying the main problem is the coins and not the pig?

Hi,
Here are two images I would appreciate help with.

http://imageshack.us/g/9/p1050950copysmall.jpg/

I submitted them as part of my shutterstock application and they were rejected as 'Poor or uneven lighting, or shadows. White balance may be incorrect.'

I would have been OK if the rejection had been something like, 'fake plastic gold coins are fake' but the lighting on these was something I had actually spent two or three days tweaking to get perfect, shooting many dozens of images to get a setup I liked.

The idea behind these was to use reflections to make the piggy appear shiny and 3D as opposed to the somewhat flat white shape it appears in real life.

These images have been accepted at every other stock site I've sent them to. I am not sure what I am supposed to do differently on these?

Thanks for your help!

I don't have any direct skin in that game, (IOW no real reason to care if Yuri succeeds or fails with his own site) but I think that he sells a one-look plastic fantastic type of stock. It's hugely successful but it really is so homogenous. I can't see it becoming dominant unless he broadens his reach a bit.

Are you serious? How exactly would you define dominant? He's the most successful stock photographer on the planet and therefore dominant.

Plastic fantastic is what faceless corporations want, isn't that obvious?

It's a picture of an image taken in 1953 of the Queen greeting Sir Edmind Hillary.

Great shot of a Masonic handshake