You don't (unless you are uploading video). It isn't available.

Quote from: latex on June 05, 2008, 03:41

Quote from: sharply_done on June 04, 2008, 20:50

Yep, my IS sales have recently fallen victim to this. Although I'm considering eventually going exclusive with IS, I'm glad that I'm not that way now.

Maybe if you were exclusive this wouldn't happen...

As a victim of the infamous November 2006 Best Match change, I can say that exclusives are not immune (I've never recovered to October 2006 download figures. Or dollars for that matter. My istock downloads dropped by around two thirds over night as all the strong images that were carrying my portfolio died in one day!  Of course having a relatively small portfolio whose downlods are largely dependent on a small number of images makes that sort of thing more likely)

I like the room I'm currently working in - It has the desk and computer at one end, stereo and TV at the other, large comfy sofa and rocking chair, two huge   bookcases (both double stacked with books). It's also got a nice domed plaster ceiling with interesting early twentieth century plaster work which are an inspiration to look up at! A South facing window under a verandah, which provides decent natural light all day for real drawing, and a pleasant outlook over my front garden and the park beyond. I could do with more desk space to give me room to do real media drawing - for that I tend to go into my family room and monopolise the dining table. Or the kitchen and use the kitchen table!
I currenty use a G5 imac and Wacom Intuos tablet. I'd really like a Cintique, but can't justify the expense

Quote from: Bateleur on May 30, 2008, 22:11

Quote from: hatman12 on May 30, 2008, 20:34

My main concern about iStock exclusivity is that it is too easy and allows the world to be awash with iStock exclusives.  That needs to change.

...

In fact, what is probably happening is that they are tending to get the moderately competent hobbyists who are doing this for 'pin money' and don't want the hassle of uploading to a load of different places.

....

I resemble that remark!

(Istock exclusives do seem to include a lot of people like me!)
I do find it hard to imagine why they would raise the bar back up on exclusivity though. A lot of the  amateurs do find it hard to get noticed and get the downloads. When I joined istock a couple of years ago, it was very easy to get a couple of hundred images up in the space of a month or so (upload limits were 10 a day, i think when I joined) and once you had more than a hundred images online downloads pretty much automatically flowed. It isn't that simple now with the vastly huger image collection - which is why istock dropped the limits on exclusivity when they did, on the "catch them before they get too addicted to other sites income" principal (or so I assume). making it harder would just weed out pretty much all new potential exclusives, good or bad, as the upload limit fr non-exclusives makes it so hard to build up a decent size portfolio at reasonable speed.

I'm down on istock in terms of number of downloads, but look like being up on dollars (A combination of upping a cannister level and having a quarter of my downloads this month being ten credit vectors). I've had a very mixed bag - some extraordinarily good days and some dreadful runs of zeros. One of the drawbacks of a small portfolio. If my vectors hadn't started to earn some $s May would have been sad - but no worse than the fall I saw last May.

If the image was from istock and they bought the appropriate extended licence then the use as a e card is OK. If no extended licence was purchased, then they need to get one. I don't know what restrictions other sites use on redistribution of images like this - one of the downsides of having your images on various sites is that it makes compliance enforcement a bit harder, especially if terms and conditions of use vary.

It's always amused me how some people love stirring the pot on internet forums... They must have very boring real lives.

Istock isn't for everyone's taste. The rejects brought up in this thread (apart from Lisa's which we can't see!) don't surprise me. The vector is a bit quick and dirty. And derivative. I wouldn't have expected it to get knocked back, but it wouldn't have suprised me either. And Cathy's knockback is the sort of straightforward composite concept shot that just doesn't fly at istock. If you want to do that sort of stuff, you definitely don't want to be exclusive at istock, for whatever reasons they just don't seem to accept it. Or at least only if you get lucky.

I don't do composites in PS (for stock), and my vectors tend to be handrawn arty stuff (which doesn't sell much but get accepted most of the time! ). So istock exclusivity currently suits me. But the ups and downs in sales with changes in best match/changes in the wind direction are annoying - if I was in this for anything other than a hobby, and putting enough time into it I'd be spreading my stuff out across sites a bit. But I think I'd be doing very different images for istock and say shutterstock, from what I've seen accepted and rejected at the two sites. It's not worth banging your head against a wall trying to upload stuff that just isn't going to work at a particular site. You need to work out what istock will take. At least they are (usually) consistent enough in their policies, whether you agree with them or not, that it's possible to get a very high acceptance rate if you play along with their foibles.

He must have quite a team there. His "examples of out commercial photography work" include one of istock's most popular best four downloads (the one with the woman with laptop hands raised), rzdeb's chairs (which look like a 3D render to me). The shopping trolley in a car is a 3D render done by Mark Evans who is an istock admin...

istock are picky about technicalities - crisp focus, the dreaded artifacting and especially , in my experience, lighting (no harsh shadows, odd colour balances unless you can persuade them it's deliberate). So to get a high acceptance rate clean files are very important.

I'm only at istock so it's 100 per cent of my earnings! Best month for dollars since July 2007 (which was abnormally high as I had an image of the week). Downloads, best for this year.  Big increase in dollars per download, mainly as the ten credit vector sales are starting to kick in, and you don't need to get too many of those at silver exclusive pay rates to increase earnings very pleasantly.

The last two weeks have been better than over a year for me...

But small portfolios will always be more subject to sudden swings. It's just applied statistics (I have a small portfolio...I've had changes in best match or the positions of the moon, or whatever cut my download rate to a third of what it was overnight...and sadly it stayed there!)

And any portfolio that can have no sales for five days is by definition small  and you can tell nothing about the way that the site is operating as a whole from such a tiny sample. What is small? My portfolio is small (only 300 images). There are 3 million images at istock. There are very few portfolios that are large enough or sell enough to have a valid statistical sample. Sean (sjlocke) would I guess be one of those - although even then with the massive growth in istock it would be a close run thing.

To make that point is not invalidating your experience. It's just pointing out that there is very little reason to think that your experience is a good pointer to what is happening to the site as a whole.

Quote from: hatman12 on April 22, 2008, 02:10
Well this is broadly similar to what I was trying to point out in my 'not as good as I thought' thread, in that existing 26c credits get replaced by new 19c subscription credits.  In an absolute worst case scenario this would result in a drop in income of 26%.

Of course that worst case scenario will probably never occur.

Set against the 'risk' of the new scheme must be the positives: the possibility of iStock attracting many more customers, the possibility of existing customers buying more images (perhaps even a probability for larger portfolios and those containing 'sets') plus the 'free lottery ticket' of unused credits.

Given the strength of iStock's marketing, my gut feel is that over the longer term this plan will result in an increased income for larger portfolios due to the tendency for subscribers to make multiple purchases.  The risk is higher for small portfolios.

I should think its a given that a high percentage of existing customers will switch to subscriptions.

Actually I don't think it's a given that a high percentage of customers will switch at all. Surely the only buyers who are interested will be the heavy users who will already be buying credit bundles. Or whose bean counters insist on subscriptions so they are currently buying elsewhere.
The smallest subscription package indicated by the calculator is ten credits a day over six months, (1800 downloads) costing around 600$.  This is a decent outlay - and presumably any istock customer who is interested in that sort of outlay will currently be saving money by buying the 600$ credit bundle. Which gives a per credit price of 1$, not far short of the minimum. I can't see the buyers who are currently paying more per credit than this buying these very large subscriptions

On the credit prices implied by the examples you would have to be a silver exclusive or better to do this sort of arbitrage - and be willing to pay out some serious sums of money (three months subscription at more than 100$ per day!) in the vain hope that you wouldn't be stopped after about five minutes. Not terribly likely although theoretically possible!

I don't have a lot of isolations on istock (they are too much hassle to do, so I don't bother). but I've never had any rejected. I do them as much as possible with lighting, then use a combination of a channel mask and the pen tool to create a mask to isolate the object and use levels to whiten the background. I generally only isolate objects with a very deep depth of field, otherwise geting an edge of the degree of fuzziness consistent with the segree of focus is too hard - unless the isolation can entirely be done with lighting. And I usually leave shadows, so it's not really a real isolation anyway!

Quote from: madelaide on April 21, 2008, 04:30
Do I understand it right, we can opt-in or out as we wish, even at image by image level?

Regards,
Adelaide

yes you can opt out even at the image level - images that are opted out will show up in the search labelled with a little leaf icon. Given you are guaranteed a minimum payout of 19c per credit (same minimum as now with the cheapest credit bundle), there doesn't seem to be any reason to opt out as all it's doing is cutting down potential sales.

Quote from: maco0708 on April 20, 2008, 20:59

Quote from: dbajurin on April 20, 2008, 20:51
I personaly think that in this picture noise not a problem. There is a LOT Color aberration in your picture. Use Adobe Lihtroom to correct this

Yeah, I was wondering about that too. I wish they had VERY specific rejection reasons. If it's noise, say noise, if it's artifacts, say artifacts,....

Do you consider that a LOT of color aberration? What lenses do you use? This was taken with the Canon 17-40 f/4 L at f/8. Is there a better wide angle zoom for Canon? Maybe the 16-35 II?
Or all lenses have aberration and we just have to correct it in the photoshop?

Every wide angle zoom I've tried from Canon has sufficient chromatic aberration that I've had to clean it up using lens correction to get the edges acceptable to me at 100 per cent view. (that includes the 17-40 - although I've seen images from that lens that were better in that respect than the copy I tried). It's the main reason I haven't spent a lot of money upgrading from my good copy of the 17-85IS. Yes it's got horrid chromatic aberration wide open at the edges. But it's no harder and more time consuming to correct moderately large amounts of CA than it is to correct small but still noticeable CA. 
I'm really looking for a landscape lens (so it doesn't have to be super fast) that is sharp right out to the corners at f8 with no appreciable chromatic aberration. So far I haven't found it. (the 10-22 EFS seems to be the best bet, but I'm still thinking about full frame so don't want to spend that much on an EF-S lens)

I don't advise trying  cartoonish stuff when applying for istock. I always recommend that what seems to get people through is to demonstrate that you can draw - by which I meant show that you can do things like stuff in perspective, shade with a consistent light direction ie a reasonably realistic render of a real object (even if taken from a photo).

Doing good cartoons can get you accepted - but it requires a lot of practice with old fashioned pen and paper and ink to get a good consistent style, otherwise it's all too easy to get   varying elements that just look dropped together (as in this case) rather than a cohesive style. Which is why I don't do cartoons, as I don't have a consistent style together. I'm working on it, but it' s not good for publication yet.

Because .... Mine is a Canon G3 which actually cost as much as my DSLR when I bought it nearly five years ago. it's actually got more controls than my 20D (focus bracketing for example). And a really good quality f2 lens. It can take an external Canon flash; at ISO 50  the image quality is less noisy and more robust to post processing as far as artifacts showing up than my DSLR (but no use at higher ISOs). It's only got 4MP so I don't have too many stock shots with it, but the quality is well good enough. While it's not exactly tiny, I can keep it in my handbag and use it to take reference shots for illustrations whenever something shows up. Because the small sensor has a depth of field from here to eternity when stopped down to f8 or so, it's a fine macro or landscape lens for non-moving subjects in good light. It has a swivel screen so that I can get down low without breaking my back, or take shots over the heads of a crowd. And people don't realise that I'm taking photos as it's so discrete.

And my daughters can hold it  -  they are very petite and finds the 20D too much of a handful.

I only wish that any of its successors were as good as I'd like to upgrade- while it's replacements have more megapixels they have slower lenses, and no flip out screen.

So why use an SLR if I love my P&S so much?...because the P&S focus is slower, the viewfinder is non existent and I can't see the screen clearly without wearing reading glasses. And I shoot a lot (not for stock) with moving subjects at low light (kids theater and concerts, mainly) and the focus speed and high ISO capability of a DSLR is essential. But having an alternative that can do maybe 75 per cent of what I need, that is always in my bag whatever I'm doing, is a real useful trick. And I still upload the odd istock photo with it (it gives me a medium)

I have a Sigma ring flash (dedicated to Canon EOS). Works pretty well, but I don't do much stock stuff with it. I picked it up in a bankruptcy camera store auction very cheaply. I don't think it would get enough use to warrant paying full price - I find I get better more interesting light using an off camera flash - the ring flash is pretty flat front on lighting, even with the sides of the flash set at different strength - but at least the ring flash can be used as a combination of fill and a master to fire my Sigma DG super which is my main flash, so it's useful that way.

How much talent you need to have depends a bit on what you have in mind to submit, and where, as the sites have very different requirements. If you want to submit to istock, you really need to be able to draw a bit - I can draw a bit, but really don't go much further than using a brush and tablet with the occasional foray into the pen tool in Illustrator and I got through the istock acceptance process first time. On the other hand because I don't produce those glossy buttons and swirly backkgrounds my files get a lot of nice ratings from other illustrators, but don't sell very much!

Looking around at other sites, some allow you to submit jpegs of illustrations (which gets around the pretty complex requirements for getting files to meet the appropriate EPS criteria) and also take simpler files. It is possible, especially if you are a good photographer and thus have raw material to use as a source for traces, to produce some interesting things just by learning to use the pen tool. And if you are doing isolations in photoshop already, then the pen tool is probably familiar anyway. While traces aren't as easy to do as one might expect (I find them much more time consuming than original drawings and you need to have a good eye for light and shade to simplify things well enough to make an effective final product) - you can use them as the basis for finding a style and training your eye.

Illustrator is a complex and somewhat counter intuitive program to learn - but if you have a couple of weeks to immerse yourself into it and do nothing else it's possible to go a long way very quickly, as to produce stuff that's acceptable for microstock, only the basic illustrator functions are needed anyway. My eleven year old daughter spent a couple of weeks over the Christmas holidays doing nothing else, after watching me, and ended up decorating all her school books with home produced smilies and glossy icons, made several birthday cards and drew some manga figures...(but then she has been using photoshop since she was eight)


She wouldn't pass the istock inspection as her drawing isn't strong enough yet, although it's getting better, and she hasn't the patience to produce EPS8 compatible files. But I bet she'd have a chance at one of the sites which take jpegs of illustrations. Anyone know whether Shutterstock allow under eighteens to contribute? (istock do if a parent signs the contract)

I'm not an inspector and I only submit to istock

When I started out I needed to look at 200 per cent for everything. Once I had spotted an issue at 200 per cent, I found that it was often visible, now I knew what I was looking for and where it was, even at lower magnifications. These days, with a callibrated monitor and more practice, I can see problems if they are there at 100 per cent. A callibrated monitor makes a huge difference in seeing artifacts - if you have a monitor that blocks up the shadow areas then it can be much harder to see issues at 100 per cent.
But I do still check the edges of the images taken with my wide angle lens at 200 per cent, as there is more likely to be chromatic aberrations  in those areas and it's easy for me to miss it at 100 per cent - my close in vision is deteriorating rapidly, and even with glasses I don't see a clearly as I once did (the curse of getting old!). The only istock rejection for artifacts I've had in the last eighteen month has been for a chromatic aberration that I missed on the edge of an image. All my other rejections have been for lighting - I like images darker than istock does. ( I'm not a volume uploader though).

The current increasing strength of the Australian dollar may have something to do with it too. Local camera retailers are hurting a lot as the temptation to import from the US becomes overwhelming at 95cents Aus to the US dollar! (there are a lot of products where even the lack of warranty makes little difference as the price is just so much cheaper in the US you could almost buy two of them and be ahed at the moment!)

Quote from: basti on March 09, 2008, 09:20
To the SW licence guys - using Photoshop for microstock is commercial, so any Photoshops bought under educational licences are illegal. Theres exactly written in the licence you cant use it for commercial purposes.

Actually not  true. see this page http://www.adobe.com/uk/education/purchasing/faq.html on Adobes site: (quote from Adobe's FAQ on education licensing)
"Student question

"I'm very interested in buying the Education version of Adobe Creative Suite, but first I want to know if the software can be used to produce work for paying customers once I am working in the industry, or do I have to buy a different version of Creative Suite once I'm working in the industry?"
Answer

Good news! You can use Adobe Education software (any title!) to produce commercial/professional paid-for work when you leave school, or even while you are in school. In this regard, Adobe does not limit how student software is used. So students can use it to learn and to make money!

(Of course, students must agree to the terms of the End User Licensing Agreement — which appears during installation — just as every software customer must do.)"


I went from photoshop CS educational to CS2 full version - I'm a teacher in a tertiary education institution - and I own an educational version of Illustrator CS2 - and I checked the terms of use very carefully (including a phone call to Adobe).  (I think the macromedia products like Flash are different and have different licensing conditions, despite being now owned by Adobe)

Edit to add: there is a new even cheaper Student edition available for CS3 products (at least in Australia) and that does not allow commercial use.

The standard istock reply seems to be some words about wanting images rather than finished designs - as you can pull vector designs apart and reuse them you can get away with murder there (or at least I have - so far no "not suitable for stock" rejections).

While that green one is sort of pretty it's a bit obvious in a "gosh I've got the flood filter and I'm not afraid to use it" kind of way (but that's a personal opinion - art is all about personal opinions which is why I think it's harder to get past not suitable for stock rejections when you do it)

If you look at the raster art that is accepted at istock it comes mainly in two forms - really high quality (often quirky or amusing) photo montages -  like the prize winning image of the year; or scans of conventionally produced artwork ( I presume that's what this week's image of the week is although I guess it could also be painter or photoshop generated) . Almost never photoshop based artwork with obvious use of filters. You do sometimes see the odd photoshop or painter produced original painting. (emphasis on "original - styles that are recycles of common stock themes don't seem to get through)

I've no firm views on whether it's a good idea or not for istock to choose  to reject this large category of images. But there's no doubt in my mind that that is their policy.