What I find weird is that on the camera settings there is not much to set in terms of colors. I always use the landscape setting but that setting only has some increased sharpness.

As others have noted, in Canon DPP you can apply an interpretation to the data which mimics what the camera does when you shoot using eg the Landscape, Portrait etc settings. You can do the same (roughly similar anyhow) in Lightroom by using the Camera profiles (profile drop-down option in calibration settings). Lightroom and ACR include alternative optional profiles which mimic alternative built-in camera settings. There are also lots of third-party .dcp profiles available which provide alternative processing. Different from presets - though well designed presets typically also include their own camera profiles (looking at decompiled profiles I have noticed that some but not all also include a tone curve - within the profle).

In Lightroom (eg): If you begin by applying a different profile - eg Camera Landscape in Lightroom - you will get an image with a completely different interpretation of the color data. Most particularly the hues. The image will look completely different compared with the default Adobe profile. But the all of the other Lightroom settings (eg hue, saturation etc) will still be at their defaults. ..... because the slider values of these settings are relative to where you began. And you begin somewhere different when you apply a different profile.

Profiles mimic camera settings (eg Landscape, Portrait etc). The camera does not expose an interface to (ie control over) the majority of different ways in which the raw data can be interpreted (even a raw converter really only offers control over facets of a virtualised abstracted model of the data). Choosing the camera's Landscape setting is just like applying a profile in Lightroom (though this will also optionally additionally affect the 'sharpness' setting as noted in the OP).

Profiles define the way in which the raw data is initially interpreted. The color values. Most particularly the hues. The camera's Landscape/Portrait etc options do the same. Which values match different colors etc. Profiles are typically .dcp files. Adobe offers a free profile editor which can be used to create alternative profiles when used in conjunction with a calibration chart. We can also decompile existing .dcp files into XML to see their structure. A decompiled profile will be hundreds of lines long. There is a huge number of specific values - far more than either the Camera menu or Lightroom could usefully allow us to individually tweak.

There is no such thing as an original neutral raw image. As if that implied that a file had not been manipulated or processed. The default settings in any raw converter produce an image which is a manipulation of data. There is no such thing as neutral processing. The same as there was no such thing as definitive film - just different chemistry. Velvia was relatively more saturated and intense than Portra. Neither was accurate.

I'm now starting to remove my higher value images and will move them to macro.

Does the Exclusive contract allow that or are you quitting Exclusive ?

No no he's not dead, he's, he's restin'! Remarkable bird, the Norwegian Blue. Beautiful plumage!

trying to streamline language is a gargantuan task

In many cases there would surely be difficult to resolve [many]>-<[many] and recursive relationships within meanings. It may also take an extra layer of overheads to reverse translate search queries into their CV relationships. I wonder whether this sometimes contributes to the slowness of the site.

Possibly the CV is a legacy of a different business - designed for a site with many fewer images which were keyworded by the bureau. In those days it would have perhaps been a more manageable prospect.

Ultimately the CV seems to reduce meaning. I think it therefore makes their results in some cases inevitably less niched and less specific - which would especially be a potential issue with respect to new trends which they cannot know. In some ways that seems to undermine the benefits of user generated submissions.

According to some interviews with some artists who have some really quality fine art on POD sites, they claim that limited series prints do help, do raise the print price and also people get interested into buying original witch is artists ( at least for painters) main goal

Doing numbered editions of ink jets (sometimes amusingly called gicl�e prints) from a digital file seems terribly pretentious to me. The thing is endlessly reproducible at identical machine quality (unless the digital file is then verifiably destroyed !).

And it seems borderline dishonest to me - given that the prints are made to order - ie that the complete series may likely never actually exist (how can a thing be 1/50 if 50/50 does not yet exist and may never ?).

Numbered editions make sense when an image is printed from a plate which gradually degrades in quality through use. Or when an object is produced by casting. Or, for example, if a particular printer makes a series of silver prints from a negative. Years later it would be interesting to know how many of those prints were made in that edition.

I feel worse about them cutting our 'normal' royalties from 60% to 50% to set up a new US office

I feel very good about 50% being the normal royalty rate and 30% being the minimum.

Quote from: bunhill on December 23, 2014, 10:25

Quote from: SSArtist on December 23, 2014, 09:58

Well, this possibly could affect us too, because buyers in the EU will need to pay more for our files

What has changed concerns the detail around the way in which the process is administered.

Yes that, plus no more VAT threshold and hiding in Ireland/Swiss.

http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/taxation/vat/traders/e-commerce/index_en.htm

The clients were not avoiding VAT. The clients are unaffected.

The Ireland/Swiss (?) thing does not involve clients (Switzerland is not in the EU anyhow).

The clients are not affected. They will not be paying any more for your files. They were already subject to VAT at their home rate.

Take it from someone who is facing a mountain of metadata to climb, you're well advised to do this from the start.

PhotoMechanic is meant to be very good for doing metadata. I wonder what others here think about that software.

Also, can we license our images through other-than-Getty, Rights Managed sites like Almany? Are there others?

As an IS Exclusive, where do you sell your work other than iStock and how effective are those other channels?

(I do not know anything about POD.)

We can licence different content elsewhere as RM. Not the same images as we are selling at iStock as RF. It's a good positive opportunity to do something completely different.

I have a completely different portfolio at Alamy. All RM. I started uploading there in 2012. Initially I was only uploading non-commercial (aka typically editorial) content. Today I have about 700 pictures with them. It starts slowly there for most people typically. This month I have 5 sales reported so far netting slightly over $200. That's a good month for me at Alamy. So very much less than iStock - but from rather different images. Also - I feel like I am making progress there where as I stopped feeling like I was making progress at iStock. Alamy are helpful and friendly to deal with. That's a big plus.

I  think that it is also worth having the best of our legacy images sorted and keyworded ready to upload elsewhere - if we choose to or if iStock scraps the exclusive program. About 1/4, perhaps less, of my legacy RF stuff I will bother with again.

Looking at it from a symbiostocker's perspective,  I can see at some point paypal starting a service to handle VAT on sellers' behalf..

I cannot see this happening. Since Paypal is not the seller and does not provide a marketplace.

I think you are being over dramatic Hobostocker - looking at the situation from an almost apocalyptic all or nothing perspective. Like the doomers, conspiracists and fringe economists who predict economic meltdown year after year (always trying to sell Bitcoins and gold )

Europe will muddle through. The same as ever. It's not a race, for most ordinary people. (And soon enough Europe will be buying gas from Israel and Egypt anyhow as the huge Mediterranean Leviathan fields come on stream.)

The demand for phone photos is just a fad that will run its course

There are people making seriously big money in this arena ...

... the people renting office space and delivering pizza and weed to the venture funded tech startups which have an idea about algorithmically interpreting mobile and social and monetizing it as stock. 99.9% of these startups are going nowhere. But the 0.1% possibility keeps the venture money sloshing on through.

My predictions:

1. I expect iStock to (sooner or later) replace the artists exclusivity program with some sort of updated offering (which will amount to ending the exclusivity program). For better or worse, artist exclusivity seems like a legacy of another era which makes all of their processes and procedures more complicated (and expensive). Change could be good for a majority of contributors. (Much content at the main Getty Images site is no longer even image exclusive from what I can see).

2. Replace the iStock forum.

3. Maybe a Getty IPO depending more on external influences than anything else. ie depends where the market goes. Either way I bet that this is the long term exit route. If not, what ?

4. Jim Pickerell says there is a rumour that Getty is looking to get out of editorial. Not that this directly affects most of us here.

Me - Alamy and small cameras. Same as my 2014 prediction. That is working for me.