Interestingly, one of the stolen works appears to come from a designer on fiverr - more often a place where we've found stolen stock images & illustrations in the past

https://www.fiverr.com/chatif676/design-wedding-invitation-card-and-any-event-invitation-card
https://stock.adobe.com/images/blue-modern-wedding-day-card-landscape/596877049

And the list goes on and on

https://stockagency.panthermedia.net/m/stock-photos/12054269/zwei-ringe-mit-rose/
https://stock.adobe.com/images/happy-wedding-day-png/595557835

I've suggested many times before that agencies should use Google image search for new portfolios to weed out this sort of theft. It's too expensive to do it all the time but just for the first 100-200 images.

I think the typical stolen work situation is new portfolios looking for some easy cash with no effort, not established portfolios which suddenly turn to the dark side.

And...Adobe's own "Find Similar" feature has your image first in the (huge) list of similars. You'd have to be asleep not to realize this was stolen if you looked at that search result.

You posted the same link twice, so I can only comment on one

As I mentioned for the earlier image, it's likely the quality rejection had more to do with "we don't want this subject matter", but I could also find some technical flaws they might be referring to.

The image looks really over-sharpened - crunchy - and for an apparently overcast day, has much more contrast that I'd expect. If you were concerned about softness, I'd back off on the processing and downsize to try and improve sharpness. If it was a cloudy day with relatively flat light, let it be that rather than trying to amp it up too much.

I just added one new Dropbox link to see if it works
https://www.dropbox.com/s/30pipmd5luxldef/DSC04742.jpg?dl=0

I can see this - thanks for sorting out the problem.

I suspect that the "Quality Issues" translates to "we don't want this subject matter" rather than technical flaws, but I thought I'd point out something in the details of the shot I noticed that don't look great. It may be that this is just how the camera is - it looks like it's a Sony NEX-5N from the metadata - but could be how you're processing it.

This was pixel peeping, and probably doesn't mean much for most real-world uses of this image, but I saw some "wormy" looking artifacts in some of the tree trunks and leaves that reminded me of what my Fuji RAW files look like when Lightroom processes them (I use Capture One to avoid that). To make it easier to see what I'm referring to, I've put an example together. Click on the thumbnail to view the example at full size.



Sometimes these "wormy" artifacts are made more noticeable by sharpening in Lightroom/ACR. You can turn off sharpening in RAW processing and use Photoshop's high pass sharpening instead which is much cleaner. If you're shooting JPEG, perhaps turn off/down the sharpening in camera?

FWIW, I wish Adobe had a different rejection for images they don't want because of subject matter - when they say "quality" it suggests if you'd just done it "better" it would be accepted. Then save the quality rejection for technical flaws.

Hope this is helpful.

This is slightly off topic, but I wanted to comment on your introduction as I think it's missing one very important element:

"When Stock Performer started in 2010, there were a lot of complaints that the stock industry was dying. The rush of the agencies to implement subscription models, triggered mostly by Shutterstock�s success, led to a lot of uncertainty about photographers� income. After all, customers were able to buy images for mere cents now. Talks of impending doom was nothing new, however. When microstock, cheap equipment, and the internet entered the scene a few years earlier, everyone earning a few hundred dollars per sale before certainly thought it was going to be the end of their career."

You then continue to talk about the introduction of AI as another round of similar worries about whether there was a future in supplying content to stock agencies.

I think there was a fundamental difference between the introduction of microstock - primarily iStock and Shutterstock, but to a smaller degree Fotolia (they pioneered offering sites in languages other than English and sales in local currencies) - and any of the subsequent agency shenanigans in the market for stock licensing.

Microstock - web sites licensing royalty free with immediate downloads at lower prices - brought many new buyers into the marketplace for image licensing. It wasn't just lowering the price for existing buyers, but all sorts of businesses who would never have been able to afford to use images could now include photos and illustrations. Don't forget that initially, just about everyone involved in the traditional stock business viewed microstock as cheap rubbish and not really competition for them, but there was a lot of bog standard content (apple slices, shots of well-known cities...) which anyone could now deliver. Microstock did change things for traditional stock agencies - rights managed licenses are complex for customers to deal with and small businesses didn't have $500 per image to spare when setting up a web site. Now buyers had options.

Gen AI content isn't, as far as I'm aware, bringing new buyers into the market, just offering new content to the people who've been licensing stock for the last couple of decades. Stock licensing can be very trend-driven, so one possibility is this trend has its moment and then we get something else in a year or 18 months. I read recently that film photography is now a trend for weddings, so possibly traditional, human-created photos and vectors will be a new trend to follow on from AI?

Shutterstock's pairing of "margin optimization" with building the biggest collection (largely abandoning quality metrics IMO) seems short sighted and mostly shareholder (not customer) focused. The problem of reducing per-item price and betting that you'll make it up in increased volume, is that at some point there are no more new buyers and no more increases in the need for images and you can't make the volume go up enough. They've also squeezed contributors pretty hard so there's not much left there.

When agencies are focused almost exclusively on swiping customers from the competition, that doesn't help contributors. It might if the agency winning at the customer grab paid contributors more than those losing customers, but that's not the typical case in the last 5 years.

I've been pleased to see a big increase in my sales at Adobe Stock and I'm guessing (I have no data to back this up) that they're doing a good job of enticing Canva customers to their various Creative Pro offerings. But looking at the big picture, if we don't have new customers and we have gobs of new GenAI content available for licensing, that will put downward pressure on contributor royalties.

I worry about agencies paying lip service to the rights of copyright-holding creators in their dealings with AI (but that's been bothering musicians, artists, writers and others too). I see problems for contributors as largely the business models of the agencies, not AI per se. Royalties to creators are an expense shareholder-focused businesses want to minimize. Anything non-royalty-bearing that customers will buy is a win in that scenario.

...At the end of the day, the only thing that really matters is total earnings at the and of the month.

If you think about this a little more, which month are you thinking of - this month, May 2024, May 2018...? I'd argue you can't think so narrowly and look at only one month.

It isn't hard to come up with scenarios where you have great monthly earnings, but only for a short time before the whole business model collapses. Watching trends that give an idea of where things are going, or opting out of trends that long term are not good for contributors, may help us as a group.

There was some discussion of Adobe sales in another thread, so I thought I'd update my tracking of the change in the mix of custom versus subscription sales and falling RPD (I only have photos and a few illustrations; no video).

Both downloads and $$ at Adobe Stock continue to beat last year's numbers, which is obviously good. May isn't over yet and already the numbers are 15% higher in $$ and 33% in DLs over all of May in 2022 (and May 2022 was 25% higher than 2021, so it's not just a rebound situation).

Revenue per download continues its decline and the proportion of "custom" downloads (versus "subscription") grows. There isn't a drop at the bottom end of royalties, which is good news. I still very occasionally see a 33� download although none this month. Otherwise it's 38� and up for everything. This week I saw a custom royalty for $16.50 which I assume is a very discounted extended license (that'd be a $26.40 royalty at list price for an EL). If I exclude that one license, May 2023 has an overall RPD of 64� versus May 2022 at 78�

In May 2022, subscriptions were just over twice the number of custom downloads; subs RPD was 74� and custom RPD 87�
In May 2023, custom were just about equal with subscriptions (6 more custom); subs RPD was 66� and custom RPD 63�
If you go back to May 2021, subs were 7x custom and the overall RPD was 80�

Looking at the year to date, the RPD is 70� - in 2020, the overall RPD was 95�. I guess the question is whether the volume of downloads can rise enough to offset the reduced royalties, assuming these trends continue.

Hello. How to create a post? I just registered and I don't see the option to create a post or topic.

I just approved your post (a measure put in place to avoid spam). Don't know what the rules are, but I believe you can't create new topics until a certain number of (non-spam) replies have been made

That sounds like a color profile mis-match. When you edit your images, do they use a profile other than sRGB?

When you upload JPEGs to stock sites, do you convert from whatever profile you're using to sRGB?

You can see some examples in the page below of what happens to an Adobe RGB image that is untagged or mistagged (muted colors)

http://www.gballard.net/psd/srgbforwww.html#

And if you haven't calibrated your monitor, you should - because otherwise anything could look good to you, but it won't match what others will see.

https://photographylife.com/how-to-calibrate-your-monitor

Here's a good overview of Color Management (if you are not already familiar with the topic)

https://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/color-management1.htm

... but no one said "game changer"? What's wrong with them?...

Oh but they (she) did. Tune in around 58 minutes if you're skeptical "AI is here; it is a game changer..."

Some of the other language abuse:

igniting possibilities
driving innovation
disrupting established norms
AI is a way to supercharge your operation
create at the speed of your imagination
as we venture into this new AI frontier together
AI can transform the entire creative process
inspire your creative journey

A part of the demo was having an image generated from the prompt "close-up of a bouquet of golden roses". I thought it might be instructive to show a screen grab from the video and compare that to what Firefly beta can produce. I would have included what Firefly did when asked to make it look like clay (which was something SS demonstrated with the roses) but virtually nothing changed visually when you selected different materials in Firefly (it has a "clay" option).

Email arrived this afternoon announcing editorial subscriptions at SS. I wasn't sure why that was new, but looking at the pricing page for editorial images (I think this is unrelated to editorial use only images in the main collection), they only had per image -single or multi-pack - at $199 or $99 per image.

There's no info on the price for these enterprise subscriptions (I clicked on the Subscribe link but you have to fill out a form and someone will contact you) but I'm guessing it'll be less than the image packs. Which will mean lower royalties for contributors.

If anyone has more information about how this is priced, please post.

On Wednesday, as part of Google's I/O event, Adobe announced their partnership:

"Today we announced that we�re bringing Firefly to Bard by Google with the ability to continue your creative journey in Adobe Express, to inspire millions of people to create. In the coming months, Firefly will power and highlight text-to-image capabilities in Google�s experimental conversational AI service, with the ability to continue your creative journey further in Express. Users of all skill levels will be able to describe their vision to Bard in their own words to create Firefly generated images directly in Bard.

After you generate an image with Firefly, you will have the ability to edit and further modify it using Express, making it easy to create standout content with inspiration from Express�s beautiful, high-quality collection of templates, fonts, Stock images and assets."

Up till now, if you downloaded an image you generated with Firefly beta, (a) it had a watermark and (b) was not authorized for commercial use. Is that true for the output from Bard/Firefly/Adobe Express?

"Stay tuned in the weeks ahead for updates on Firefly and more exciting features coming to Express!"

I think it's more than time for an update for contributors on when they might see compensation, or at least a plan. We should not just be an afterthought as the execs make deals. What exactly is holding up the compensation model announcement?

We were asked to be  patient while beta was underway (although it would have been preferable to have to consulted before the training was done), but announcing a big new partnership, trumpeting the main advantage to be the rights to their (our) content, makes it clear the marketing messages are Adobe's priority, not the reality of putting a compensation plan in place.

https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2023/05/10/adobe-firefly-adobe-express-google-bard

Here's some more coverage of this announcement:

https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/10/google-partners-with-adobe-to-bring-art-generation-to-bard/
https://petapixel.com/2023/05/10/google-is-integrating-adobe-firefly-and-express-into-bard-chatbot/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2023/05/10/google-bard-boosted-with-adobes-ai-art/?sh=1f00687f31ef
https://www.engadget.com/google-is-incorporating-adobes-firefly-ai-image-generator-into-bard-174525371.html
https://www.fastcompany.com/90894359/google-and-adobe-firefly-bard-partnership
https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/news/366537328/Google-adds-Adobes-image-generator-Firefly-to-Bard

It's lovely that the press coverage is emphasizing the ethical basis for Firefly - our content uploaded to Adobe Stock - but that has to be backed up with a plan and actual compensation.

From the TechTarget article ""It's an interesting example of how training data may be the most important differentiator between AI services rather than usability or output,""

From the FastCompany article:

"THE ETHICAL ADVANTAGE
There�s something unique about Google and Adobe�s play: The ethical aspect. Google explains that �unlike any other Generative AI tool available today, Firefly is designed to generate images that are safe to use in commercial settings once the model is out of public beta, free from copyrighted materials like popular cartoon characters and branded content.�

The secret to Adobe�s sauce is that Firefly is trained on hundreds of millions of professional-grade, licensed images in Adobe Stock, which is a critical aspect in obtaining not only high-quality images but material that respects copyright owners. "

I'm not feeling respected today...

My catalog is also there.  I would like it removed.  I do not use Wirestock.

All Adobe Stock content is shown there - if you check the box marked Adobe Stock. My images are too, but I don't think individual contributors have any control over Adobe API customers - there's no opt out. And you can't issue take-down notices as they have a license to use these images.

Adobe just take your images, feed a machine with it and generates a lot money.

Did you contributors get even a penny for such a usage?

No - there's a statement that they'll work out a compensation model and share the details when Firefly exits beta (it's still in beta now)

https://helpx.adobe.com/stock/contributor/help/firefly-faq-for-adobe-stock-contributors.html