If you have a pretty noise free image from where to start you add noise with levels, curves and saturation only if you have to heavily compensate a wrong exposition. Practically you try to take out from the shadows details that due to the nature of the digital sensors simply aren't there or are very faint and they seem noise. This is the reason to expose to the right with digital.

The same with sharpen. Sharpening adds noise when it's too heavy (often to compensate a focus-lens issue) or there is some noise hiding in the original image ready to come out. The same as above what you see as noise it's faint or out of focus details that the sharpening process just put in evidence.

And if you're asking me how I'm sure of all that it's because I was there too, I was using a PS first and bad lenses with my DSLR later. It's a world of difference using a cheap DSLR with a cheap but sharp 50mm and expose to the right.

Take this image I shot for Alamy as example:


This is taken with my D80 with "el cheapo" 50mm 1.8 plastic chinese nikon lens and the right exposure tecniques.

Let's see a shadowy detail at 100%


The postprocessing work with that image was, in order, my personal raw conversion, Neat Image with the standard d80 ISO100 profile, a gentle High Pass sharpening to compensate the low pass filter of the d80, levels, my personal contrast curve to replicate Provia. Total time 5 mins.

@Pywrit

Hehehe... I think everyone here experienced what you wrote and reviewers are human beings too. For sure a real DSRL will improve tenfold your acceptance ratio, trust me.

Anyway the funniest rejection I received lately was this shot. The file was descripted as "isolated on white with faint shadow". Accepted everywhere from SS to IS to DT, Fotolia rejected it because it wasn't properly isolated (I guess because of the shadow because eveywhere else the BG is 255,255,255).

In time of economical crisis, advertsiment is the only option for companies that don't have the space to reduce their prices too much.

So I don't think there will be a long-term decrease of the market, I think it will be opposite instead.

I have just upload 2 images to IS, one get in the other was rejected for artifacts, and 3 spot that and quote "+++sensor dust or birds---hard to tell+++" 

Who was saying that reviewers don't have sense of humor? LOL, I'm still laughing.

If Nikon launch a '5D equivalent' I'd buy it immediately, but the prospect of that looks like being a year or more away.

  So true, it seems more than 1 year for sure. We can hope for Fuji S6 with F mount though.

I think it depends on your skills... I sell a lot web buttons, I don't think is a saturated market... but my backgrounds doesn't sell and on IS they just don't accept them.

Just like my 3d renders. I stopped submitting them to IS even if they're my bestsellers at the other agencies. Doing so my approval rate stays well over 60%.

I had a look at the whiter pixels into PS levels and they seemed ok to me.
IMHO the clouds don't have a blue cast, it looks like they're semi-transparent, not dense enough to stop all the blue from the sky to pass through them.
Fact is that if you change the white point you can see that the baloon colors go awry.

I just find the image a bit on the dull side, not with WB incorrect.

Anyway with just playing with levels and adding a contrast curve it comes out like this:



I'd give it a try, I found out SS love "popping" colors while IS don't and actually I had some rejections from the latter using the same calibration as SS where I have 100% acceptance in my brief experience.

they have to be at least 2.5 megapixels.

It's 4MP for new submitters if I remember correctly.

Directly fro Alamy site help:

"Uncompressed file sizes of between 48MB and 200MB. This means you should make your JPEG file from an 8 bit TIFF file that is at least 48MB. Our maximum size for the uncompressed file is 200MB."

If you open "image size" into PS you can easily see the MB of your image and how much you have to enlarge it.

Ale,

What do you mean by "upsample" to 4mp ... ?

Mark

Sorry I meant to write "upload" downsampled at 4MP 

First thing is to check for noise at 200% magnification. Noise for SS is not what noise is for other agencies. Every digital camera, except the 20-30k$ digital backs, has noticeable noise in the shadows, no matter how good exposed the photo is (I run into very little exceptions with very clear subjects on a still life table).

So the best strategy is to clean out all the noise you see with an appropriate plugin and/or other methods (I sometimes used a small gaussian blur on a different layer masking in just the most troublesome shadow parts that really didn't have any worthwhile detail to be saved).

In the first two images you posted I already can foresee noise problems due to the exposition latitude, I'd personally go for brighter images for another reason too. It is that SS seems to me more oriented to "commercial" shots that stand brightly out with vivid colours. For example the buildings in the foreground of your first image are too much greyish imho. The overall exposition is fine but I could bet that SS reviewers would say it's not because of it.

Take my words with the obvious grain of salt as I can just talk from my (limited) experienced, most professional microstock contributors can probably give you more solid advices.

What really seemed out of place in Harrington's article is that it seems that every customer in the past easily departed from hundred of bucks for every image he used.

I know for direct experience that it wasn't the case, also with huge advertising companies. Usually they "borrowed" images from various sources for their preparation designs just to be replaced with a specific customer-oriented shots once the design was approved.

Now instead they use microstock images because they can prepare better preparation designs and with more impact without spending hours in photoshop to crook things up or manually draw the design.

So I agree that they can spend more than 1$ for a timesaving image even if it's not for the final design, but no way they spent 100$ or more before.