Quote from: lisafx on June 12, 2008, 17:38
Someone tell me I am wrong because I would welcome the reassurance....

Those guys mostly hate iStock and the iStock me-toos. Even though their own RF model was hated by a generation who were 10 - 15 years more established. They are used to working to very different technical standards (they're into uprezzing and sharpening and all of that stuff which we all learned not to do). But you can't stand in the way of inevitable economics and even the old timers are starting to understand that.

Alamy is barking up a tree with this will we - won't we go microstock approach to RF licencing. It's neither one thing nor the other and it demonstrates a lack of confidence - a lack of knowing quite what to do. Everyone who has thought this through knows that microstock RF is going to be the only model for everything which does not have to be commissioned. Including editorial eventually. The prices will go up a bit more from the bottom (leaving space for really cheap deals) but will come down a long way from the top.

All that said - I can understand that Alamy will face a difficult transition and may not survive. The best thing we can all do is to welcome the photographers who make it over. Competition even with each other is good for all of us. We can all learn from each other.

Quote from: leaf on April 04, 2008, 21:29

Quote from: AAC6D63 on April 04, 2008, 21:14

Quote from: sharply_done on April 04, 2008, 20:27

Quote from: thesentinel on April 04, 2008, 20:05
^Interesting handle Mr Newbie 

This thread attracted some attention from the higher-ups

Negative on that.

why are i totally lost here... does AAC6D63 stand for something or are you a known face on another forum??

Most of us don't use our actual names on the internet. For example, I'm guessing that you are not called Leaf? Am I missing some bigger point?

Quote from: sharply_done on April 04, 2008, 20:27

Quote from: thesentinel on April 04, 2008, 20:05
^Interesting handle Mr Newbie 

This thread attracted some attention from the higher-ups

Negative on that.

Quote from: Vonkara on April 04, 2008, 18:46
Sorry guys, but I think that in 2 or 3 years everybody will understand what happened today whit IS ,3 months ago? whit StockXpert. That's when the agencies will make profits over my back and sending me 25 cents for my work. Hope I'm strongly wrong on this

No way. What just happenned (about 15 mins ago) was that iStock clarified the details of their intention to wipe out the subscription based competition. Anyone who makes most of their income at Shutterstock & iStock will now want to be exclusive at iStock. They now own the RF stock business. And probably from now on and into the future.

I always quite liked Shutterstock, so that's a pity. Dreamstime can rot in hell for all I care.

Unless or until someone comes up with a new business model, iStock is RF from now on.

Quote from: digitalfood on April 02, 2008, 19:53
The problem with iStock is the percentage period exclusive or not, 40% max. is insulting considering most other sites give a min. 33% and more at 50% and some %70%....

The subscription sites make money on the subs whether or not the clients download their full monthly quotas of images. They pay a fixed amount and we therefore have no idea what percentage of the income is being paid back to the contributors.

The greater the advertised monthly subscription image quota ... so the more generous the stock site seems to its contributors.

But unless we know how many images have been downloaded and how much money has been paid in subscriptions it is impossible to know the average price which the buyers are paying for images. And therefore the percentages paid to the contributors.

Example  - if a subscription site were to increase the size of the monthly quotas by, say, 200 .... it would make their images seem even cheaper than they are already .... making them seem like even better value. And it would make their payout to the contributors seem even more generous. A win - win for the stock site (assuming - and we can assume this - that there is a mathematical model aimed at finding the ultimate sub price / monthly quota / payout combinations .... and which will be based on actually knowing the extent to which the monthly download quotas go un used.)

iStock is much more transparent. Old credits don't expire - therefore most are probably used in the end. The contributors get a percentage of the credit price paid. This seems much more transparent to me.

The only thing that matters to me is how much the site makes for me.

If you make effective use of the pen tool and do the job properly then it will get through. Thousands of these sorts of images accepted at iStock without any problem.

I find that is often useful to have two windows open viewing the same image on different screens. Say - 1600% for the actual pen tool work and the other view at actual pixel size. The regular view helps me remember where I am in the image and hiow it looks overall.

Zero feathering is the right amount. Careful use of gaussian blur on a small selection (say 1 pixel either side of the line of isolation) can be useful if you have an edge which you don't like even though you have done it properly. I make an arbitrary rule to always downsample the image to about 2/3 if I have softened an edge after isolating.

Some people recommend using the 'bicubic sharpen' option when downsamping. I don't think that is always the best option. If you are downsampling then compare very closely the results from 'bicubic sharpen' and regular 'bicubic'. You don't want anything which looks anything like edge enhancement in that situation.

Using the pen tool is rather like drawing. Certainly more like drawing than cutting out. There isn't always a right and a wrong place to position the line. If you are going around a highlight for example. It's a question of making it look natural.

Open a terminal console and type ftp at the prompt. Windows has built in ftp too.

Do the subscription sites (Shutterstock & Dreamstime ??) allow contributors to opt out of their subscription schemes?

Quote from: Aurelio on March 16, 2008, 11:45
but i have to wait until may, because of their rules of keeping images for 6 month.

Have you tried emailing them and asking them to let you go early? It would surely be against their reputation to keep you against your will. Whatever any actual rules. I can't believe that they would do that - it would be so old fashioned and pointless.

The web way of doing business is that you keep your customers and contributors because the relationship works for everyone. It's about you all liking each other. Companies that don't do it like - well they don't get it IMO.

Is Dreamstime a US company in any sense?

Quote from: rjmiz on March 10, 2008, 20:58
I am highly insulted! How dare you call me a spammer! How is it you are allowed to throw out derogatory
words at people based on just "What you think"

It's not too often this happens, but I take exception to your slanderous remarks.
It's quite obvious to me that your false and malicious statements are meant to ridicule me, and attempt
to damage my reputation here on this forum, and on the stock sites that I submit my work to.

You are someone who deliberately stirs up trouble, as I have witnessed from your post in the past.
I insist you cease your loudmouth slander of me at once.

The MIZ

If you post stock photography tutorials on the internet then you should accept the possibility that people who have an interest in the subject are going to critique them.  Especially given that web traffic is a monetizable currency.

What I am doing is no different from rating an ebay seller or reviewing a product on Amazon. I'm reviewing your tutorials and calling them lousy. Also your work. It's my honest opinion. I do not believe that the examples you keep posting are good examples of successful and well executed stock photographs - and therefore I'm suggesting that you aren't in the best position to be offering advice.

To turn the tables on your retort - how dare you question my right to do that? I'm calling shenanigans on your tutorials. It's my serious minded point of view.

I'm not trying to cause trouble or be nasty. Like an ebay review, this is essentially a consumer point of view.

Right. Well this is going to be a controversial opinion but I think people are being duped here. So I'm going to say what I think.

The examples are poorly executed. As are the examples which accompany all of these tutorials from this spammer. This just isn't well executed stock and I don't believe that m/any of these images are actually being accepted as stock. This is some kind of con - possibly spam aimed at driving traffic to a web site. Or else it is a pointless vanity project.

I've been using Photoshop since about 12 years. I'm guessing that if a person was relatively new to Photoshop then some of the stuff in these tutorials might seem clever or even vaguely useful. It isn't. These tutorials are a waste of time.

There are many much better tutorials. Buy one of Martin Evening's book if you want to learn Photoshop from a photographer's point of view. These tutorials are junk. They aren't free. They cost valuable time which could be better spent.

Sorry.

I get good results from medium and large format negs and transparancies using my Epson 3200 flatbed scanner. I use Vuescan software on my Mac - rather than the software which came with the Epson.

You'll spend some time sussing out a workflow which will work for you. Flatness of the film and the distance from the glass are the 2 main issues. I ended up making my own neg holders.

It takes days to remove the dust specks and other gunk in Photoshop. I ended up hating scanning

Quote from: Seren on February 26, 2008, 13:35
I've never had a rejection for colour problems (too saturated, wrong white balance etc) ... My laptop isn't caliberated either.

It isn't only about color. Calibration would also be about controlling the tonal response which will, for example, affect your ability to assess images for noise and artifacting.

(and the lighting, obviously) 

Quote from: wysiwyg_foto on January 30, 2008, 04:13
Knowing Serban personally, and having worked with him, I will tell you straight out that he is extremely honest and genuine.

Did he used to be a member of iStockphoto?

Quote from: sensovision on January 28, 2008, 21:49
Hi folks! good to hear that I'm not the only one who using Linux 

BTW forgot to tell that I'm on Debian distro.

How do you do monitor color profiling? I was reading on one of the forums that it can be complicated under Linux?

Quote from: dbvirago on January 27, 2008, 01:09
Great looking dog, Jay, and nice shot. In the intersest of capitalizing on a good thing, why not extend the frame to the left and fill it with your black background?

Something like this, or maybe a bit more

Those two blacks are completely different. Is that deliberate in some weird way? What would be the point? The black on the left is clearly considerably darker than the background.

Non. Je ne comprends pas. You might as well add a pink strip to the left.

Quote from: lisafx on January 26, 2008, 14:22
With Getty for sale to the highest bidder, and in a bear market, it remains to be seen where their "vision" will be going in the future ....  I ..  think it is the worst possible time to be considering exclusivity there.

Exclusivity isn't some great all or nothing commitment. Uploading a single image to DT is a bigger commitment.

I upload Adobe 98 images to iStock using only CV root tags. But my collection exists simultaneously as psds and tiffs in the larger  ProPhoto gamut and tagged in the metadata using old fashioned (as many terms as you can think of) non cv keywording.

I estimate that it would take me a couple of weeks  after exclusivity ended to get the bulk of my slightly less than 2000 images uploaded to a handful of the copycat microstocks if anything ever went wrong at iStock. Outputting them as sRGB files keyworded the old fashioned way would be as simple as running a Photoshop action. Some of them would get rejected but the majority of my collection would be back online across the various me-too microstocks (if they even all still exist by then).

That said - I really like iStock and i hope that I never feel like wanting to not be exclusive again. If I ever do go - I expect that lots of the well known names will have gone well before I do.

Quote from: zorki on January 21, 2008, 15:48
I could envision a scenario where they spin off iStock from Getty and fire bitter and the rest of them and bring in someone else to run the company... pure speculation, but not out of the realm of possiblities.

That's such an utterly pointless and random thing to write. You have to be trolling.

Meanwhile he's one of their best assets. You fire people who are unsuccessful - not people who are successful. 

Quote from: Yuri_Arcurs on January 02, 2008, 20:42
I know from a backend source that the average subscribers only use about 15 - 30% of the full potential of their membership. This means that most pictures in a subscription sell at a 5-6USD price-point in average, giving us about 35 cents in commission. A bottom-line commission of about 5 percent. Even if I was totally wrong and every subscriber actually downloaded the double of what I have heard, the commission would still only be 10%.

Sounds about right. Just like retail gift vouchers \ tokens etc get given as presents but often don't get used. So the retailer wins twice.

Shutterstock is so cheap that I can certainly believe that the vast majority of independent designers would never get anywhere near their maximum download limit. Even given that offices and teams certainly share the accounts unofficially without taking out multi seat subscriptions.

Pleased to see Getty and IS looking to take stock towards sustainable pricing.

The business is settling down after a period of upheaval. The microstock sites which survive 2008 are going to be charging more over time. They'll need to in order to fund the sort of infrastructure and management costs required to maintain and service collections of millions and millions of images. These are real businesses now and starting to mature.

A big collection costs more to operate than a tiny collection.  Ultimately - the more images in a collection, the more people who have to be employed to maintain it. The more successful a site the more it costs to run.

I predict that some sites won't survive 2008 - they won't get their next round of funding. The credit crisis will affect their ability to find new investment. I'd be thinking first about the 2nd and 3rd tier sites. But ultimately there will probably only be room in the market for 2 or 3 viable large RF stock collections. At the most.

iStock will do really well. Being, already, way ahead of the game. And I agree with the people who say that ultimately iStock will be folded into Getty as the de-facto RF brand.

Quote from: sharply_done on December 04, 2007, 00:22
There are probably many ISO 1600 images on IS.
I can even go one better - here are two recent ISO 3200 images I have there

Am I right in thinking that your images have been down sampled - where as the D3 image of the buckets is at the native resolution?

I still can't understand how an RF image could be used as part of a logo. Given that logos are (normally)  trademarks. I don't see how an image which has been RF can then be TMed. Equally I don't see how an image which is known to have been included in a logo can also continue to be sold RF.

It would be great if someone could explain this.

Quote from: sharply_done on November 29, 2007, 21:35
The person may want to purchase the image privately because his/her intended use lies outside of the IS licensing agreement - using it as part of a logo comes immediately to mind.

I was under the impression that an RF image couldn't be used as part of a logo - since a logo will normally be registered as a trademark.  Also - a registered trademark (or part of) wouldn't normally appear in an RF image. I'm curious how you managed to find / negotiate a legal contract to get around the various issues (previous and future sales of the image).