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Messages - Noedelhap
Pages: 1 2 [3] 4 5 6 7 8 ... 89
51
« on: August 14, 2023, 07:29 »
Small Shutterstock thief who stole one of my vector graphics and shamelessly uploaded it to the same website: https://www.shutterstock.com/g/sibella8And Shutterstock simply accepted a similar without checking anything. Edit: sent a DMCA notice and they swiftly removed the fraudster 
52
« on: August 13, 2023, 05:22 »
This cannot be a coincidence, they probably massively diluted our share by paying everyone royalties from the same dwindling pool, a 40% drop across the board is not a normal summer dip. They should really become more transparent in their payouts because this makes no sense.
53
« on: August 06, 2023, 17:05 »
I would wait until the Compliance team has reached a final verdict. If the proof you submitted is ok, your account will be reinstated. It's not useful and possibly counter-productive to keep spamming them for a reaction.
54
« on: August 05, 2023, 17:34 »
From my experience, they will give you your money when you close your account, even if it's below the treshold level.
A wise decision to say goodbye to them. 20% is a ridiculous royalty, and punishing contributors for lack of sales (i.e. demoting them to Silver level for not making $250 gross revenue) is unethical in my opinion. It's a cash grab, nothing more.
55
« on: August 05, 2023, 13:10 »
because of how effective Fireflys integration into Photoshop has become I lol'ed. Almost sounds like a PR-stunt from Adobe to make people think Firefly is amazing. Because Firefly is (however fun to use) far from amazing, let alone useful in advertising at this point.
56
« on: July 28, 2023, 11:41 »
I've tried Firefly beta too for some project, but the results were clearly even less accurate than Midjourney.
It does work OK for small fills/extensions of floors, walls or skies; the trick is to also select the edge of the pattern you want to extend, so Firefly has some information and space to work with. Then Firefly can blend it nicely with the existing textures.
But for new objects (I tried palm trees) it comes up with ugly deformed trees which didn't fit at all in my composition. Either Firefly is still too primitive or finding the right prompts is truly an art form.
57
« on: July 28, 2023, 06:06 »
You know what. I take back everything I said about embracing AI. If this is the quality that gets accepted by Adobe; practically useless images, inaccurate depictions of people, locations and food that no client would want to buy... I'm afraid buyers will leave the platform and this AI experiment will backfire. It's already flooding the database and burying the real stuff, so buyers will have to search for needles in an artificial haystack.
58
« on: July 28, 2023, 04:43 »
As a recent example (yesterday) of how much difficulty a stock image/video customer can get into when they use content from the wrong places...
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jul/26/yorkshire-water-ad-ridiculed-over-clips-of-herefordshire-and-russian-bar
This was stock video, not AI images, but the goof could just as easily have occurred with genAI Adobe Stock images of "Yorkshire"
"The advert for Yorkshire Water made what appeared to be Yorkshire look wonderful: beautiful, sweeping countryside and smiling, friendly local people, some in a car and others enjoying their downtime in a pub.
But the countryside was not the Yorkshire Dales but the Malvern Hills. The car was left-hand drive and in Ukraine. The chances of getting a pint of Landlord from the pub would seem remote, given it was a bar called Eskimos located a couple of thousand miles away in a Russian ski resort near the Black Sea."
At Adobe Stock, the unsuspecting buyer could license supposed scenic views of the Yorkshire Dales, drone aerials of Whitby Harbour or Leeds, Sheffield town hall, a footbridge over the river Aire, Clifford's Tower in York, or many others. None of these are real and would likely inspire the same mockery the Yorkshire Water ad did.
The problem with real places isn't just wonky Big Ben or the Eiffel Tower moving around Paris but all sorts of smaller cities or landscapes all over Europe and the US (or not really there, but labeled as if they were). Fake drone and aerial footage surprised me - with Google maps satellite view it's so easy to see how wrong these genAI creations are.
Here's just one example of a part of Devon, UK - the Salcombe Kingsbridge estuary. A search with the "Relevance" sort shows a number of real pictures but the second item in the list is a genAI effort that is wrong in just about every respect.
Real Salcombe estuary
https://stock.adobe.com/images/aerial-view-of-salcombe-and-kingsbridge-estuary-from-a-drone-south-hams-devon-england/585530226
https://stock.adobe.com/images/aerial-vista-of-salcombe-and-the-kingsbridge-estuary-south-hams-devon-england/484221969
https://stock.adobe.com/images/salcombe-devon/130326993
genAI's imaginary Salcombe
https://stock.adobe.com/images/drone-footage-of-the-kingsbridge-and-salcombe-estuaries-in-devon-england-s-south-hams-generative-ai/580334780
These not-real-places images need to be labeled so the buyer doesn't find themselves in the mess Yorkshire Water did.
Well said. It's ridiculous how these uploaders are allowed to use specific locations and landmarks to describe their fake images. It's very misleading, they could have said 'inspired by' , 'based on' or 'similar to' if they really wanted to mention a specific location. I agree it should be clearly labeled.
59
« on: July 18, 2023, 11:05 »
SS is drying up, Adobe is about 10x more monthly revenue.
60
« on: July 11, 2023, 03:59 »
This industry will change without a doubt, for better or worse. Everything changes over time, whether it's new technology, new social norms, new fashion trends. The big question is: are you able to adapt? I'd like to think we creatives are able to use our artistic skills to adapt and make the changes in the industry work for us rather than against us. Life, uh, finds a way.
61
« on: July 07, 2023, 07:30 »
I don't think they need to do that, it wouldn't be beneficial in terms of library growth.
62
« on: July 05, 2023, 14:18 »
This is one of current Adobe Stock best selling portfolio.
https://stock.adobe.com/contributor/286186/Rafa%20Fernandez
It's all AI generated images. Very nice images. You don't even need a camera.
I don't want to ridicule disabled people, but once quick glance at the top row in that portfolio: what's with her arm? I've seen horror movie monsters that have less distorted limbs.
This is on Adobe?  6 fingers, nice
I hadn't even noticed that one, haha!
63
« on: July 05, 2023, 13:44 »
Interesting hands to say the least.
64
« on: July 05, 2023, 13:35 »
This is one of current Adobe Stock best selling portfolio.
https://stock.adobe.com/contributor/286186/Rafa%20Fernandez
It's all AI generated images. Very nice images. You don't even need a camera.
I don't want to ridicule disabled people, but once quick glance at the top row in that portfolio: what's with her arm? I've seen horror movie monsters that have less distorted limbs.
65
« on: July 03, 2023, 11:09 »
Adobe should have a clear disclaimer on every page:
"AI generated imagery can possibly contain:
- unnatural limbs or lack thereof
- non-existing species or inaccurate depictions thereof
- proportions or dimensions that do not accurately represent real-life subjects
AI images should not be used for scientific subjects or representations of sensivitive subjects. You as a buyer are solely resonsible for any consequences as a result of wrongful use of these images."
66
« on: June 30, 2023, 05:56 »
The SS and their treatment of contributors is a prime example of how unions are born. It's no different than the "boardroom boys" of a company mulling over how they can squeeze their employees out of more money before the employees finally are fed up and unionize.
From my perspective that would entail contributors creating their own microstock site and contributors signing an agreement that this site would be the only one that they will contribute to.
It's a complicated scenario. How can the microstock group ensure that contributors are adhering to the agreement they signed and not continuing to feed the SS and other agencies with their images and clips using another erroneous name? And how can contributors initiate the site? Can enough money be raised to create and maintain the exclusive site? Will enough contributors sign up and build an agency that reaches the top 5?
50% for the contributor's exclusive agency and 50% of the buyer's money for the photographer/Videographer would be incentive to get things moving.
The SS boardroom boys and their trained monkeys. How can we, as photographers and videographers, change the current industry standards? Unionization. IMO.
I am not someone who has ever depended on commissions. I'm concerned about the contributors who used their earnings to
feed their families. In the pre-SS days when commissions were a
lot higher, the money was a part of the essential need for those of
us who really depended on commissions to move forward. Those are the people I think most about and why I feel the SS and other agencies are immoral and corrupt.
Tale as old as time; people have been advocating for years for a union or a contibutor-run stock site, there have even been a couple of attempts in the past (Stocksy comes to mind). But in the end, heavy competition from the market leaders made it nearly impossible to gain enough traction and become a big player. And how do you get all contributors working together in the first place? Joining a union can be risky for those who need the income. People contribute to SS from all over the world, and in some low-wage countries, the revenue from SS is still enough to feed their families. So good luck convincing them to join your union.
67
« on: June 28, 2023, 11:54 »
I'm having my second best month of the year on Shutterstock with a mix of low and higher commissions on videos and download numbers overall are pretty good. So take heart that your poor month is probably temporary because I've had some very slow periods during this year when others are reporting all is peachy. Appears that internal 'adjustments' will impact different ports either negatively or positively.
The comissions are NOT cut "temporary" from 0.38 to 0.10.
True but don't rely on subs to build earnings, get more videos uploaded.
Videos don't sell for $23 a piece anymore either, you're lucky if you get an RPD from $5 to $12 or so. My highest video sale this month was $5.27, the lowest was $0.25. It's a joke.
68
« on: June 27, 2023, 15:27 »
I'm having a horrible month on SS as well, literally the worst in 10 years. Too many 10c sales (even at higher levels), and the small amount of video sales I do have are sub $5 so even that doesn't make up for it. I don't know what SS is doing, it seems like they are failing miserably.
In the meantime, Adobe is stronger than ever in terms of revenue (despite their recent "EUR becomes USD" cash grab and influx of AI crap) because the RPD is still somewhat decent.
69
« on: June 19, 2023, 14:40 »
For all the money SS grabs from their contributors you'd think they would invest some of it in upgrading their review system or do some active thief hunting...
70
« on: June 17, 2023, 05:14 »
You can set 'keep online' as the default action in your account settings. You'll still get reminders for each image that passes the 4-year mark, but you don't have to take explicit action anymore.
71
« on: June 15, 2023, 06:18 »
Actually I'm wondering, is all of this stuff Midjourney? The generated resolution is not very high so is it all upscaled to a higher resolution? Or are there certain paid plans or AI generators that produce higher resolutions, or higher quality results?
Not that I intend to use AI myself; it's an uphill battle, and it feels like cheating... Anyone who knows how to write prompts can do it, whereas not everybody can shoot high quality photos or videos or draw beautiful vector art.
About agencies needing to take responsibility to check these images for accuracy: that will probably never happen, because reviewers are trained to determine photo image quality (like noise, out of focus, etc), they're not biologists, historians or food experts. They won't check Wikipedia for species of insects to correctly determine the shape and size of legs, or the correct size or color of a piece of fruit.
72
« on: June 12, 2023, 12:56 »
1 - real 2 - AI 3 - AI 4 - real 5 - AI 6 - real 7 - real 8 - AI 9 - AI 10 - AI 11 - real 12 - real 13 - real 14 - real 15 - real 16 - real 17 - real 18 - AI 19 - real 20 - AI 21 - real Edit: wanted to add that it's very hard to tell at miniature size so I might have given some (too many) AI photos the benefit of the doubt probably... 
73
« on: June 09, 2023, 16:44 »
Consistently returning value to shareholders but in the meantime I'm experiencing the worst streak of revenue in 12 years of Shutterstock. SS is now nothing more than a mid-tier agency for me, while Adobe is still going strong.
74
« on: May 17, 2023, 11:41 »
I have been on Motion Elements since 2013 (not actively uploading in the past 2 years) and I have 274 clips uploaded (animations), the past 2 years I made about $350-400 / year there. I am opted in to the Global Content+ Program and Video Editing Platforms (API).
Not really a major earner but YMMV.
75
« on: May 14, 2023, 16:51 »
I trust Adobe. They have built an ethical
This is where I quit reading.
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