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How to Prepare Images for Stock Photography Agencies

It's important to establish an efficient workflow when you prepare images for stock photography agencies. Photographs, no matter how beautiful the subject, will not be accepted if they do not adhere to technical requirements. Only images of the highest standard will be able to compete.

The Digital Stock Photography Process

Reputable stock photography agencies have quality control teams that check the technical quality of images to ensure they meet their criteria.

A good place to start is to visit several stock photography agencies' websites that you may be interested in submitting your photos to and read their submission guidelines. Spend time on each of their websites and soak up as much information as possible.

Some stock agencies provide tutorials for photographers and they usually host forums or blogs that may go a long way to answer your questions on how to prepare images for best results.

These are the steps I use and recommend to prepare images for submission:

1. If you shoot in RAW (which is definitely a big plus), open your converter and do your basic photo editing before converting to jpeg. That includes checking white balance and exposure. I usually boost saturation as little at this stage.

Tip: Don't sharpen your photograph at any stage of your workflow if you want to submit it for stock. Agencies require non-sharpened images to avoid unsightly artifacts when preparing an image for repro.

2. Open your image in your editing program for fine-tuning.

3. I don't recommend you crop when you prepare images for stock, but if you absolutely have to, this is the time to do it. Also check that your horizon is straight if applicable and level if needed.

4. Check the quality of your image at 100% zoom. 100% means that one monitor screen pixel is displaying one image pixel. This is the only way to see every pixel in your image.

4. Perhaps the most useful tools to retouch your image at this stage are the clone stamp tool and healing brush tool. Software such as Photoshop’s ‘dust & scratches‘ filter may save you time, but these techniques generally work by softening the image. They do have their place, but try to use them selectively and sparingly. Take care that image detail is not degraded to an unacceptable degree. Again, you should check this at 100%.

5. Save the image as a high quality JPEG file (level 10 or above in Photoshop - some agencies require images to be saved at 12). Ensure your file name includes the ‘.jpg’ extension.

More Tips on Preparing Stock Photos

Calibarate your Monitor

The appearance of your digital images will vary according to the monitor you use, and again on the printed page. It's therefore very important to regularly calibrate your monitor. This can be done with specific software packages and on screen meters, or more easily with the Adobe gamma software, which is a part of Photoshop.

Color Space

I recommend you use Adobe RGB (1998). This has become the standard for most imaging professionals. If you are working with grayscale images, save them as RGB prior to submission.

Interpolation

When an image file is increased in size, software has to 'create' extra pixels to fill the gaps. It does this by estimating the brightness and colour of the new pixels, based on their neighbouring pixels. There are specialist software packages and techniques available, some methods are more successful than others.

Some agencies, such as Alamy, require scans to be un-interpolated and digital camera files to be interpolated up to 48 – 50MB. Alamy recommends that if you have a camera that is capable of producing an uncompressed 8 bit, TIFF file size of over 48MB then leave it that size. If you need to interpolate your image’s digital camera files you must ensure that you use a professional software package, such as Abobe Photoshop.

If you found this page on how to prepare images for stock photography agencies useful, you may like to visit the following pages too:

* Top Stock Photography Tips

* Stock Photography Agencies

* Digital Workflow