13. Rejections - part I
13.1.Introduction
In a perfect world every photo we upload would have been accepted. But because we live in a far from perfect world (I hope you already knew that) it could well be that some of our photos are rejected.
Rejection are not pleasant. And that's normal. You thought you had a good image, did put a certain amount of time in it and than someone just rejects. Actually he's saying "that image is not good enough for us". Than it is normal that you're a little frustrated.
BUT ... Try to see rejections as a kind of feedback, a way to improve your skills. Maybe not every rejection is fully justified (reviewers are only humans too), but most of the time they are right (at least that's my opinion).
The review process (with rejections) is necesary to keep the quality of the database high enough. Nothing is worse than a designer buying a bad quality image, which he can't use. This will undermine the confidence of such a buyer has in Microstock sites. And because of that, maybe he will not buy any images anymore from that site. That's bad for all of us.
Interesting Read :
click here for an article on iStock named : "Dealing with rejections"
13.2. Acceptance Ratio
Along with rejections comes your "Acceptance Ratio". Your Acceptance Ratio (AR) is the percentage of accepted photo. If you submit 100 images and 80 are accepted, your AR is 80%.
Most see this figure just as a statistical figure. But slowly I realized our AR could be more important than we think. How is that ?
We don't know for sure how the search functions of the different sites work. Why are certain images listed earlier in the search result than others ? Of course keywords play a big role into this. But I think there are many more factors influencing the way the search result are ranked.
At iStock I think exclusives are favored while at SS I suppose new photographers are favored. If sites have the opportunity the influence the result in a certain way, why would they let the acceptance ratio play a role into this ?
I think we can assume that the higher a photographers AR, the better quality his images are. So it is logical that a site places the better quality images in front of the search result.
there isn't hard evidence for this theory. But if sites are tracking this number and display this on the photographers profile. There must be a reason for.
Underneath, and on the following page, I will discuss the main reasons for rejection one by one. I will also try to give a solution if possible.
13.3. Out of Focus
Underneath you can see a 100% crop of 300*200 px of that picture which was original 3300*2200px. Although this picture would look good enough on a moderate size print or certainly on a website, at 100% it isn't really sharp, hence it's rejection.
A full size version of this image can be seen here
I sometimes get a rejection for this when I process a RAW image without any sharpening. Although these images look soft compared to a sharpened one, they are perfect focussed. Applying some sharpening in PS resolves this problem.
The most effective way to counter this problem is to downsize your image. This will increase the illusion sharpness.
Shapening your image with UnSharpMask can help to a certain extend.
13.4. Bad lighting
Although there are many possible errors in this category such as :
- reflections
- under- or overexposed
- harsh shadows
- lens flares
- purple fringing
The most problems I personally had was with purple fringing (chromic aberration). The origin of this problem was my Canon ef-s 17-85. In wide angle it displayed way too much CA.
Here you can see a review of the Canon ef-s 17-85 on Photozone.de which reveals its bad CA
Underneath a typical example of the problems I had. I stopped using this lens and ordered a Canon 24-105 F4. I know that CA can be removed with the aid of software, but I didn't want to check every image for CA. An image must be as good as can be from the start. Otherwise you lose too much time photoshopping.
A full size version of this image can be seen here
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