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R1: Is anyone using one of these to sell to Stock sites?

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Greg Henry

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So far I've probably had about 5 people email me via my site asking if the Sony R1 is suitable for selling pics to microstock agencies such as istockphoto, shutterstock, dreamstime, etc.

Since I don't work for a stock agency, and since I've never laid hands on a R1, I haven't been able to answer them. I found one of these at a local store still new in the box, and a relative wanted it very badly as a Xmas gift, so I snagged it. I've only opened it to make sure it's in working order and take a few test shots, but I'm packing it back up to ship out tomorrow to them so can't take a lot of time doing more test shots.

Again, I'm not a photo inspector at a stock agency but I do sell through a couple of them. I usually use a Canon 10D or Rebel XT and even then they can get rejected for various technical reasons. The sample images I've taken with the R1 seem "fine" to me, but they're of course not quite up to DSLR standards in terms of "bite". Prints look good, but photo inspectors at the agencies inspect images at 100% size. Better than a Sony 828 I have laying around and of course, noise control is better, but I'm not sure if it's good enough for stock shots.

So asking here - is anyone in here using a R1 and getting their pics accepted to any of the microstock agencies with it? After my testing I can recommend the camera to folks for certain things and for prints up to a certain size, but I'd like to be able to give them a yes or no as to whether I've heard that people are actually using one for stock or not.

Thanks.
 
Greg Henry said:
Again, I'm not a photo inspector at a stock agency but I do sell
through a couple of them. I usually use a Canon 10D or Rebel XT
and even then they can get rejected for various technical reasons.
The sample images I've taken with the R1 seem "fine" to me, but
they're of course not quite up to DSLR standards in terms of
"bite".
Click to expand...
Say what? As far as IQ goes, the R1 can hang with the DSLR crowd without a problem.

Prints look good, but photo inspectors at the agencies
Greg Henry said:
inspect images at 100% size.

So asking here - is anyone in here using a R1 and getting their
pics accepted to any of the microstock agencies with it? After my
testing I can recommend the camera to folks for certain things and
for prints up to a certain size, but I'd like to be able to give
them a yes or no as to whether I've heard that people are actually
using one for stock or not.

Thanks.
Click to expand...
--
Check out my newbie efforts and comment freely!

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This is my observation after just a few test images, not cast in stone.

But back to my actual question, about whether or not people are selling images via microstock using this particular model...

Thanks.
 
Greg Henry said:
So far I've probably had about 5 people email me via my site asking
if the Sony R1 is suitable for selling pics to microstock agencies
such as istockphoto, shutterstock, dreamstime, etc.
Click to expand...
Yes, all of the above will accept R1 images and so will every other microstock agency. Most of them accept 3mp images and upwards. It all depends on subject matter and how clean the images are. The R1 is on par with (and better than some) dSLRs for IQ. Going up on the quality criteria, Alamy accepts R1 files, in fact the only place you'd get rejected is probably getty, who have a somewhat stupid system of accepting images based on certain cameras only.
Greg Henry said:
Again, I'm not a photo inspector at a stock agency but I do sell
through a couple of them. I usually use a Canon 10D or Rebel XT
and even then they can get rejected for various technical reasons.
Click to expand...
Out of about 100 images that I submitted to those microstocks, I had a handful rejected due to my own bad pp work. Not a bad success rate for an R1 huh?
Greg Henry said:
The sample images I've taken with the R1 seem "fine" to me, but
they're of course not quite up to DSLR standards in terms of
"bite".
Click to expand...
How so? Did you shoot jpeg or raw? Admittedly R1 jpegs suck eggs big time (heavier than necessary NR even at lower ISOs, bad compression), but shoot in raw and it's a completely different camera!
Greg Henry said:
Prints look good, but photo inspectors at the agencies
inspect images at 100% size. Better than a Sony 828 I have laying
around and of course, noise control is better, but I'm not sure if
it's good enough for stock shots.
Click to expand...
Microstock sites don't analyze images as precisely as you might think. They're pretty lax compared to regular stock agencies. Even rejected images often get accepted the 2nd time around just because another inspector checks them out and ok's them, being too lazy to look closely at the photos.
Greg Henry said:
So asking here - is anyone in here using a R1 and getting their
pics accepted to any of the microstock agencies with it? After my
testing I can recommend the camera to folks for certain things and
for prints up to a certain size, but I'd like to be able to give
them a yes or no as to whether I've heard that people are actually
using one for stock or not.
Click to expand...
The R1 images processed from raw are as good for up to certain sized prints as any 10mp APS-C sized dSLR. Anyways, yes, I used the R1 for the microstock sites you mentioned, and others, without trouble.
--
Martin ( http://www.mpolanic.com )
 
Just a quick question... what are microstock images buyers that you two spoke of? I'm a hobbiest photographer I know 8)

thanks,
josh
--

A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know. -Diane Arbus

 
mschf said:
Member said:
The sample images I've taken with the R1 seem "fine" to me, but
they're of course not quite up to DSLR standards in terms of
"bite".
Click to expand...
How so? Did you shoot jpeg or raw? Admittedly R1 jpegs suck eggs
big time (heavier than necessary NR even at lower ISOs, bad
compression), but shoot in raw and it's a completely different
camera!
Click to expand...
-------------

Thanks for the reply, Martin.

Mostly yes, I did jpeg files and in several cases they simply seemed way too soft, even when I later cranked up the in-camera sharpening to high. You of course do want to do much of this later yourself, but I try to see this through the eyes of the person who is going to wind up using this later and many times they're not 100% up on Photoshop and are looking at "out of camera" images.

I did try RAW and used the converter in Elements 5.0 to tweak them and they looked "a little better" than the jpegs. Strangely Elements 5 would at least work with these a bit, but Paint Shop Pro XI would not work with them at all (boo Corel takeover!). Maybe the Sony software works better, but I didn't want to open the disk as again, this is being shipped to someone else.

You did answer my question however about microstock, so I can now tell folks they can use R1 images for it. If I may ask though, do you find you need to downscale the images at all, or do you submit them at their full 10MP sizes when you submit?
 
jgilbreath77 said:
Just a quick question... what are microstock images buyers that you
two spoke of? I'm a hobbiest photographer I know 8)
Click to expand...
------------

Microstock companies sell images that photographers submit to various people or companies. If you need an image, you go to their site, enter keywords for the subject you're looking for, and it will display a variety of images that meet that search criteria from various photographers. You then choose the images you want and size, and pay the appropriate price. There are use limitations on certain ones, but that's the idea of it.

Such sites are istockphoto.com, shutterstock.com, dreamstime.com, bigstockphoto.com, and stockxpert.com, to name a few.
 
I submit to microstock agencies also, and so far I haven't scaled them down. I intend to do that in the future, just to test if it will improve the acceptance rate. Scaling them down a bit can soften the noise while retaining much detail (if you do it carefully though). Also, because of the 10MP you can't save the jpegs in maximum quality for all sites: they have stupid file limits of 5Mb and fitting 10MP in 5Mb is just too much for complex photos.
--
oVan - http://www.fotocommunity.com/pc/pc/mypics/746281
 
Yes, I use the R1 for my submissions to Alamy and they have a high quality threshold.

The expectation is that any image in their collection might be used to produce anything from a thumbnail to a poster.

Upsampled JPEG is perfectly good where images are well exposed and sensitively post-processed.

Joel.
 
Hi Greg, likewise as oVan answered, no need to downsample from the 10mp dimensions, plus some of the stock sites charge based on those dimensions, so the bigger the file, the better they'll pay out if/when someone purchases the largest version. The images also hold up very well when upsampling to 50mb files for agencies that require that.
Greg Henry said:
Mostly yes, I did jpeg files and in several cases they simply
seemed way too soft, even when I later cranked up the in-camera
sharpening to high. You of course do want to do much of this later
yourself, but I try to see this through the eyes of the person who
is going to wind up using this later and many times they're not
100% up on Photoshop and are looking at "out of camera" images.
Click to expand...
Yeah, that's understandable if someone doesn't want to get into post-processing. But (and I may be wrong but I do have a feeling that) the jpegs straight out of the R1 will be rejected more than if they were raw-> jpg. Setting sharpening to high isn't good, it's way too aggressive and causes stairstepping among other things... the normal setting isn't much better, the lowest settings is ok... but, at the low setting, there's no choice then but to pp, if not for anything other than to apply USM, so raw really is the best bet, even if it has to be learned (or, unfortunately, another camera may have to be considered that has a very good jpeg engine).
Greg Henry said:
I did try RAW and used the converter in Elements 5.0 to tweak them
and they looked "a little better" than the jpegs. Strangely
Elements 5 would at least work with these a bit, but Paint Shop Pro
XI would not work with them at all (boo Corel takeover!). Maybe
the Sony software works better, but I didn't want to open the disk
as again, this is being shipped to someone else.
Click to expand...
That reminds me of another factor to consider. While the Sony converter isn't really all bad, it's as slow as a caravan of turtles moving uphill. The best R1 converter I've found is rawshooter (RSP/E), so if you processed your test raws under ACR, you might've not squeezed all there is out of the files vs rawshooter. C1 is also known to be as good or better, I haven't tried it myself but Adam-T swears by it and I'd tend to believe him if he says so. Cheers! :)
--
Martin ( http://www.mpolanic.com )
 
mschf said:
That reminds me of another factor to consider. While the Sony
converter isn't really all bad, it's as slow as a caravan of
turtles moving uphill. The best R1 converter I've found is
rawshooter (RSP/E), so if you processed your test raws under ACR,
you might've not squeezed all there is out of the files vs
rawshooter. C1 is also known to be as good or better, I haven't
tried it myself but Adam-T swears by it and I'd tend to believe him
if he says so. Cheers! :)
Click to expand...
I have Rawshooter from an old disk and tested out the R1 files on it and it seemed to do a good job. Darn, could they have made it any more confusing to do a simple SAVE on files on that thing?? Too bad they got absorbed, so I doubt newer versions will come along (at least free versions).

Maybe it's because I'm on VERY strong sinus pills tonight and barely know what planet I'm on, but what is "C1"?
 
Yikes, you really must be on some strong stuff to forget what C1 is... Capture One. It's ok, I get confused sometimes too, I'll see RSE and think RIP (rest in peace) ;)
Greg Henry said:
it and it seemed to do a good job. Darn, could they have made it
any more confusing to do a simple SAVE on files on that thing??
Click to expand...
Agree, it's a bit silly and unintuitive having a batch save tab just for one conversion. Took me a while to figure that one out at first too.
--
Martin ( http://www.mpolanic.com )
 
oVan said:
Unfortunately even at quality 12 I get photos rejected because of
jpeg artifacts.
Click to expand...
Are they specifically saying "jpg artifacts" or simply "artifacts"? I've been told by an inspector from one site that sometimes they slip up when putting in the rejection reason and if it's due to a noise issue it might be listed as "artifacts". If it's noise it's easy to correct most times, jpg artifacts involve a little more work in order to get rid of them and ot damage the details of the photo, but they're doable.

Since testing the R1 I tried sending a few of the shots I took to a couple of stock agencies and so far it's been 50/50 in the acceptance rate category. The rejection reason I've had with those that were so far were noise issues (even at iso 160), though inspecting at 100% myself I didn't see anything much beyond what I'd deem as normal for any 10MP sensor at this point.
 
I think both noise and artifacts are reason for rejection, unfortunately. That's why I was thinking of reducing the images from 10MP to 8MP or something similar, at least the noise would disappear a bit by the downsampling.
--
oVan - http://www.fotocommunity.com/pc/pc/mypics/746281
 
oVan said:
I think both noise and artifacts are reason for rejection,
unfortunately. That's why I was thinking of reducing the images
from 10MP to 8MP or something similar, at least the noise would
disappear a bit by the downsampling.
--
oVan - http://www.fotocommunity.com/pc/pc/mypics/746281
Click to expand...
-------------------

oVan,

It's not uncommon to have to resize down a bit when submitting to microstock. I know folks who use 8-10 DSLRs who do so regularly if the conditions or camera settings weren't absolutely correct when they took their shots, or, if having to do a shot at a higher iso.

Since the last attempt I've tried two more of the R1 shots I took with two stock agencies with the same results - two were accepted, two denied, and they were reduced from 10MP to around 7MP before submission. Trial and error but I think after my own experiments the conclusion would be that the R1 CAN be used for microstock sites - just expect some decent post processing and don't expect a 95% acceptance rate.
 
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