Sharpening Issues

[MJLDPS]

Lets see, where to begin, i've been taking photographs for 20 years plus, 10 of those were as a professional with a company doing events, publicity etc, and i have experiance with weddings, never had a dissatisfied customer, I am no longer professional after an accident robbed me of a limb, but i still take lots of images that i like to upload for stock, my problem is the bigger stock agencies mainly Alamy and Crestock keep rejecting my images as soft or not sharp, lacking definition, i use a Canon Eos 60D and have a Canon 70-300mm IS lens, a Sigms 50mm DG f/2.8 Macro lens and a kit 18-55mm IS II, i realise the kit lens is probably the weakest one but surely it should be able to produce a bare minimum sharp shot, unfortunately due to my health and injuries i am unable to buy the more expensive lenses, could someone explain to me how the agencies check them and how i can improve my chances of acceptance, Thanks.

[thefonz78]

Are you sharpening them in editing software? If you are shooting in raw your images will need to be sharpened.

[MJLDPS]

I am shooting in RAW but the agencies like Alamy stipulate they will not take images that have been sharpened, so how do i get round that? I convert my images with lightroom 3, i do use the noise reduction on the images which softens them slightly, but the luminance noise looks quite harsh when i'm zoomed in at 1:1 or higher, any ideas? thanks for your reply.

[Markulous]

Personally, I'd not use NR and give them a very subtle RAW pre-sharpening

[thefonz78]

The stock companies sound like a nightmare. I wouldn't have the patients for them. I think unless your are really prolific and uploads 1000's of images on stock sites it hard to make any money. I would prefer to take some prints and postcards to a craft fair. This way its all cash!

[donoreo]

Originally Posted by thefonz78

The stock companies sound like a nightmare. I wouldn't have the patients for them. I think unless your are really prolific and uploads 1000's of images on stock sites it hard to make any money. I would prefer to take some prints and postcards to a craft fair. This way its all cash!

That depends. If you are using a microstock company or not. Microstock companies pay pennies. Larger ones like Getty or Masterfile pay more and do more for you.

[MJLDPS]

As if it isn't difficult enough, ive looked into Alamys submission more carefully and they say amongst other things 'if we reject one image out of your submission we will reject them all' that hardly seems fair, i've got some RAW pre sharpening software but now i've got to look at my previous submission and try and figure out which ones they are rejecting and donoreo is quite correct with smaller companies they more or less dont do much for their sellers with the odd exception but the bigger libraries are quite aggressive in selling your images for you, so its better to get in with them if possible, i'm just struggling to see how i can improve my sharpness, initially i'm going to stop using NR in LR3 and try this RAW pre sharpening, re submit an image at a time if i have to, if there are any other words of wisdom could someone please let me know, thanks.

[donoreo]

That seems rather like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, rejecting them all because of one!

[KeithT]

If you are using Photoshop try sharpening via the Lab Colour method. If you convert your final edit to Lab Colour and then sellect the lightness channel, and use Smart Sharpening. You can switch back to RGB when you have finished the sharpening process. Here's a couple of tutorials:

http://www.dphotojournal.com/photosh...or-sharpening/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OptOm3RkByM

To get round the sharpen/unsharpen bit you will have to produce two files; one for Alamy unsharpened and another sharpened for other stock agencies.

[MJLDPS]

Thanks for that, i have just checked the settings in camera and found that NR is on strong and sharpening is set to 0, i'm fairly certain that these settings do not apply to RAW images, but i've turned off NR and turned sharpening up slightly (Eos60D), i entered another small batch at Alamy but as one of my previous images failed Quality Control i have to wait up to a month before they will look at any more submissions, to be really honest it's all starting to seem really childish how things are run, so i may just forget them all together, i'd just like to know that i've got the sharpening conquered.