Digital Photography - Photos

How to Prepare Digital Images for Stock Photo Libraries

Today’s digital SLR cameras are capable of producing high quality images. Below are a few tips to help you prepare your images to a standard acceptable by most stock photo libraries.

Use a professional level DSLR camera with a true, non-interpolated resolution of at least 6 megapixels. This will give you an uncompressed image size of at least 17MB at 8 bit.
Shoot in RAW file format for maximum control in post-production. If shooting in JPEG, be sure to use the ‘fine’ quality setting, as this provides the least amount of compression.
Capture your images at the lowest possible ISO setting.
Turn of all in-camera sharpening.
If your images were shot in JPEG (fine), be sure to resave them in a non-lossy format such as TIFF before working on them. Never resave JPEG’s in JPEG format as this will result in the permanent loss of data and result in degraded image quality.
RAW files should be checked for correct exposure and colour cast. Any adjustments you wish to make to the image should be made at this stage. Note: when converting from RAW to JPEG, be sure to turn off all sharpening.
Do not excessiviely crop your images. After cropping, your file should still be a minimum of 17MB at 8 bit.
Interpolate (upsize) the image file to 48-50MB. This should be done with specialist image editing software, such as Photoshop. If using Photoshop, be sure to select the bicubic option. Do not use incremental interpolation. Be sure to turn off all sharpening before upsizing your image.
Open your image at 100% and check for dust contamination. This shows up as dark, circular marks and is particularly noticeable in large areas such as sky.
Check the image at 100% and make any adjustments using the Clone Tool, Healing Tool or History Brush where necessary.