As was stated in Part 1; there is money to be made selling photographs over the Internet through Microstock Agencies. The idea here is to get you started, assisting in your skill at selling Microstock images, not as photographer or photo editor.

This article will focus on typical reasons for photographs being rejected by Microstock Agencies before the buyers even get to look at them.

If you think your image has some of these problems, you should try to fix them first or, in some extreme cases, not waste your time uploading and key-wording an image, but discard it and move on.

Part 3 of this series will concentrate on using software to attempt to fix the potential problems highlighted here, but it is worth re-itertating that as you gain experience with taking Stock Photography the best place to fix images is in the camera when you take the photograph. Take multiple images, pick the best and throw the rest away.

Before we start on problems with the actual image a word about image sizes.

The Megapixel sizes offered by digital cameras seems to increase month on month, this is good, the bigger the better from the point of view of taking Microstock photographs.

Microstock Agencies have upper and lower limits on the image sizes and file sizes that they will accept. This has been known to cause some confusion amongst new submitters.

The main thing to remember is:

• The Image size defines the area of the photograph in Megapixels (Mp).
  
• The File size defines the encoded size of the image as stored in your camera or on your computer and is measured in Megabytes (Mb).
• Image files need to stored in JPEG (.jpg) format when they are submitted to the agencies.
  

If you are still not sure have a look at my article on Microstock file definitions.

As a rule of thumb, to be accepted by an agency an image's minimum size must be 4 Megapixels, this is obviously a great deal smaller than the average digital camera's best quality size. But this does not mean that you should take smaller images, always take your photographs at the maximum size possible, this gives you greater scope for image fixing later.

It is a fact that some of your submitted Images will be rejected. This is always frustrating and to say the least anoying, but do not take it personally. Unfortunately, the agencies do not have to accept anybodies images, even if you feel your photograph would have sold if the buyers had the chance to buy it, you have to get it accepted first.

Once your image is on the computer the first thing to do is inspect it yourself at full resolution. Now unless you have an enormous monitor, this will mean working your way around the image with scroll-bars. Many of the problems highlighted below will only show up like this and it is worth doing first because this is exactly what the image inspector will do.

You remember thinking carefully about a shot, you have got all of the details in that you intended, but when you come to view it, there are distracting elements at the edges. They will need to be cropped away, this is one of the reasons for taking all photographs at the largest Megapixel size that you can, you have more scope for cropping.

When not viewed at full resolution many photographs will appear to be in focus, but when blown up to 100% will show some blurring, an inspector will reject such an image.

To start with attempt to get everything in focus. While controlling your depth of field, having items in the foreground in focus with the background out of focus are legitimate techniques and such photographs do get accepted, inspectors tend to be a lot harsher when judging such images. For a new contributor/ less confident stock photographer the simpler the image is the better.

Image inspectors do not like shadows. High contrast between two areas will cause rejection. They also will reject images for white balance problems, if light levels are clipped at the upper or lower registers. This is explained in more detail in Part 3, but in general it relates to under/over exposure and a way to recognize and possibly fix such problems in software.

This is a digital cameras way of producing noise in low light situations. It manifests itself as straight edged blocks of pixels when an image is viewed at its full resolution. If over used almost all software editing techniques will also produce digital artifacts, even re-saving a file in jpeg format multiple times can cause data loss which shows up as artifacts. If an inspector detects any digital artifacts your image will be rejected.

The inspector will call it poor quality equipment, you will call it the best that you can afford. Fringing is where the outline of darker details are fringed by a line of colour (often purple) most of the time this is fixable but can require some work. In the long run work out when your camera/lens is most susceptible to it and take steps to avoid it, a lack of (or too much) light is often the culprit.

Other problems may have come from smudges on the lens that you did not notice. The inspector will reject an image with any imperfections that become visible at full resolution, so do your own inspection first.

Any recognisable logos, names or people in your photograph will result in rejection unless accompanied by a signed release form for each cause of rejection.

In photos where there might be copyright problems such as street shots, search the image at full resolution for anything that might need a release and that is recognisable.

The accompanying image contains some heavy handed logo and name removal to show the areas that needed editing. An image actually containing the logos and names would have ofcourse infringed copyright.

Part 3 of this series will start you on the road to being able to fix some of these issues.