Under the Microscope

I see so many great photographs that have potential to sell really well, but unfortunately I have to reject a lot of these photos because they just don’t stand up to close scrutiny under the microscope. These photos look great when they are viewed on online galleries, at around 700 pixels on the longest side, and receive great acclaim from peers, but that doesn’t mean that the full-size, original resolution image is automatically going to be approved for sale.

I’m going to try and show you the problem areas I see in photos so that you can take your photos from being viewed online to the next level of being sold.

Upsizing
Modern compact cameras and DSLRs are capable of taking photos at very high resolutions of around 6mp and upwards, and the bar is constantly being raised. Taking my camera as an example, I use the Nikon D80, it is a 10MP camera and can take JPEG images at 3872 x 2592 pixels at the highest resolution. The new Nikon D3 is a 12MP DSLR capable of taking JPEG images at 4256 x 2832 pixels. This is as at early 2008. Probably by 2009, these figures will seem miniscule!

These sizes are of course too large for web viewing because the page would take too long to load and so naturally people reduce the resolution. Maybe a lot of people take photos specifically for the web and then once they have reduced the size of the original image, they discard the original. They then decide that they want to offer these photos for sale, but find they don’t have the original image anymore, so they try to upsize them. Upsizing by a small percentage isn’t too much of a problem and doesn’t compromise the quality of the image too much, but when people try to double or triple the resolution that they have, that can be disastrous.

Here’s a photo I took in Sanya of the Kempinski Hotel. The original resolution was 3872 x 2592 and here it is reduced to a width of 700 x 469 suitable for web viewing:

Now let's take a look at a close-up area of the hotel viewed at 100% at it's original resolution of 3872 x 2592:

Not bad, that's pretty sharp for a handheld photo.

Now lets look at a close-up of the same image, but which has been upsized to our minimum required longest side of 3,000 pixels:

and this is the problem, even though the upsized image viewed on the screen back down at a reduced resolution appears like it may be good enough to sell....it isn't:

Never attempt to upsize your images because the quality will be impaired and we won't accept them. We would love to be able to accept all the images you upload, but by rejecting them we are also protecting your reputation as a great photographer. Displaying and selling your images with quality that is anything less than excellent will damage your reputation as a photographer, and will also detract buyers away from other images you are selling that really are excellent quality.