I am talking from experience here when I say “don’t be lazy”.

Before submitting any images to a stock library, make sure they are the highest quality images you can produce.  By this, I mean examine your images closely for things like dust spots (my nemesis), burnt out highlights, distracting details that draw the eye away from the main subject, poor composition and all the other things that may put someone off buying your image.

It can take just a few seconds to correct these problems in a software package like Adobe Lightroom, or Adobe Photoshop, so there really isn’t any excuse for submitting sub standard work.

Here are 3 simple things you should check for and tips on how to cure any problems.

1. Dust Spots

Probably the most annoying thing to search for, but also one of the easiest to correct.

Once your have your image open in your photo editting software (I use Adobe Photoshop CS2, but am now using Adobe Lightroom 1.2 more and more) you need to zoom in close to a portion of the image and then move the view around so you can inspect every bit of the image. While zoomed in, a useful shortcut key in Photoshop is the space bar. Zoom in, press the space bar and while it is down your cursor will change to the hand so you can use the mouse to quickly move around your image.

If you come across a dust spot, the healing brush is the tool to fix them. Select the tool (both Lightroom and Photoshop have healing tools) and set the brush size to a diameter that covers the dust spot. In Photoshop, press the Alt key (on the PC) and then click in a good area of the image that has similar colours and tones to the area you want to fix. Release the Alt key and now click on the dust spot to heal it. Simple as that. You may need to play about with this tool a bit to get used to how it works, but it’s the photographers friend, so be nice to it.

In Lightroom, the tool works in a similar way except you don’t need to press the Alt key. Just click on the area you want to fix and a circle will appear which you can drag to a good area of the screen to heal it.

2. Poor Composition

This one is not so easy to fix on the computer. If the original composition was really bad then it may be beyond help. If it’s just a little off, or there are some distracting objects at the edge of the frame, then the crop tool can be used to cut a chunk off the edge of the image to get rid of something you don’t want, or improve the composition. You can even use the crop tool to correct the sloping horizon issue too.

It’s simple enough to do. Select the crop tool, drag a box around your image and then use the little ‘hooks’ on the corners and mid points on the box to move the box to the desired size. Move your cursor a little way away from the corners of the box and the cursor will change slightly, now when you click and drag the crop will be rotated, thus correcting your sloping horizon. Press enter, or click on the little tick icon at the top of the screen and the crop will be applied.

One word of warning, only use this for cropping small bits off the edge of your image. Stock photography usually requires a large image to be submitted, and every time you chop a bit off you are reducing the image size and the file size, so you may no longer reach the minimum size requirements for submitted work. So don’t go over the top!

3. Highlights and Shadows

A very simple way to correct highlights and shadows is to check the levels, or histogram, of your image and make sure you have a good spread from true black through to true white. If your histogram is all bunched up towards one end then you’ll need to make some corrections. Levels will do this to a certain degree and correct any exposures that are slightly off. Obviously it can’t correct things that are way off, but make sure every image has a levels histogram that gives you the full spread of tones fro black through to white.

So there you go. 3 simple things to check before you submit your image. None of these take very long to do and if you find that you are having to do these to every image it means you might have to adjust how you take the images in the first place. Get it right in the camera to avoid too much time spent correcting things on the computer.

Do you have any other tips like this? What tools do you use most when preparing your images? Let me know. It would be nice to create a tip sheet people can print off and pin up next to their computers.

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