fotoLibrarian

As a picture library / stock agency it's vital for us to protect our members' copyrights. At fotoLibra our members add their captions and keywords, and we copyright the images in their names, adding the Copyright Status, Notice and Info URL.

All this metadata is neatly stripped out for anyone who uses Adobe Photoshop Creative Suite 3. Adobe Support charges us £30 if we want to speak to them (the CS3 suite costs a mere $3,200 in the UK) and meanwhile unscrupulous people can get hold of images with no clue as to their origin.

How do we get Adobe to listen to us? How do we contact them? How soon can they fix this bug? Sure, WE can use workarounds, but we have no idea what software our customers are using. And we are getting complaints from both our members and our customers that we're selling images with no metadata attached.

Of course we're not, but it's hard for them to believe it's the fault of giant Adobe rather than tiny fotoLibra.

But I do believe it is.

At last it's been released. Of course this means we now have to rewrite the Submission Guidelines which we only posted on the site last week. Still, we moaned about the pace of change in the document itself.

I'll put it up on the fotoLibra site and post a link to it from this blog tomorrow. It only works in Photoshop 8 and above, but we are working on a cunning plan to allow you to adapt and correct your metadata live on the fotoLibra site.

More information tomorrow!

I don’t enjoy being dictatorial, and the founding concept of fotoLibra is that’s it’s the first Open Access picture library / stock agency — we can all upload what we want. But if you want to help your pictures to sell, there are certain basic rules to follow. And here they are.

1. Only upload your very, very best pictures.
Eleven blurred pictures of a ¾ side view of a G-list celebrity merely fills up your storage space and does not benefit you or us.
2. Become massively proficient in a few subjects.
If you excel in portraiture, then upload portraits. If you love trees, then photograph them in every season and condition. Always give the Linnean names as well as the common name. If your passion is architecture, either use a rising front or become a Photoshop expert. Choose a subject you love and let your love shine through.
3. Always respond to Picture Calls when you can.
If you live in Oslo and someone needs a picture of the Lehmann Brothers building in Mumbai, you may not be able to help — unless you have a library shot which you haven’t yet uploaded. And if they say Mumbai, they mean Mumbai — they will not want the Lehmann Brothers building in New York City or anywhere else.
4. Follow the Picture Call instructions to the letter.
If Jacqui asks for 24MB portrait images, she won’t even look at 12MB landscape images. You will be wasting your time, not hers.
5. Always leave yourself enough room in your space allocation to respond to Picture Calls.
Full members get three gigabytes, a huge amount of storage space. Don’t fill it up as quickly as you can.
6. Delete all those pictures which don’t get past item (1), which will then allow you to do (3).
It’s a good idea to prune your pictures regularly, to sift through and delete duplicates, the ones uploaded on their sides, the ones that don’t meet up with your rigorous quality standards. You’re getting better all the time, so make sure your pictures reflect this.
7. The caption must describe the picture.
That’s what a caption is for, an unemotional flat description of what the picture is about. Be as clinical and precise as you can. You only have 36 characters in which to do it.
8. Don’t make puns or jokes in captions.
The caption is a tool to help buyers find your picture. They do not search by punch lines. If you cannot resist it, place your joke among the keywords.
9. Use the TypoChecker.
Even my lean, tanned fingers sometimes mistakenly hit the next key. fotoLibra’s Typochecker picks up inadvertent as well as advertent mistakes.
10. Make absolutely certain your keywords are relevant and correctly spelled.
Don’t cut and paste synonyms from thesauruses. Mention the things that can clearly be seen in the picture. Describe moods and emotions, colours, places and times. And now go back to rule (1).

These comments apply principally to rights-managed images. Royalty-free pictures are subject to slightly different criteria. Another time, perhaps.

Of all the pro-am contrasts, one thing in particular differentiates the serious photographer from the enthusiastic amateur.

The full-on professional will spend more time working on the photograph after it’s been taken than before. Lots of pictures will have been taken, the great majority will have been discarded, and only the very best will make it through to public scrutiny.

For want of a better term I’ll call this post-processing. That covers a manifold of subjects but here I’m going to concentrate on two things: horizontals and verticals.

Walls usually rise vertically. Water surfaces are usually horizontally flat. So our pictures need to reflect those two states, unless you are striving for a particular effect.

By far the most difficult effect to achieve is the vertical wall, and I will cover that in a future blog. The reassurance is that it’s a lot easier to do now than it used to be.

The easiest to get is the level horizon. There can be no excuse for not getting your horizons level. Look through all your photographs which have visible horizons – seascapes, those dreaded sunset pictures and so on. Is the horizon at 90 degrees to the side of the picture? If it’s at 88 or 91 degrees you may think that’s close enough, but you’d be wrong. Only 90 degrees is close enough. No musician can get away by always playing off key. Even a demi-hemi-semitone off is excruciating to many ears, and a guarantee of a short career.

OK, so you’ve spotted a barely perceptible tilt. Now look carefully at your other photographs. You know what? I will guarantee that you will find the same angle of tilt in all of them.

It’s natural. We lean. Our eyes may tell us we’re vertical, we’re right as a Ribstone Pippin, but they lie.

Accept it, because you can do something about it in post-processing. But first, there’s something you might be able to do about it in pre-processing. If you have a highly featured SLR, you might be able to change the focusing screen in your pentaprism – consult your manual. You can buy focusing screens with grid patterns engraved on them which makes lining up horizons and verticals a doddle.

Even better news is that virtually all digital SLRs have ‘on demand grid lines’ as a custom setting in the viewfinder, which you can turn on or off at will.

Yet even with these tricks of the trade many of my photos still have a perceptible lean, so out comes the trusty old Photoshop. There are other image editing programs, but if I tell you how to do it in Photoshop you’ll be able to find the equivalent feature in your preferred application.

Just go to View> Show> Grid. Click on it and a grid overlays your image. You then select the whole image and tug it about in Edit> Transform> Rotate to ensure that your levels are level.

You then have to crop the image, and in the process you will inevitably lose 10-15% of your image area. It’s worth it if the picture sells.

Alternatively, ensure you get the photo level from the start. I’m only trying to help!