8 Tips for Processing your Images before Uploading

Following a few key processing steps prior to uploading images to Picfair can help you maximise your store’s potential - whether you want to sell images to your existing clients or via Picfair’s Central Marketplace.

Whether you plan to sell images as prints and digital downloads to clients that you’ve known for years, or to editorial and advertising image buyers, (such as book publishers, magazines, newspapers, websites and design agencies) on your store, or via Picfair’s Central Marketplace, these are key steps in your image processing that will help you get more sales...

1.) Dust Removal:

Even if your camera has a built-in dust removable system, it’s inevitable that some dust will find its way on to the sensor and make itself known in your images. And once you or a potential client sees a dust mark, it’s hard for them to see beyond it.

Thankfully, it’s easy to remove the tell-tale marks using the cloning or healing tool in an image editing software package like Adobe Lightroom, Camera Raw or Photoshop. However, a methodical approach is essential if you’re going to get every spot.

Whatever software you use, magnify the image to 100% and examine it in sections, starting from the top left corner, move down checking the screen’s width to the bottom of the image before moving across another screen-width and checking the next section. Keep moving down and across until you reach the bottom right corner and all the marks have been removed.

2.) Cropping and Levelling:

As a rule for editorial images, you want to leave the cropping to the buyer. However, crop out any odd bits that may have crept into the edges of the frame accidentally. When you crop, stick to one of the standard aspect ratios. If you're unsure, an ideal aspect ratio is 3:2, which gives the buyer plenty of flexibility when it comes to cropping.

You also need to make sure that the horizon, or any vertical lines, are straight. Some image editing packages can detect and correct wonky horizons for you, but if not, there’s usually a simple tool that you can use.

3.) White Balance and Colour:

White balance can be a creative tool, but for straight editorial images, it’s important to correct colour casts, especially with images uploaded as a series. An attractive, warm landscape image is more likely to sell than one that has a cyan cast, for example.

4.) Noise Reduction:

Unless you’re shooting at a very wide aperture, if you’re hand-holding your camera in low light you have to push the sensitivity (ISO) up to enable a fast enough shutter speed to avoid camera shake spoiling the shot. The downside is that a high ISO setting introduces coloured speckling called noise.

Cameras apply noise reduction to JPEG files to reduce the visibility of noise, but it can also reduce the amount of detail that’s visible. As a rule, the best results are created by shooting raw files and then applying a bespoke level of noise reduction when you process them. We’d rather see a little grain than lose all the detail or have images that look like watercolour paintings.

5.) Creative Processing:

There’s a creative aspect to image processing that’s entirely personal, and it's great to develop your own style. A personal style makes your images stand out from the crowd, and it’s why your clients come to you. However, many editorial clients, such as book and magazine publishers look for 'straight’ images, or images to which they can apply their style. So with this in mind, it may be worth producing two versions of your images, one for editorial buyers and another for your followers.

6.) Sharpening:

We recommend that you don’t sharpen images that are for the editorial or advertising market, leave that to the buyer. You may wish to apply a subtle sharpening treatment to your creative work, but take care to avoid introducing sharpening artefacts such as halos along edges within the image.

7.) Personal Watermarks:

There’s no need to watermark your images before uploading them!

Picfair's watermark will be applied automatically when you upload your work. And, if you upgrade to a Picfair Plus account, you can upload your own watermark, or remove them altogether! Find out more about custom watermarks with Picfair Plus here.

8.) File Format:

Although you may shoot raw files, you need to create JPEG files in order to upload your images to Picfair. We accept a minimum size of 800pixels along the shortest side and the maximum file size of 30MB per image.

As a rule of thumb, we recommend always uploading your images at the largest size possible up to 30MB and as close to the original dimensions of the image as possible - the more freedom you can provide the buyer, to resize the image to their preferences, the better.

By following these steps when processing your images, you're on your way to creating image files perfect for sale in an online environment!

And once you're ready, you can upload your images by clicking the 'Upload' button found on the menu at the top of any page on Picfair, or simply click here.

We hope you've found this guide useful!