Quality control for stock photos

As I look through my old travel photos, I post-process some of them to prepare for use as stock photos. When I first started shooting stock photos, my approach was to prepare large batches of images and send them to an agency (I used Alamy). I quickly found that I would often become overwhelmed by the amount of cleaning the photos required in order to pass the agency’s quality control.

In the case of Alamy, this was usually related to digitally removing traces of dust particles, which are always present on the lens and the sensor of the camera. Modern cameras have improved dust control technologies, but some amount of particles is always present. These blemishes usually show up in uniformly lit and coloured areas of the photo, e.g. the sky. Higher f-numbers (smaller apertures) make the dust particles more pronounced.

Removing the dust in post processing is not difficult per se. I usually use a variation of the clone stamp tool in Lightroom or Photoshop. However, cleaning up many images at once is a sure way to kill all fun aspects of photography, and least for me personally.

Many professional photographers recommend outsourcing tasks like digital dust removing. I am sure that this is a solution that Tim Ferriss, the author of “The 4-hour Workweek” would recommend. In my case, the solution has been to drastically reduce the volume of the photos that I submit to the stock agencies. Doing so not only saves time overall, but encourages a more critical evaluation of the photos, as I select the ones that would be processed and submitted. The obvious drawback of this strategy from the purely business perspective is that some of the potential sales would not happen, because of the reduced volume of photos offered to potential customers. However, for someone like me, who does photography part-time and has already established a stock portfolio of reasonable size (few thousand images on sale), focussing on quality over quantity pays off in time savings alone.