JPEG (left) vs RAW (right)

The Differences
When shooting RAW you are not actually creating an image. Instead, your camera is recording the scene as a sort of digital negative. The RAW file created will record the scene photographed as well as all of your camera data, leaving the image to be rendered by software such as Lightroom, Aperture, Bridge, and many other programs. When shooting JPEG, your camera is creating an actual image saved in a JPEG format. So, the question you need to ask yourself at this moment is: “Would I rather have my camera or my computer software interpret the scene into an image?”

Noise Reduction

The Benefits of Shooting RAW
Most would answer that they want the camera to interpret the scene; it seems easier and more like photography than digital imaging. When shooting for microstock, however, the easier way isn’t always best. When shooting microstock images, quality is the most important factor. If you are willing to take the time to shoot in RAW and process your images on your computer, then you are going to get significantly nicer images compared to shooting JPEG. We’re talking about better color saturation, vibrance, contrast, tone, etc. as well as more accurate exposure and perfect color balance. This is only a partial list of the advantages of shooting RAW. To the left is an example of the difference in image noise between RAW and JPEG, as you can see, noise is much worse on the JPEG image.

RAW Workflow
First thing is first; you are going to need a program that handles RAW images. There is a lot of software that can do this for you, but in case you don’t know, here is a list. I recommend Adobe Lightroom 2 and I’ve written an entire tutorial on how to use it correctly, but the list goes on: Aperture (Macs only), Adobe Bridge, Canon Digital Photo Professional, Capture One, Camera Raw (plugin for photoshop and bridge), and more. You can look at my Lightroom 2 article for a more in depth RAW workflow analysis, but here are the basic steps I go through.

1. import & backup RAW files
2. organize files & filter through what to edit and what not to edit
3. make basic adjustments: exposure, highlights, shadows, color balance, contrast, color saturation/vibrance, sharpening, and noise reduction
4. advanced adjustments (if needed): vignettes, curves, alternate color, black & white, sepia, split toning, etc.
5. export to JPEG (this is the final step in “creating” your image)

IPTC data is information stored within your image. In the case of photographs for microstock websites, we are talking about title, description, and keywords (or tags). Using IPTC data will save you a lot of time in the long run. Rather than adding all of this info to each file each time you upload it to a site, you can add the information once and all of the sites will recognize the IPTC data that you have input into the image.

There are a lot of different ways to do this properly. It really depends on the program you are using. Here is a list of acceptable programs for inputing IPTC data into your JPEG images: Photoshop, Elements, Bridge, Aperture, Lightroom, Windows Vista, Pro Stock Master. Each program will have a different process to go through but it will work the same in the long run. Embed the information into the file so that you don’t have to copy and paste or retype all of that info every time you upload an image to a site. It will save you a lot of time. (I personally use Pro Stock Master or Adobe Bridge to embed all of my IPTC data easily).

Keywording is the process in which a seller describes an image being sold. Keywords, or tags, are used to describe an image so that a seller can find relevant imagery within a microstock website’s database. The better you are with keywords, the easier (and more likely) it will be for a buyer to find your image. Make sure you use descriptive and conceptual keywords for all images. Here is a list of questions you can ask yourself in order to determine keywords for images:

What is the image about?
What is in the image?
Which element has the most impact?
What does the image mean?
What does the image say to you?
How does the image make you feel?
Why would someone want to download the image?

Once you have come up with your list of keywords you need to apply them to the IPTC data of your image. Find out how to do this for the program you are using first. Then go into the IPTC data and add your list of keywords in order of most relevance. You will need to seperate each word with a comma in order to recognize individual words or phrases. Once you have added this information to your JPEG file you can save it and each site that it is uploaded to will recognize the keyword data for you.

If you are wanting to get into microstock photography, then you hopefully know what noise in an image is. If you don’t, however, then you are about to learn what it is and how to avoid it.

There are a lot of blog posts and tutorials out there that attempt to inform you on how to remove noise from your images. In all reality, if you are shooting for microstock, you should make your best attempt to avoid it all together. Avoidance of noise is always going to be easier (and give you better results) then removing it.

Ok, back to the point. Images are made up of pixels. Pixels are tiny squares that represent a color/tone in an image. If your camera is an 8 megapixel camera then you have 8 million pixels that make up each image (example: one of my cameras is about 8.2 megapixels and it produces images that are 2336×3504 pixels). Pixel sensitivity is controlled by ISO on your digital camera. The lower the ISO, the slower the pixels respond to light and the more accurate the results are. The higher the ISO, the faster the pixels respond and the results become slightly less accurate.

Noise is very similar to film grain on a 35mm negative. It appears as a bunch of spots throughout areas of the image. You can usually only see noise in an image if you are zoomed in to 100%. Here is how noise relates to ISO settings. As the ISO goes up, so does the noise in an image. Therefore, if you want to avoid noise, use the lowest ISO setting you can at all times. I recommend 100-200 for ISO when shooting specifically for microstock. Of course, every camera is different and every lighting situation is going to give you different results, so expirment with what gives you the best results when shooting for microstock.

There are ways to reduce noise in an image, too. If you are shooting RAW then you have a bit of room to work with. In whatever RAW converter you are using (such as Lightroom, Camera RAW, Aperture, Digital Photo Professional, etc) there should be an area where you can fine tune sharpness and noise reduction. These two controls usually go together because as noise reduction goes up, sharpness goes down. They directly relate to each other, so don’t reduce noise to point where you lose sharpness! There is a lot of info out there about noise reduction, how to do it properly, what software to use, etc, etc. In my opinion you should try to avoid noise as much as possible but when you do need to reduce it use your RAW converter and make minor adjustments to the noise reduction levels until your image looks sufficient when viewed at 100% magnification.