Bobkeenan Photography Aperture microstock workflow - a Recommended process

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Note that I have been an Aperture user for about 3 years. I am self taught. I have read several books on this software and sat through many free and purchased tutorial videos. But…. I am not a professional. What I am about to explain may not be the best way to work your images…but its my way (why do I think of Frank Sinatra right now)….. This blog should have some value for relatively new Aperture users whether its for microstock, regular stock, or just personal use. During my point and shoot days I mainly used Apple’s iPhoto . I think this is a great program and gets better every year. If I wanted to do something special I would open the image in Photoshop . But when I started ramping up my photography and got involved with microstock, I needed something more. I was accumulating A LOT of images, I had to put the required metadata ( name, caption, keywords) and the stuff that can be automatically put on your file (camera, lens, focal length, shutter speed, aperture setting, ISO, etc). Oh and now I need to put a copyright statement in too ( ©Bobkeenan Photography ). And I had to do a lot of photo manipulation. Photoshop was overkill on capability and iphoto just did not have enough. So I checked out using Adobe Bridge and PS but it was not intuitive enough. I played with Lightroom. Its close to what I wanted but still did not have that intuitive feel that I am used to with most Apple Apps. Then I found Aperture ….And it was just right.

The first step is to take a lot of pictures. Good microstockers think of a theme or a message they want to tell. They select a location. They review where and when the sun will rise and set. Maybe they will hire models, bring remote flashes, reflectors, backdrops……. I am not that kind of microstocker…and that is why I can never depend of this for a living. But I have fun and I think that it is realistic that I can get enough income to match my camera equipment addiction….some day. So this is what I do. I grab my 5DmkII or 7D, depending on the kind of location I am going to. I attach the lens that I want to work with. Sometimes I will grab a complementary lens, sometimes a circular polarizing filter, sometimes a coke ND gradient filter, some extra CF cards and a spare battery. If the light is low I bring a monopod. And then I am off to my location. The location may be my backyard, the neighborhood, the zoo, downtown, bird sanctuaries, almost anytime I leave the house I have a camera. I immediately put a hood on the lens and uncap it. I do not like filters for protection. I have had too many shots ruined by them. I put the camera in Av mode. And I set a bracketing of exposure with high speed frame rate. The width of the bracketing will depend on what I am taking. Low diffuse light I use a small spread. Harsh light and shadows a much larger spread. And if I am going for a HDR (high dynamic range) shot I spread it all the way.

MAKE SURE YOU ARE TAKING IMAGES IN RAW. There are lots of discussions about whether you should do raw or jpg. Take Raw!!! You will get all of the info from the sensor and not a sampled modified image. Most of the post processing that I will be talking about will ONLY work well if you have the Raw image. Then I wait for my muses (I had to add a Greek representation of Muses) to whisper in my ear. What does that mean…. well. I think this is the same for everyone. The trick is to listen and look around a lot. Every few minutes your attention will be pulled away to something. Normally you would just keep walking. But if you are sensitive to these times, then you will find some good stuff. Something in the scene around you made your brain say “Whoa….. there is something interesting” So you stop. Go back and look at what caught your attention and start thinking about what the background is for each position and how the light illuminates the area from different angles….and then I just start shooting. With a bracketed exposure I get 3 images for each intended capture. So chances are I will be close to the correct exposure. I then also run up and down the apertures so I have a variety of dof’s (depth of fields) to choose from. And then I move on till my muse talks to me again. Only digital cameras let you do this (unless you have an unlimited film budget). I remember in the 70’s with film and when I had less money……I would never squander my money doing it this way. Now, when I get home I have anywhere from 500-1000 images. OMG……. How am I going to deal with this!!!

I like to take the cards out of the camera and load them via a card reader. I don’t like anything attached to a camera that might drag it off a table or armrest. There are 1000’s of options for setting up Aperture 3 (AP3)and I will just cover some of the ones I use. If you want to learn more about AP3 read some of the books out there AND/OR go to Aperture Expert . Its an aperture users group with lots of free advice, articles, forum, video. They also have tutorial videos for sale. I have found them quite helpful. So I have my aperture setup to require a manual start. You can set it to autostart when you hook up a card reader with a card installed. I also have it set-up in the import window to put my copyright statement in the metadata of each image. So I start up AP3. ( I have a bunch of screen captures that I have inserted in this posting for an example of a load of images. ) The first thing I do is set up a new project.

I give it a name like stock to be uploaded. The program usually senses the CF card but if not there is a window in the lower left that has the potential sources to import from. After selecting the CF card all of the images will show up in the window. This may take a while if you have hundreds of images. You will have an option of importing checked. They start out all being checked. I find it is easiest to just import all of them…. this will take a few minutes. You can start viewing and modifying right away, but with my macbook pro I find that the computer uses a lot of its processor capability for the importing and raw processing that it will be doing. Modifying during the import is a bit hurky jerky. So I wait…. and take a break.

Now you have hundreds of images to look at. AP3 has a draft button (right below the lower right corner of the image) that allows you to skip around from picture to picture quickly. This is important because it takes my macbook pro about 5 seconds sometimes to finish processing each image before you can judge sharpness and other qualities. So starting with image 1 I start scanning through all of them in full view mode.

I put a single star (the rating system available….there is also a color code you can apply….but I like the stars). by the images that I like. There will be some images that are just too badly exposed, out of focus (OOF), or poorly composed. They get no stars. I may give a star to the set of three (from the bracketing) if its a particularly nice image. That will give me more options later in case I want to do a HDR or exposure blending (I use a photomatix plug-in). AP3 allows you to sort by a bunch of different characteristics. I usually sort the images in this project by stars. You can select ascending or descending.

Descending will put the starred images at the top. Then its an easy step to select all of the non-starred items and delete them ( I use command-delete) Those files will all be sent to the AP3 trash (not your computer trash) so they are there until you empty that trash.

Note some people keep every image they take….. To me that is crazy. If you shoot a lot you would need many terabyte drives to keep up with that. So I keep the good stuff and dump the bad stuff. So now you have thrown away about 80% of what you have taken. So you have 100-200 shots that have potential. For me, by the end of this whole process, I will be lucky to get 20-40 good images out of this. Ok…now we have to get more serious.

Is the focus where we want it. Microstock reviewers love their focus to be perfect, according to what THEY think is perfect. Usually the focus has to be tack sharp on the interesting part of the subject. You cannot see this that well in the normal full screen mode (unless you have a huge screen). But in AP3 you can it the Z key and you immediately see a portion of the image at 100%.

Note another thing that I usually do is hit “option-f” that will show you, in red, the focus point that was selected.

I use this to see if the there is a camera problem that may need to be adjusted. So I review the focus of each image. If its good the rating goes to 2 stars. I sort and delete the 1 starts.

Well now you are probably down to 40-60 images First, I turn on the “Highlight Hot and Cold Areas”.

It will make any colors that are saturated at full black show up with blue and areas that are saturated with full white will show as red. The example above is not the best. You can see some oversaturated black (shown in blue) in the upper right corner). There are no oversaturated whites. I picked an image that was a little underexposed. I usually pull the raw sharpening and edge sliders fully to the right.

If its a portrait or some image where tack sharp is not necessary I leave that adjustment alone. Next I correct the exposure. I rarely move the exposure slider. It seems like it provides too course of a change. First I will back the black point down till the highlighted blue is mostly gone.

This does not all have to be gone because having some pure black in the image helps with contrast and I think it makes the colors look richer. On the other hand…I hate blown out white areas. So I use as much adjustment on the recovery slider as is necessary to get rid of the red highlighted areas. Then I go to the curves adjustment.

Most of the time I use the curve in normal mode. But if you have an image with some bad overexposure areas and recovery does not help enough, you can use the extended mode to pull the white balance to the right until the red highlight areas go away. The next thing I do is add a little contrast to the image, with the curves adjustment. To do this you select a point on the lower right that represents the darker areas and pull that point down a bit. It will make the dark areas a little darker without going to black. Then take a point in the light area of the curve and lift it a bit. It will lighten the lighter areas without blowing them out. The curve now looks like a shallow “S” and you have just added contrast.

The exact placement of the points on the curve is an “art” and you just have to play with it to get a feel for it. But its a powerful tool. Even after all of this you may have areas that are too dark because they are in the shadow or too light because of the sun or clouds. Under the curves adjustment there is highlights and shadows adjustment.

Use these carefully. A little goes a long way. Too much and they will destroy the look of the image. But you can improve the image by using these. It’s like a poor man’s HDR. HDR is better because you will be blending to get a proper exposure and with this you are stretching the information in the image. I will also check for Chromatic Aberrations (CA) or purple fringing. CA does happen. I see it on bright days in areas of the image where there is a dramatic change in contrast. AP3 has an adjustment for that and I think it works pretty well. Just move the sliders until the CA goes away. Next I do straightening. As level as I think I get stuff….it usually is not perfectly level. Sometimes I want an angle and more of an angle is needed. I will crop next. Cropping helps with composition by eliminating distracting stuff in the periphery and positioning the main subject in the best position. All of these are easy fast fixes.

I go though the images again for a final cut. The ones I want to keep get 3 stars. Usually there will be two similar images will a little different DOF or composition. Microstock sites don’t want to be in role of picking your best image from similar ones. They want you to pick the best. So I pick the best of similar images. I get rid of the 2 stars. Now I am down to the last 20-40 images and its time to do the final clean-up.

The images are in pretty good condition by now. But I look at them again further work. This take a little more time…but its with only 20-40 images and not 1000. The next thing I will do is look for distractions. It could be a stained rock (like in my example), a cigarette butt, a person face (that I do not have a model release for) or a lot of other stuff. So I use the retouch brush. You can find it here.

I usually used the softest brush and mostly the clone mode.

I try to pick samples from a distant section of the image. All of this is done in the zoom mode. I may also use the dodge and burn tools to make sure it all looks right. So here it is with most of the mostly stain gone.

I will also use the burn and dodge tool to fix any light/dark issues in the image that the curves and shadows/highlights did not take care of. By the way I enlarged the cursor/target/brush on my screen so it is more viewable. In real life it is smaller.

I may also use the color adjustment. You can just pull up the saturation adjustment but that is a gross color booster and I prefer to be more select. So I will use the eye dropper to select a color that I want to boost and then adjust that color. There is a final non/raw sharpening adjustment. I have found even small adjustments with this ruins some of the details of the image at 100% and it looks artificial. I will also use some of the plug-ins. Two that get a lot of use are PTlens .

It takes the camera metadata of camera and lens and automatically adjusts for lens pin cushion and fish eye effects. The other thing that I use is the combination of horizontal, vertical, and rotational adjustments.

I have been able to correct images that I had to take from an undesirable position. It can almost behave like an artificial tilt shift lens. For instance I found this great old building in Port Townsend WA. It was about 8 stories high. I had to take a picture from the ground level. I wanted a view as if I was in another building on the 4th floor. Instead I got this that showed the distortion you would expect from taking a photo of a tall object. PTlens allow me to adjust it so it looked like I took the shot from 4 stories high.

The final adjustment that I make will be denoise. With the cameras I have there will be no noise issues below an ISO of 300-600 (depending on the camera). Note that these camera probably have no noise issues up to (500-1150) ISO but, with our adjustments we have pushed and pulled the image information around and have created noise…or at lease we have brought the noise into the light of day at 100%. I have tried lots of de-noise stand alone programs and AP3 plug-ins. DFine used to be my favorite. But currently I think Topaz’s De-noise does the best job.

I use the preset adjustments for RAW files staring with Raw lightest and working my way up. You can view it at 200% but I drop it to 100% as that is where microstock images are reviewed. I try to not go higher than the raw moderate adjustment. There are 4 levels above that but I think that you start to loose too much detail and will be reject as over filtered. Sometimes I will try to get an image with an ISO greater than 1150 where I have pushed the shadows too much and I either will not be able to get rid of the noise OR too much detail will be lost. So a few images may bight the dust in this process. So now your done with the images…..You are ready for the next step and that is preparing the meta data.

The meta data already has the camera and settings, the date, and your copyright info.

Now you have to put a file name, title, caption, and finally keywords. I use simple version names with 2-5 words. I copy that to the title as well. I think fine art or stock photographers develop a lot of versions of the same image but that does not seem to be a good fit for my microstock process. Then I put a caption. Some of the microstock sites have no rules others say they have to be at least 7 words long, don’t start with “A” (A cow in a green farm pasture with trees), don’t repeat any word. So I follow those rules. Next is keywords….You can do these on your own. Sometimes my stuff is different enough that the online help site cannot work. Actually before I discovered the online site I would go to one of the microstock sites and search for a similar set of pictures. I would go to the most popular and then copy that images keywords into mine. But then I found Yuri Acurs , and God love him for providing a FREE keyword service. Yuri is either the top or one of the top microstock photographers in the world. His site if full of helpful information. His keyword page is HERE.

The way I use it is that I select images under the type and pick 25 rows, the default shutterstock (my main revenue maker by a factor of 10) and the default sort of most popular. I put in 3-5 key words that most reflect my image and the hit search. It will come up with 25 rows of images that are the most popular selling images that match those words.

I pick the images that are closest to my image. I hit the accept images button at the bottom of the page. Yuri’s page then comes up with a page out all of the keywords found on those images and rank orders them by how often the word appears.

It also automatically checks the first 50. Most sites will not allow more than 50 keyword. I think it is important to have a good set of abundant keywords. But they all need to be pertinent or you will get warnings from the microstock sites if you fail in this. So I scan the list and uncheck the words that do not apply. Then I go beyond the pre-checked list and usually add a few more. With that done, I hit the “show chosen words” button. Another page comes up with the words all neatly in a comma separated format.

I select all of them, copy, and then past into the keywords space in AP3.

You are almost done. Create another project and call it “upload a (b,c,d etc)” and I put in a mix of 10 images. I have found that if you have similar images only one will be selected and the others rejected. I have also found that reviewers are people with good days and bad days. If you get a bad day they may reject the whole batch. If that batch had 40 images in it…they are gone as far as that site is concerned. I picked 10 to avoid big losses like that. The images are usually reviewed in a day or two and then you can upload another 10. All of the major sites, except iStockphoto, allow for FTP transfers. And THAT is the way to go. I have tried a few. My favorite is Fetch. Its simple and easy. I go to the AP3 folder for upload and do an export.

The export has some more choices to make. The most important is the file to be exported. All the sites take jpeg, some take tiff, other raw. Since jpeg universally accepted that is what I upload.

I go for maximum quality setting either 300 0r 340 dpi. The color profile should be sRGB. I shoot and print in adobe RGB 1998. But most of the internet is sRGB and online images look better in that colorspace. So I go to the export page, make sure the settings are correct, I usually direct the export to the desktop, and I use the “create folder” button to make a folder (named upload a,b,c,etc.). Then I start up Fetch. After you do this once it remembers the ftp addresses, login name, and password. Hit new connection and then drag the 10 image in the folder on the desktop to the fetch window…. And you are done….well almost. You then have to go to the microstock site.

They require that you upload model releases if appropriate, select categories, approve your keywords, and usually select the kind of rights you want to sell your images under. iStockphoto is a bit of a pain in the butt. FTP is not a feature. You upload image by image to their site or use a third party software. A good one is DeepMeta. iStockphoto is VERY particular about its images and keywords. In fact they have no tolerance for vaguely connected keywords. So why bother with them, you ask….. They only accept about 1/5 of the images that the other sites do but ……what they do select sells fairly well with a decent payback.

So let me know if you have any comments or questions. I hope this helps some of you.

Jiri October 18, 2013 Hi bobbyk. Thank you for this article and tips how to start with micro-stock. I have a question though. While trying to get the key-wording tool I did not get lucky. I cannot load the page. Is there any chance you could send me the free tool to my mail, please? If you still have of course. Thank you again for your effort while writing this helpful article. Jiri. Reply

Hi bobbyk. Thank you for this article and tips how to start with micro-stock. I have a question though. While trying to get the key-wording tool I did not get lucky. I cannot load the page. Is there any chance you could send me the free tool to my mail, please? If you still have of course. Thank you again for your effort while writing this helpful article. Jiri.

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