Genuine Fractals

James Greed

Suspended / Banned
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180
Edit My Images
Yes
Been thinking of how i can up size my images for submission to alamy and this seems like 'the' software for upsizing in terms of quality retention, however i notice that the .stn files it outputs are smaller than jpegs- obviosly for sumbitting to alamy, who want minimum 50mb files, this may be a problem as i am trying to increase the file size, not decrease it!

Also i guess if it produces an .STN file then i will have to convert it BACK to a jpeg to sumbit it.

Any thoughts on using it for this purpose or just gereral thoughts on the software itself?
 
Alamy do recommend Genuine Fractals James, although they also say that PS and other editing packages may well be acceptable. Having tried Genuine Fractals, I'm damned if I can see any difference!

I'm currently upsizing my images using Bicubic resampling in Paint Shop Pro and not getting any rejected. :shrug:

Alien Skin is another interpolater that's supposed to be very good, but I've yet to try it.
 
50mb?!? Chuffing heck - how many megapixels do you need to get files that size?!? Or am I missing something....
 
Not that many these days I'm guessing?

My D2Xs outputs c.20mb RAW which as simple conversion to tif become 80mb or more, so I'm guessing anything around 8mp as a RAW to tif will be 50mb

CT?

It's not at all difficult usually as long as there's no cropping involved.

A full sized Tiff from my 1DMK2n is 23.6 mb. Increasing the file size by 145% gives a file size of 49.6mb. (48mb is the min file size for Alamy.)

Alamy say as a general rule you shouldn't try to reach the bar starting out with files less than 17mb, and it does get difficult below that I find, although it is possible with a really sharp image.
 
Ok - that doesnt seem so bad then!! I was just looking at my 7mb raw file size and thinking 'ouch'! Output from lightroom as a 300dpi tiff the files are coming out at 32mb.

Long way to go before I'm of a standard to start submitting to agency's but its always good to know these things :)
 
Long way to go before I'm of a standard to start submitting to agency's but its always good to know these things :)

Well don't get the wrong idea - Alamy don't sit as a panel of judges on the artistic merit of your pics. The only thing they say is no glamour (soz) and no pics which are a virtually identical series... (shot on hi speed).

All Alamy do is open your pics at 50mb and look for dust bunnies and any interpolation artifacts. They're quite likely to reject the lot if they find either -they don't do any retouching on images at all. Also they specify no sharpening on the image, taking the view that it could sell at any size from a small postcard to a huge poster print, and the client will handle any sharpening needed. It follows that they're looking for a sharp image or one which they judge will sharpen satisfactorily.

Beyond those basic ground rules, the content is up to you, although it obviously needs to be something you think is possibly salable. ;)
 
Do people actually make any decent money from submitting their images to Alamy...? I'd be interested to find out.
 
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