My better selling images seem to be the most colorful and saturated ones. So I tried an experiment and took an image to what I think is the extreme, going past what I would normally do. A link to the photo is pasted below and is getting a pretty good amount of downloads.

Do you think this is oversatured or should I be doing this with more of my photos?

Note: I say Saturation but do not actually use the PS Saturation tool.

http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-2934008-a-blue-peacock-with-colorful-open-feathers-filling-the-entire-frame.html

Yes, good guess/observation. This was mostly from playing with curves in the A and B channels of LAB and then a touch of Paint With Light technique. I masked the blue during some of the changes b/c I was losing detail like you said.

Thanks for your comments!!!

My guess is that saturated images sell better because they look better on the reduced-size preview.  It's too bad that our customers want such saturation--it's easy to saturate an image once you've purchased it.  But, if the image delivered to the customer is oversaturated, they cannot reverse the damage and regain image detail.

Yikes! That's almost painful to the eyes     ... of a photographer, anyway.

But I agree with Professorgb.

The fact is, when you're trying to sell an image it's up against thousands of other photographs. And all that the buyer sees is the tiny thumbnail. The ones that jump out at her/him tend to be the ones that get bought.

And (I don't want to sound snooty about this) I think that a whole load of buyers aren't terribly 'visually literate'.

I have a Sony Vaio at home. I guess it has a wider dynamic range than my CRT monitor at work. The sony can retain much more detail in highly saturated images (and not look over saturated), but when I view them at work they look like someone colored the images with makeup.

Take one of those highly saturated images and print it out. See what it looks like. Paper has much less dynamic range than monitors.

"...but when I view them at work they look like someone colored the images with makeup."
"By the way, the monitor I work on is also a Sony. It looks over saturated to me also but that was on purpose."

1. Monitor calibration
2. Embedded color profiles
3. ICC profiles

Without getting into a lengthy discussion, how come I see no mention
of the above in this thread? You can not achieve the "What you see is what you print"
without any regard to discussing the three above. Miss just one, and you are DEAD OFF
on your printing, and/or the way the image may look on another monitor.

It appears the two statements I quoted from the gentlemen above are moot, unless we first
establish these three required steps at the begining. We all need to be on the first page as it were.

Yes, my intent with the original post was simply whether or not highly saturated photos sell better. It seems to me that the answer is yes. I plan on saturating my stock photos more than I have been doing in the past but maybe not quite as much as with this peacock.

On the color management topic, I use ICC profiles for printing. I do not use a calibration device on my monitor. I almost bought one even though my prints acceptably match what I see on my monitor, but reading the latest edition of Professional Photoshop talked me out of it. Dan Margulis has a few chapters devoted to color management and is really against using electronic devices for callibrating monitors. He sure got me to buy in to his arguments.

Without going back to the book, the main points I remember are listed below. These are in my own words, not directly quoted from the book.

1) Humans perceive color in different ways depending upon the surrounding colors and the background. A machine will always perceive the same colors as the same no matter what color the background is.

2) The most "Important viewers" are clients if you are selling your work. The only judgement on color that really matters is that of the client.

3) Most people viewing your prints did not see the image online. What matters is how this print looks, not how it looks relative to what you saw on the monitor. Therefore, a pretty close match is good enough.

The bottom line was that your eyes can do a better job than a machine. This is in large part to #1 above.

Gee, I have a "Red/Green" color deficiency.  I doubt very seriously if MY EYES can calibrate a monitor
better than an electronic device. I know I relay on my speedometer to tell me how fast I'm going.
Every time I rely on my eyes, I wind up with a speeding ticket. Same goes for measuring distances,
for some reason I have trouble measuring how far 25 feet is. I always have to rely on a measuring tape.

I wish my eyes were as good as this guy's ....Dan is his name?