hey there,  IS is not really that difficult to figure out. anything you shoot, don't do any post processing other than adjust maybe the levels or cropping. and you should be accepted.
even if you do a montage, you will be rejected. so don't waste your time trying to make an interesting montage .
IS makes the least money too, so perharps it should not be your priority site , but do give it another try.
i find that anything that is considered by other sites that prefer higher saturation, a bit of sharpening,etc...  will most times be rejected.
in fact, here's a hint. every , almost , every photo i submitted at the same time to other sites, the ones IS took is considered "low contrast" by other sites, and the ones that other sites took, are mostly rejected by IS as "overfiltered".
i hope this gives you an idea.
as i said, IS , to me, is the most consistent .
i could name another site that is the most difficult to figure out , but that's not for this topic.  good luck.

wow, rene! that's one heck of an almost perfect acceptance percentage!
 

I have to jump in here and say what's always said....but here it is yet again.  From a designers perspective, we'd rather have a completely unfiltered image to work with.  They blow up better and retain more original data which makes it possible to filter it to our needs. 

A good stock image is one that can fit the widest array of uses and situations.  An image that you've sharpened or saturated may look great on your screen but cause huge expensive headaches when blown up for a large print job for example.

I seriously doubt it has anything to do with them being like "spoiled children" and more to do with providing sound images to clients.  But heck, what do I know?

It would be nice to upload unfiltered photos everywhere  .  The problem is that most of us find that if we add a bit of saturation our photos sell more.  Just look at the most popular images page.  Lots of over filtered images there.

http://www.istockphoto.com/most_popular.php

And the artist of the week and image of the week often feature heavily filtered images.

Perhaps if the designer needs an unfiltered version they should be able to request it.  I don't like uploading photos that look flat, as they don't tend to catch the buyers eye.

They are not "spoiled children" because they want "unfiltered" images. They are so because they are TOTALLY inconsistent about what they want.

Now how on earth can a image be "overfiltered" (meaning over sharpened) and too soft from noise reduction at the same time?

I take "overfiltered" to mean over-saturated as well.

I find IS to be very consistent about accepting or rejecting images for me personally. They are normally right when they reject one of my photos and often give me a chance to fix the problem and resubmit. I appreciate the way they do things because it helps me learn what is best for stock. I can usually predict what they will reject and occasionally upload stuff just to see what they will do. Sometimes I am pleasantly surprised when they take an unusual shot.

The reviewers has no idea what the original looked like so that small tidbit should not be mentioned in the review. I have had rejections where the image
was not filtered or saturated and have had acceptances where it was. To reject because an images pops is plain nuts.

Quote

I find that resubmitting anything to IS is a wastee of time.

About 20 of my 101 files online were accepted after I made the corrections IS suggested and resubmitted them.

Unfortunately this displaces new work that could also be submitted. My philosophy is to shoot and process the way I believe a shot should look, if it gets rejected, oh well...

although i don't usually re-submit, as it's faster submitting a new image,
i do have to give credit to IS (DT and StockXpert, if i can add them here), for allowing us to re-submit.
sure, 1 out of 3 will be rejected yet again, but whenever i did take the time to read the rejection reason and correct it, it was accepted.

i cannot say if it's helpful or not to all of you, but at least, as some of us here find, IS is consistent ie. submit a shot that is unprocessed, get it right at shooting. you won't get a problem of too many rejections from IS.

however, what IS puts on the frontpage and what IS wants from us, ... well.. that's yet another story. but then again, helix7 has a point.

In 18 months all they have accepted is 3 images from me. I have practically given up on them.

Well, I personally see no reason to badmouth IStock (or anybody else, for that matter). They have their acceptance criteria, which is OK with me. The problem is (the way I see it) that the "overfiltering" is never explained, and I know for a fact that many pics rejected for this reason have not been processed excessively.  I think that a much more honest reason for rejection would be "We do not like this image" - which IMHO is fair enough.

Also - the rejections/approvals are not very consistent (at least this is my observation).

As a result - so far IStock does not work for me, but this is not to say that it wouldn't if I discovered the magic formula which makes the reviewers happy. So far I didn't.

I never bothered to submit images to IStock, which have been rejected elsewhere. Basically, I was limiting my submissions to what has been accepted at least at SS, Fotolia, StockXpert and Dreamstime.  Still - IStock accepted less than 40% of those - and many of the rejections are selling OK.

To me it is a bit strange - as I am not sure what the business objective at IStock is: either it is selling images and making money, or maybe it is imposing their criteria of what is overfileterd, what is not, etc.

Which is still OK - as they are free to do whatever they want on THEIR site - it just does not work very well for me.

Quote from: litifeta on July 23, 2008, 13:45

In 18 months all they have accepted is 3 images from me. I have practically given up on them.

I think you have to put that in context , how many did you submit in that much time?

3?