Why are moderators assessing images at 72 dpi?
Why are moderators assessing images sent to them at 300dpi; but at 72dpi, then rejecting the image because of artifacting issues? instead of moderating the supplied uncompressed 300dpi image which several other companies who deal stock photography always do; who have immediately accepted every image I have offered them, including being accepted for both standard and exclusive advertising licences, but the same images which are accepted by every other Stock photography company, has been rejected by Adobe Stock on the grounds of artifacting?
300dpi is the native resolution that my camera has taken the image. I have post processed the image at 300dpi, and thus following the technical rules laid down by Adobe Stock in their technical manual and assessing the image at a minimum of 100% magnification, all the way up to 500% + magnification in some cases, with no artifacting issues on all images prior to being supplied for moderation by Adobe Stock this is regardless if I am providing standard colour, standard Monochrome, HDR, Focus Stacked, or IR images.
It is becoming very apparent that there is a clear bias to the photography and educated background in photography that some Adobe Moderators are rigging the assessment of images, to an extreme low resolution purposely generating artifacting issues on some photographer’s images, but assessing full native resolution, in favour of some photographers. where I have licenced several images which have been of poor quality, failing my own quality control, that even some my clients who have no photographic background and knowledge are spotting clear errors with some stock supplied images making them unusable for projects. Ranging from manipulated dpi to ensure that a mobile image taken below 150dpi meets the 300dpi threshold for assessment, but is not suitable for project transforming processes in higher resolution images but clearly advertised at 300dpi, images which have had very poorly selected subjects and cut from one image placed into several others with the process repeated several times leaving the image unusable for actual projects because of the several outlines built up around the subject, and breaking a fundamental rule of providing stock photography which is "the image should be in an as much as shot form as possible with minimal post processing in raw, and some shake reduction / straightening is permitted during the post process", but again the image is moderated as being good for Adobe Stock to even some images which have managed to get through moderation where the model has bruising and track marks on their person which has been poorly masked by the originator! (this is just some of the issue I have found in my use of the platform)
So, the question needs to be asked, who is right in moderating images for a Stock platform? The half dozen or so companies out there, who offer a better and more streamlined service than Adobe in stock photography, who moderate and present images at uncompressed 300dpi, give the amateur photographer the kudos for taking a good picture and is given a seat at the big boy table with the university trained professional photographers, or Adobe's platform team of university trained / university student / AI moderation team who transform the resolution from uncompressed 300dpi to an extremely compressed 72dpi thus purposely causing artifacting in the image as Adobe PS, LR, RAW, then needs to generate pixels and a ton of noise when being viewed at over 150% magnification, thus purposely generating a reason to rejecting the image to keep the amount of stock images on the site in favour of themselves and their friends.
Following this recent rejection on some very good IR photography (which was rejected because of heavy artifacting which I am not surprised when it has been shrunk from 24.3Mpix at 300dpi to 0.5Mpix at 72dpi I am actually supprised an image could have been made out other than a couple of square blocks!) which the image has been accepted everywhere else at its native resolution!! myself, with the support of my clients which I serve for several projects for published materials are in agreement to me changing my policy where by Adobe Stock is no longer the favoured supplier of images to their projects, I will no longer supply images to Adobe Stock until rouge moderators have been removed from Adobe making the moderation process an unbiased environment for all photographers, at all levels.
