Is iPhone 12 Pro Max decent for Stock Photography ?

Hi @Sergio23701002y9og,

You have gotten some excellent suggestion so far. I will add just this, because of the wide f-stop (low number) there is limited flexibility for what subjects you'll get in complete focus. This info on Camera's Limitations will give you more insight about phone camera use. 

Best wishes

Jacquelin

I have an iphone Pro Max 12 and was wondering if I could create good stock images with a smartphone.

By @Sergio23701002y9og

Yes, but the images are vetted the same way, independent of the camera. Unfortunately, small sensor cameras tend to introduce many artefacts. But I know of people successfully submitting phone camera images.

As for investing in a good camera: mirrorless is currently the technology to go after. However, you could get good used DSLR cameras for a considerable discount. For phone pictures, I would consider @reedesign1912's and @Ricky336's talking points. Especially taking raw pictures will help you to work around some limitations of the small sensor, as the possibilities for targeted corrections are better. Phone cameras tend to have built-in software, that attempt to make nice-looking photos for the phone screens, but as soon as you examine the picture at 100% on a computer screen, you see many artefacts introduced by the camera filter program. Pictures are probably good enough for Facebook and Instagram but not for stock use.

And: don't forget, it's not always the camera, but the person using the camera. If you know the strengths and weaknesses of your system, you may be able to work around.

Another point to consider is that if you take photos with the iPhone - it saves it as a compressed file - HEIC or JPEG.

As this compresses the file to save space, the quality is reduced - (despite what is said to be High Quality). To get around this problem, you have to install a camera app such as Adobe Lightroom camera, which can take DNG. This is without compression, so better to work with a raw file in post-production and use a raw file converter such as Adobe Lightroom. The downside is that it takes more space! And it takes more work! And it is not as user-friendly because DNG has to be converted to JPEG for social media and Adobe Stock. But you have the choice of what compression method to use!

There are pros and cons to using DNG.

Adobe Stock accepts images taken on any device, as long as they meet their stringent critieria.

https://helpx.adobe.com/stock/contributor/help/photography-illustrations.html

While it is not impossible to get great stock photos with your phone, you will face a few extra challenges due to the small sensor size on the camera phones.  Ideal conditions and great lighting will be best when using your phone as this will limit the amount of automatic processing your phone does on your images.  Also, set your images to the highest resolution possible and take control of the manual settings rather than letting the phone make the automatic decisions for you.

Good luck with your submissions.  I hope this helps.