Rejected due to technical issues

[bsinc1962]

I submitted quite a few images yesterday and about a third of them came back as rejected due to technical issues. Of course there's no explanation of what those issues are. I've attached 3 of them as examples. The ones I attached here have watermarks but the submitted ones did not so before anyone points that out I wanted to clarify that. 

Any thoughts?

[RALPH_L · Accepted solution]

Hi @bsinc1962 , I think your owl is not focused. The moose is a very nice photo but it needs to be sharpened and you need to do some noise reduction in the background. I would also remove the unnatural object in the upper right corner.

[bsinc1962]

Thanks for the reply. The Owl is actually tack sharp. 

The Moose is also tack sharp and has been run through both Topaz Sharpen and Denoise.

[Nancy OShea]

That means 2/3 were accepted which is very good.  🙂

Increase magnfication to 250% to see the problems, particularly around the eyes. 

[Abambo]

The picture of the owl posted here is not sharp. The picture is 2500x2500pixels. The needles on the tree are sharper than the feathers and eyes of the owl.

The moose exposes some indication of over sharpening and/or excessive noise reduction. The problem with sharpening is that the algorithm can overdo and that may be the "masking" problem. Denoising is a problem as it eliminates also details. 

For pictures that are not shot under the best conditions (high ISO, big tele lens, ...) getting two thirds accepted is great.

[Jill_C · Accepted solution]

Zoom in to the owl image that you uploaded here at 100% and look at the eyes; they're most definitely not tack sharp. Have you uploaded a down-sized image for us to review? It actually looks somewhat pixelated when I zoom in.

[bsinc1962]

Thanks for the reply. It shouldn't be a downsized image but I'll check.

Thoughts on the Moose? 

[Jill_C]

I like the moose image, though I think the focus on his face could have been a bit sharper; I find that a touch of PS Smart Sharpen is sometimes enough. There are black shadows around the edge of the left rack of horns - perhaps a masking error? And the right rack is out of focus.

[bsinc1962]

The right rack is probably out of focus due to shooting wide open at 210mm
from about 40 feet away. IMO eyeball sharpness is generally a pretty
important quality.
No masking was performed on this image.
The iso was 4500 as it was still quite early.

Hard to believe that the front antler is the technical flaw with this image
but who knows as they didn't say.

[Test Screen Name]

And Adobe WILL NOT say. Their image reviewers are set up to get through thousands of images. They click accept or one of the reject buttons and the job is done. There is no review or appeal; it would not be cost effective. As a supplier to Adobe, those are the terms, and not everyone can do business that way.

The people here are not from Adobe but they are often contributors. It is NO USE ARGUING WITH THEM. If they say there is a problem, then you can expect Adobe reviewers to take a similar view (allowing for margins of human error and subjectivity).  THREE people have told you your photo has focus issued. (I have not looked). What you need to learn is the Adobe moderators view of the world, so you can deliver what they like to see.

Adobe's customers expect absolute perfection, and Adobe don't mind throwing out millions of great shots in the search for what they believe their customers want. This a particular problem for wildlife shots; do not expect any allowance for the time of day, rarity of the shot etc. etc.

[bsinc1962]

I'm not arguing with anyone. The two shots I uploaded just happened to be easily accessible on my cloud account to use as examples. My question is somewhat related to the randomness of what gets rejected and what doesn't. There were photos that I considered borderline that I was unsure about getting accepted that got accepted. Along with photos that I was surprised got rejected.

One of the pictures that got rejected was a close up of an Osprey. This same photo not only won a large photo contest a few years back but has appeared on the cover of a wildlife magazine with a pretty substantial subscription base. The picture has been scrutinized 10 ways to Sunday but got rejected for some technical reason here. 

I know they can't give a detailed reason for every rejection due to the sheer volume of images they see but narrowing it down to say 4 or 5 areas would be helpful. It would be helpful if it said rejected due to sharpness, noise, compression, or sizing, ect. 

[Abambo]

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@bsinc1962 wrote:

I know they can't give a detailed reason for every rejection due to the sheer volume of images they see but narrowing it down to say 4 or 5 areas would be helpful. It would be helpful if it said rejected due to sharpness, noise, compression, or sizing, ect. 

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That's too much work for the moderators. They even shrank the refusal reasons. I think that Technical issues is now used for all problems related to the picture, even those that got formerly called out separatly.

There is also no "randomness" in the moderation process, but as the process is done by humans, and humans tend in one or the other direction, based on different factors, there is some scattering for images that may be appreciated one or the other way. I don't think, however, that the two pictures presented here were rejected by error.

Winning photo contests is not the same as getting the image into stock. I did organize contests for 3 years and was on the board to preselect images for topic and quality. Our quality requirements were much lower than that of stock, and the winning pictures all would have gotten a refusal here on stock.

[bsinc1962]

Interesting, thanks for the reply.




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[Abambo]

The right rack was out of focus initially but sharpening added artifacts. Your sharpening is probably a bit overdone. Parts of a picture may well be out of focus, however, if it's logical from an optical point of view.

[Ricky336]

Hello,

Tack sharp?

I also think the moose is over-sharpened. It won't compensate for soft-focused areas. The head is also important, in this case.

Basically, I think the focus isn't good. Not good enough for large prints anyway! Small screens - yes!

[bsinc1962]

Just as a follow up to put a lid on this. I decided to resubmit the photos and only 2 got kicked back this time. The 2 I put up here in this post were both accepted. Thanks to everyone who took the time to respond.