Twilight Photo Rejected for "Exposure Issue"

[brandonv91940649]

Hey all, still new to being a Stock contributor and am learning some of the things to watch out for, including rejections for making images too stylized. This one, however, I can't figure out. It's a twilight cityscape, which was rejected for "Exposure Issues" (obviously my watermark was not in the submitted version. There's a full histogram and the exposure looks correct to me, based on the time of day and the look and feel I was going for. Blacks aren't really clipped anywhere and highlights are under control as well. Does an actual human always review these, or are they sometimes put through an automated scrubbing process that checks the histogram or something?

What would you recommend to make this image compliant? I took special care to remove all brand names and trademarks in post, but I don't want to overdo an exposure bump and have it look stupid.

[Szalam]

It looks a touch dark. I mean, I would still think it was usable because someone could bump the exposure up themselves however they wanted (this is Adobe Stock after all, so folks are using it in Photoshop...)

However, I could see a human marking as too dark if they are having to blow through thousands of photos a day and I could definitely see a computer algorithm picking it as too dark.

[brandonv91940649]

Thanks, good to have a second set of eyes on it. Which elements do you think are too dark specifically? I can brighten the sky just by raising the blue luminance values. If it's the freeway area below, I could throw a gradient adjustment on there. I'm hesitant to make the buildings much brighter since, like I said, it was shot at twilight. It's too bad we can't submit multiple styles and let the mods choose which one they think is most suitable.

[Szalam]

The areas under the bridges are a touch too dark to my eyes.

I think, if the sky were darker, everything else would look brighter by comparison. Right now, it almost looks like a too-dark daytime shot. I bet if you darken the sky, that nighttime context would help everything else look more appropriate.

[KathleenMadeline]

Or just brighten up the overpass areas.