Artifacts and Noise

[duanec98491816]

Just looking for some opinions on the reasons this might have been rejected for artifacts and noise problems. I'm viewing it at 300% and don't see much if any grain.  My understanding of artifacts is they show up as color aberrations along the edges of things, but I'm just not seeing them. Maybe there are other aspects I should look at. Anyway, opinions welcomed. I'm also including a very similar picture that was approved (icytreeleaves), just for comparisons sake.

[joanH]

Hello duanec98491816,

This is quite a nice photograph. I can feel the cold from the ice. Good that you have studied this work at 300% - 200 is usually enough. I will suggest that you look at the information in Adobe guidelines for Adobe Stock contributors for a better understanding of what caused this rejection. One very important thing to keep in your mind that your work should be something that another person will buy to use in their own design or background. That means a well-arranged composition the client can easily crop. I see that your background is not sharp - but it must be either completely faded or blurred out to isolate the

branch for use when cutting it out. You see the artifacts in the background. After you make a few changes in this, you may resubmit it. Here is a link to the information Adobe has posted. Best regards. JH

Read the Adobe Stock Contributor Guide  to find out:

• What buyers are looking for
• How to create content that sells
• Tips for success to make your content found
• To the right of this message are several replies to questions similar to yours. 

[duanec98491816]

Yes, thanks JH. I did read all the guides, more than once, but they just cover things at a pretty high level. Leave a lot to the imagination. Maybe I'll try blurring the background some without adding noise and see if that makes a difference. Thanks!

[ricky336]

Hello,

Firstly - "My understanding of artifacts is they show up as color aberrations along the edges of things," 

This is different. This is known as chromatic aberration and it is to do with the light entering the lens - for Adobe it is 'Technical Issues'. Artifacts are more to do with noise and JPEG compression which I think you have here.

Take note of this example - 114 % view:

and here:

This is what they are referring to I believe. In your other photo, it is not so obvious.

[duanec98491816]

Yes, I see what you are saying, it's just that in both cases what you've pointed out is the ice. That's what the picture is really all about. Without the ice, it's just a picture of of a leaf or a stem. I was wondering if they use some kind of AI for this part and it can't recognize the difference between ice and artifacts?

[duanec98491816]

Just to update, and for others who may wonder if there is anything they can in a situtation like this here's what I did. I selected the main aspect of the image (focal point) and put it on a white background (255,255,255). This time when I resubmitted it, it was accepted. I've attached the picture I resubmitted. I preferred the original image with the muted, crisp background but in this case it didn't work. So, it appears that sometimes doing extra processing works out better.

[ricky336]

It's not the ice in itself, but artifacts within the photo. It's present if you know what to look for. This is what I wanted to point out. It's present in the background. 

[duanec98491816]

@ricky I think you’ve hit upon one of the frustrating aspects of submitting photos to Adobe when you wrote “It’s present if you know what to look for.” The problem is, you’re not told what to look for and there are a lot of artifact types. I’ve read all the Adobe documentation I could find on submitting photos but none of it provides clear details about just what constitutes Artifacts. And, there are many different types of artifacts so when you get a rejection for artifacts it could be for any of them (or even a group of them), but you’re not told what it is specifically. It could be “blooming,” “pixilation,” “chromatic aberration” or any other type, or groups of types. So I’ve done some further research and here’s what I’ve found. There are at least 14 different sources of digital artifacts. The common ones are 1) Blooming; 2) Chromatic Aberration; 3)Pixilation/Jaggies/Aliasing; 4)JPEG Compression; 5) Moire; 6) Noise. (Thanks Jo Plumridge https://www.lifewire.com/avoid-artifacts-in-digital-photos-493765 ) There are also: 1) Purple Fringing; 2) Maze; 3) Sharpening Halos; 4) Luminance Noise; 5) Color Noise; 6) Posterization; 7) Channel Noise; 8) Barrell Distortion. (Thanks Russell Spears https://www.photo.net/discuss/threads/list-of-all-types-of-image-noise-and-artifacts.329761/ ) So if you get a rejection for artifacts you could potentially be staring into an abyss of 14 different potential reasons, not to mention the possibility that you could have more than one type of artifact present. It goes without saying that taking a good picture to begin with goes a long way in avoiding rejections due to artifacts. But it’s also true that with Photoshop you can fix many artifacts problems, if you only knew which were causing your photos to get rejected. So, the word “Artifact” is a wonderful catch-all for Adobe and people who grade photos, but I don’t think it’s helping the contributor community much. In fact, it’s probably even pushing up rejection rates when people submit multiple photos at one time and get multiple rejections for artifacts. It’s particularly difficult to figure out which artifact type is causing the rejection when the pictures are nearly identical and not processed to the extent of adding artifacts. Here’s an example: IcyTreeLeaves.jpg received Camera Raw Auto treatment followed by boosting the luminance to 64. It was accepted. A very similar picture (IcedOakLeaves.jpg), taken at the same time, using the same camera settings was very minimally processed using Levels only. It was rejected for Artifacts.