Today is going to be fun I hope – I’m going to show you how I edit.  I don’t claim it’s the ONLY way.  I’m not even sure it’s the BEST way.  But it’s fast.  REALLY fast.

This image was shot over grey instead of white because I like the flexibility of being able to isolate on white OR having some texture to a background if I want to colorize the available texture with some sort of blend mode.  For stock, I’d always turn this white though and let the buyer decide what to do with it later.

The entire edit ends up taking less than 2 minutes.  You can add another 15 seconds because after I finished recording I realized his shirt had a few small mistakes on the edge so I cleaned it up.  At any rate, editing at this speed would give you 30 images per hour or slightly under.  At even 20 images an hour, you could edit 100 images in 5 hours.  That would be quick and gives you 3 hours of “work day” to keyword, upload, push and submit those 100 images.  People have asked me before how I plan to sub 100 a day – this is the general idea.  Of course some days you have to shoot.  Some days you don’t get 100 edited and subbed.  Heck, MOST days I don’t.

Every trick you can learn will help you.  The difference in 10 images per hour and 15 is also the same as 1000 online vs 1500 or 10,000 vs. 15,000.  The difference in 5 images per hour and 30 is 6x your income each month.  Speed IS necessary.

Click the photo above for the video on what I did.  There’s no audio – it’s a visual process.  Tools used:

• Wand – grab the grey background.
• Lasso – select and unselect with shift and alt after the initial selection has been made.
• Feather 1, backspace – clear the grey background.
• F5 – custom action for curves.  Just brightens it up 2 steps.  I undid one to find a happy balance.
• [ and ] to resize the brush.
• Dodge/highlights around the hair.
• Eraser to trim unclean edges.
• Contrast for skin tone.
• Clone for the logo.
• Brush – for the screwdriver (alt-clicked the color nearby to grab it)
• Smart sharpen – 60/1.3 I think.
• After the vid ends, I also used clone on the edge of the shirt a bit.

To show you what my 2 minutes did, I’ve uploaded a watermarked version of this finished image to here.  One of my next goals is to upload some actual Photoshop tutorials – one using only the keyboard, NO mouse.  One as a speed drill and whatever else you guys want.

Recently accepted image

Not only are we back, thanks to Google Cache so are most of our posts.  This time we have a harddrive backup instead of just online database backups.  New look to the site too – I’ve been working out bugs but let me know if you find anything that needs fixing.  I’m all about improvements so Im interested in your thoughts.

Back to microstock we go.  I recently submitted and had new images approved across pretty much every site.  Not many but something to start with.   I landed an EL on SS so that really helped.  I’m hoping to finish the month strong as it hasn’t been the greatest month for us.  I’m editing photos for models from the trip now and then I can start doing them for myself – final tweaks & such.  I can’t wait!  I still hope to have 2000 new approved images by 12/31 but people are starting to think I’m nuts.  We’ll see!

In news – Getty opened submissions for IStock Exclusive SILVER members.  Good news for them.  Bad news for those who oppose exclusivity.

We’re in the process of demo-ing LookStat so we’ll see how that goes.  So far so good – I tried to “break” their security on a simple level and Rahul actually emailed me telling me about it.  I wasn’t “amazed” they knew – but pleasantly surprised they’re taking security very seriously, as do I.  I’m going to give him a few more tests over the next week or so and we’ll see how it goes.

So, you’re using Image Manager to upload to IStock?

1) Shoot yourself in the head because it’s less painful.

2) Go to http://www.deepmeta.com and download the program.

There’s a reason I hated uploading to Istock – it was plain & simple a pain in the butt.  With a 20 per…whatever…limit, you never had a good way to know when to submit more, how many slots you had free, etc.

Deep Meta changes a LOT about the way IStock will work for me.  I can simple add images (not simple in IM – you had to add them one by one!)  Then categorize, add to queue and upload.  Deep Meta will submit as many as you can submit (my limit is 20 right now).  Then, when you get your emails from Istock about those images, simply enter the program, press F5 to refresh data, it’ll update your statuses of those images, and press “upload” again – all the other images you queued are ready to go!  You could have 500 in queue ready to push, all categorized, etc.  VERY simple!

Deep Meta tracks a lot of IStock stats but I’m really mainly concerned with getting my images online and Deep Meta makes that SO much easier.  So thank you to the creator(s)!  I love it!!

So I read about this program, Cushy Stock, on Microstock Diaries.  I had heard the name in the past but thought it was just another agency (Shutterstock, Canstock, Bigstock, CushyStock) so I never investigated.

Well Cushy Stock is an application that will drastically speed up my workflow.  The gist of it is this:

1) You can navigate to your edited photos, keyword, describe & title them, set the status as ready to upload and then upload them to as many agencies as supports FTP at once.  Yep!  No more watching your FTPs for 10 or 15 sites.  One ap, push the button, done.  Cushy Stock also supports EPS for illustrations and most RAW formats.

2) You can track your micro finances for many big agencies (more coming soon I’d guess too!)  Right now it’s setup for IStock, Shutterstock, DT, 123RF, Bigstock, Fotolia, StockXpert, Canstock, and Crestock – again, most of what you could ever want.  No more logging in to each site 100 times a day to check balances – one application monitors them all.

3) Cushy Stock also can add keywords with a keyword generator/suggestor.  I don’t have a lot of practice with this yet but it seems to be based on DT and SS lists so it should have some validity and use.

I will post more about Cushy Stock after I own it and have given it a month or two of full testing.  I really like the program so far and hope it can speed up my workflow a lot.  I’ve uploaded almost 400 images this month and don’t want to go through it like this next month – I’m always looking for that time savings.

To get the DEMO VERSION of Cushy Stock, use this link.
To simply purchase it, use this one instead.