Stock Photo Examples April 28 2012

This weeks examples of stock photos uploaded to the main microstock sites are a mix of old and new. The new ones first – just a couple of new images for this week – obviously my creative juices must have been low! The first shot is one of a series of teeth shots with metallic fillings, taken with my ring flash adaptor:

I followed this with a shot (created from multiple images with the flash gun in different places to light the petals differently) in a cut glass vase:

I then spent some time looking at old shots that sell reasonably well, but have cluttered backgrounds. I often see cut out images in magazines and thought I could gain some extra sales by using the pen tool in Photoshop with my wacom tablet to extract the main subject and isolate it against white (or black). When you create a path in Photoshop, and then save the file to a JPEG, the path gets saved as well, and so you can let the buyers know in keywords and the description that the path is present in the file. They can very easily convert the path to a selection and immediately extract the subject. No problems with semi selected white pixels around the edge of the object. I’m told that buyers much prefer a path and will choose an image with a path over a similar one without. Here are some of the images I worked on and uploaded this week. The gasoline pumps have already sold a few times on Shutterstock:

Finally, while I was in extraction mode, I decided to replace the face of a gold watch with an image of a gold coin to really get across a wealth story. This also removes any trademark issues from the watch. The face was white and so it was relatively easy to remove that and replace it with the gold coin image: