Myerson Photo Blog

For this first DIY lighting post, I decided to go uber-simple. We’ll be putting together a lighting box for shooting isolated products. It couldn’t be any easier.

Step 1: Get yourself a box.
Step 2: Don’t throw away the old vinyl liner from the shower curtain.
Step 3: Try not to cut your fingers with the utility knife.

That’s about it. I took a large box (24″ x 30″ x 24″), and cut away the top and a side. I also cut a window in the front to shoot through. Over the open top and down the open side, I draped an old vinyl shower curtain liner (My wife was kind enough to save for it me, rather than throw it away, when it became too disgusting to keep using). As you can see, I opted for the hand clamp method of connecting shower curtain to cardboard.

Inside the box is some posterboard to create my white sweep.

In the setup photo above, you can see the box setup works fine with just a single speedlight. The sample image below was shot with a single speedlight coming through the top of the box. I experimented with a two light setup - one above, and one from the side - but frankly one light does the trick here. If you can afford some noise reduction (that is, if you don’t plan on submitting to iStock, or if you plan to downsample before submitting to iStock), you can drop the speedlight power down to about 1/4 and bump up the ISO to make up for the exposure difference. That allows you to save on speedlight batteries, and have a nice fast recycle time.

The box I used allows for a set up large enough to shoot products anywhere from very small to the size of a small cat. My cat is largish and uncooperative, so you’ll see no shots of her here.  This would be a great set up for an eBay photo shoot, or even for a catalog of smallish objects. The big downside is that it’s a big box that doesn’t store well; there’s no way to collapse it down. The upside, of course, is that it was basically free because I used found objects. If I had to buy the box and the vinyl, I’d have been out maybe $15.

Back in part one of this article, we talked about some ways to help your images get found on iStockphoto. Those tips mostly centered around things you can do before you take your shot; how to plan your shoot and compose your shot to help separate from the pack. In this part, we’ll look at some techniques for after the shot is already online.

Once the image is approved and available on iStockphoto, you’ll want to maximize exposure. There are a few ways to go about this: keywords, lightboxes, and cross-promotions are the biggest ones currently available to you.

Keywords
We discussed keywords some in the first post, so I won’t spend too much time on it here. Instead, I’d like to propose a couple of great ways to help think of keywords for your images. The first is to try to find the image yourself. That is, do a search on iStock the way a customer might. Think of how a customer might start that search, what keywords might he use, which ones would he exclude with a Boolean search string. Imagine, for instance, you have an isolated shot of a toothbrush. Pretend now that you’re a customer looking for just that - an isolated toothbrush, nothing else. A search for “toothbrush” reveals 1500+ other toothbrush shots. As a customer, the first thing I might do is remove all of the shots that also include “Dentist” and “Brushing”. That brings the count down to a more reasonable 500 images, and should provide good reason to avoid using related keywords. If you had included “Dentist” and “Brushing” as keywords, your image would now be part of the 1000 images removed from my result set. Be the customer. It will help you think of words that should and should not be part of your set of terms.

The next handy tool for keywording is the Suggestinator at iStock-apps.com. It’s a simple tool that lets others suggest terms for your images. It’s easy to use, and generally reveals some pretty good options.

Finally, iStock has started to encourage keyword requests in the Critique Forum. Start a new thread there, with “:KEYWORD:” in the thread title, and get lots of great suggestions. I did it recently for this rocket ship illustration, and was rewarded with maybe a dozen new terms, all of them appropriate and accurate.

Lightboxes
Lightboxes are collections of images on iStock. There are two kinds: public and private. Public lightboxes are curated collections of files all around a specific topic, such as “Families”, “Coffee”, “Mountain Climbing”, well you name it really. Any topic that has images on iStock probably has a lightbox or two around it as well. The files in the lightboxes are the ones that the curator feels best suit the theme. They may be those images that have the most sales among the images that fit that topic, or those that have the fewest, or those that the curator likes best, or those that were contributed within a given time frame, etc. Curators are free to add whichever images they like to their lightboxes, and are really under no obligation to add any at all. If you find a public lightbox that you feel might be a good showcase for one or two of your images, send a polite sitemail to the lightbox manager and ask if they would add yours to it. Some will, some won’t. Showing up in the lightbox may help visibility, or it might have no effect at all. It’s hard to know, but early on, it’s fun to try to increase visibility, so why not go for it.

Cross-Promotion
This is a big one. Cross-promotion is simply providing customers with a link to see some more of your relevant images. In the description field of your isolated toothbrush image, you can give folks a link to see your other dental hygiene images. I wrote a pretty thorough tutorial on how to set this up for your files, which can be viewed here.

Any other great ideas for getting found on iStock? Leave me a note in the comments or send me an email, and I’d be happy to add it here!

I shot this image of a newlywed couple a few years ago. Generally, we were pretty pleased with the results, but there’s one thing about it that has bothered me from the very beginning. We shot this image with a single strobe off to camera left, reflecting some light back onto the models from the wall off to camera right. A very very yellow wall.

The yellow cast on the left side (camera right side) of the models’ faces has always kept this from being an image I can truly be proud of. It’s time to finally fix that. Using Hue/Saturation, this is one of the easiest fixes we can do.

I opened a new Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. I could have just performed the Hue/Saturation adjustment to the existing layer, but I am a firm believer in the “exit strategy” philosophy: make sure that any changes you make to the file are non-destructive, and can be undone. Or more importantly, make sure they can be partially undone, as we’ll see here in a moment.

The key to this fix is the drop down menu in Photoshop’s Hue/Saturation dialog box. Rather than adjusting the hue and saturation for the entire range of values in this image, we can use that drop down box to select just the ones we want to modify. In our case, that’s the yellow values. Select “Yellows” from the drop down, and you’ll see the color range selector at the bottom of the window will now indicate the smaller range of affected values. There are three sections to that range indicator: the left fringe, the middle bar, and the right fringe. Input values (those colors above the selection indicator) will be affected by the slider actions and become the output values indicated on the color bar below the selection indicator. Those input values above the left and right fringes will be modified to lesser degrees than those values above the middle bar - from 100% for those values immediately adjacent to the middle bar, down to 0% for those values at the end of the fringe (marked with a rhombus shaped handle).

If that last paragraph was a little kooky, try playing with the sliders yourself to see what I mean.

With the proper input value range selected, I pushed the saturation all the way up to +100. This gave me a good sense of what values would be affected. I had to tweak the fringe sliders somewhat to get the range just right. Once I did, I could start making the real edits. I dropped the saturation down, increased the lightness, and slid the hue over a few degrees to make the last traces of yellow turn more red. Here’s what that gave me:

Not bad at all, but as you can see, it took out too much of the bride’s skin tones, leaving her much too pale. This is where adjustment layers have direct adjustments beat, hands down. I just masked out the adjustment layer, to allow more of the bride’s original image coloration to pop through:

Voila! All traces of the offending yellow wall have been removed in just a few easy steps.

iStockphoto.com has become one of the largest Royalty-Free photo libraries out there. Contributors to iStock have a great opportunity to reach a global marketplace for their images. That opportunity is only great, of course, if the images can actually be found. As an image inspector for iStockphoto, I get to see thousands of images each month as they move through the inspection queue and into the collection. So how do you go about getting your image noticed in the vast sea of 2 million+ images (nearly 3 million as of this writing)?

There are no guarantees, of course, but here is the first part of a two-part series on things to consider for your images. It may not come as a great surprise to find that much of the most important work you can do to get your images found actually takes place before you click the shutter.

Don’t push into the crowded bus
You aren’t really jockeying for position against the other nearly 3 million images. You’re only up against the images that share primary keywords with your images. You may have just shot the world’s best image of an apple, perfectly isolated on an infinite white sweep. Congrats! It’s now one of over 5,000 images that comes up in a search for “Isolated Apple” on iStock. Designers will often search well beyond the first page of results to find the image they need, but even the hardiest of image researchers will hesitate to comb through over 5000 images.

Let’s say instead of “Apple” and “Isolated”, your image was “Apple” and “Fire”. Now it’s one of 19 images. That’s a much greater ratio. The downside? As of today’s writing, those 19 images have a combined download total of about 75. Not a whole lot of demand for Flaming Apples.

Your job, then, is to find that sweet spot. Look for the underserved image markets on iStock. Often all it takes is adding a key element to your image (”Fire”, in our example above). Rather than shooting an attractive model in a business suit isolated on white (and, yes, I know I’m guilty of that as well), shoot her doing something that isn’t overdone in the library. Not talking on the phone. That is overdone. Have her balancing the books. Or balancing on a tightrope. Or balancing another businessperson on her head. This, of course, has to be thought out in advance of actually creating the shot.

Keyword Thoroughly and Accurately

Each keyword you add to an image is another search under which your image will be found. It’s absolutely in your best interest to be thorough about your keywords. This image has the following terms
applied to it:

• Single Object
• Small
• White
• Toned Image
• Horizontal
• Scarcity
• Place Setting
• Plate
• Nobody
• Empty
• Dishware
• Sparse
• Green Pea
• Food
• Silverware
• Poverty
• Famine
• Hungry

You can basically break the list up into three categories: the literal, the conceptual, and the compositional.

Literal
The literal contents of the image (plate, silverware, green pea) are the easiest keywords to add. Just look in the picture and name the key elements that are in there. An important note, however, is to avoid “laundry lists”. As an inspector, I often have to reject images for keywords when they rattle off every minute detail on the image. An image of a person, for instance, probably does contain a Human Face, Human Lips, Nose, Human Eyes, etc., but if these aren’t what the image is about - if they’re not key elements of the image - don’t bother adding them.

Another point about literal keywords - consider using parent terms if they still make sense. For example, in the image above, I have “Green Pea”, and its ancestor term “Food”. What I didn’t include, however, were the parent terms between Food and Green Pea; The actual taxonomy is Food > Vegetable > Legume > Pea Family > Green Pea. “Food” makes sense for this image, as does the specific food “Green Pea”. Arguably, “Vegetable” makes sense, but I get the sense that someone searching for “Legume” or “Pea Family” is more interested in a shot more devoted to those keywords.

Conceptual
Conceptual keywords are harder to define, harder to use, and harder to inspect. This is a muddy and slippery region of the keywording landscape. I feel the image above portrays concepts such as “Hunger” and “Scarcity” pretty well. It doesn’t at all represent “Business” or “Friendship”. What about the gray areas? Agribusiness? Competition? One could probably make an argument for those words, but my feeling is that if one has to make an argument for them, they’re probably not the best candidates. Stick to the ones that you had in mind when you made the shot.

Compositional
These are the metadata of the metadata world. These terms represent the photographic details of the image more than the contents. Horizontal, vertical, diagonal, above, below, close up, wide angle, worms eye view, monochrome, cross-processed. Again, this should be a pretty easy set of terms to define and use.

Don’t Spam
Spamming is including terms that are outright incorrect, or are so stretched so thin they’ll snap. Spamming on iStock also includes incorrectly disambiguating your terms. Spammers will be drawn and quartered on sight, so don’t do it.

Be About Something
The way to achieve both of the points above is to have your image be about something. That is, before you take the shot, decide what the shot is about. Start with the concept. Be intentional about the photograph. Don’t just set out to take a picture of a tree. Decide what it is you want the picture of the tree to portray. In essence, this means preselecting a literal keyword and a conceptual keyword to describe what you’ll be shooting. Consider the following combinations of “Tree” and conceptual terms:

• “Tree” + “Childhood”
• “Tree” + “Despair”
• “Tree” + “History”
• “Tree” + “Satisfaction”
• “Tree” + “Frustration”

Could you envision an image that could be accurately keyworded with any of those combinations?
By being more intentional about your stock photography, you gain several advantages. The first is that you can actively choose to put your image in an underserved market niche. Let’s say your research shows that there are over 220,000 images of trees, but fewer than 100 also include a given conceptual keyword. If you feel as I do that that’s an available market niche, you could plan your tree shot to portray that concept. Now it’s not just a tree image, it’s a tree image about something, and what’s more, it’s one of only 100 images about that something.

Being about something also helps in the keywording phase. The conceptual keywords - that category that is often so difficult to do - is basically handled ahead of time. You have alreay decided that your tree image would portray a given concept. The keywording is guaranteed to be easy and accurate.

Finally, by deciding ahead of time what your image is about, you give yourself the ability to remove distractions and make a better image. Does that mailbox in the background really help your tree image portray “desolation”? Is that garbage at the base of the tree really the best way to show “Stately Elegance”? Stock photography is all about iconic images that read quickly. Your job (ok, one of your many jobs) is to eliminate those elements that prevent the image from being iconic.

Join us for part II of the series, which will explore those things you can (and those things you cannot) control within iStockphoto’s environment to help boost your image’s exposure.

A question that comes up periodically among new contributors to iStockphoto is “how do I attach multiple model releases to my upload?”

It’s a good question, as there is only one upload box in the interface for attaching a model release. If you upload one release using that box, then try a second, it’s only the second that gets attached.

The solution is pretty simple: Just combine your releases into a single JPG document, and upload that. Your model releases should already be JPGs; just open a new photoshop document large enough to accommodate your two (or three or four) releases, and paste them into it. I like to do mine side by side, I see lots of folks stack them vertically into a single long document. Once, when I had five or six releases all in one document,  I went one step further: I tiled them into a document 3 releases wide by two releases high, and included a reference key indicating which release went with which model. It’s not required, of course, but that little step certainly can make things nice for the inspectors.

Time for another photoshop graffiti tutorial. This time, lets look at how to turn yourself or a loved one into a 60’s socialist revolutionary icon, a la Che Guevara.

Lets dive right in. First off, we’ll need a few photos. I’ll be using this friendly face and wood fence background, both from my iStockphoto portfolio.

To begin, we’ll need to do some preparation work on the photo of the man. Just as with our previous graffiti tutorial, we’re going to want to have our graffiti look like it was stenciled on and spray painted. To do that, we’ll have to adjust the face down to one color. Photoshop provides an easy way to do this. It’s called Threshold.

I opened the image of the man and cropped it down to just the area around the face. Before I applied Threshold, I wanted to remove some of the extraneous background. The threshold function will eliminate a great many details, so it’s OK to do a rough job of isolating the subject. Besides, if we’re going for a stenciled look anyway, edge details are not too significant. Here’s what I had:

The magic “Background Eraser” tool took care of most of the isolation for me. It’s an underused tool, but it’s so useful. After isolating the subject from the background, I added a threshold adjustment layer.

The threshold adjustment turns the image into just black and white pixels. No shades of gray, no nuance, just black and white. The slider lets you determine the threshold (hence the name) at which tones are converted to black or white. Play with the slider to see what I mean.

After settling on a good level of black and white detail, I opened the Channels palette, and copied one of the channels into a new one (as the image is black and white, it doesn’t make any difference whether you choose the R, G, or B channel to duplicate).

I didn’t really like the hard-edged bottom, so I painted a few small edits in this new channel. I then inverted the colors, swapping black and white. The end result was this:

We’re almost done with the stencil preparation. I went back to the layers palette, and added a new layer filled with plain white. I went back to the channels palette and loaded the new channel as a selection. That made it so that I had a selection of the stencil, where all the pixels were white. I dragged that selection into my background (wood fence) image:

Well, as graffiti goes, that’s pretty horrible. Lets make it a little (or a lot) more believable. First off, I went into blending options and straight to the bottom of the dialog box, where it says “Blend If:”. I moved the white point slider for “This Layer” down a notch, from 255 to 254. Since all the pixels on this layer are 255/255/255 white, I only have to hide that one value to make the whole thing go blank.

Then I went into gradient overlay and added a gradient. I like to use gradients, rather than single color overlays. Nothing in real world imagery is truly one color, so nothing in my fakery should be either. The important step, then, is to set the blend mode of this gradient overlay to “Multiply”. As you can see here, that lets the background wood texture show through.

Much better.

At this point, we’ll want to make the paint look a little more stenciled. There are two things I like to do to help create that effect: paint drips and overspray.

Paint drips are just the excess bits of paint that dribble down off the bottom edges of the painted area. These can be painted on directly, or you can use some vector art or custom shapes to do the trick. I tend to paint it on, because it’s quick, and at low resolution it’s more about the impression than about the details. If this were a high res piece, intended for print, I’d probably fire off a few more credits at iStockphoto and get one of the high quality paint drip vectors there.

The other effect I like to add is overspray. This is the spray paint that hits the wall outside the far edge of the stencil. You can see the effect in a real world photo here:

And a close up of what I’m talking about:

Creating this effect in our Photoshop document is actually identical to how it’s created in the real world; we’ll make a stencil (mask) and “accidentally” paint outside it. First the stencil. I used the shape tool to make a rough rectangle around our face. I then rasterized the shape, and roughed it up some using the Liquify filter, the Blur tool, and the Smudge tool. The areas where the edge of the mask are blurry will result in blurry edges to our overspray, similar to the effect of a stencil not placed immediately up against the surface being painted on.

I made a selection of that mask, inverted it and selected a rough brush. Make sure you’re painting on your face layer, as that has the layer effects. When I paint overspray, I try to build up the corners, to help indicate where the edges of the stencil would have been. It’s easy to go overboard with this technique, so experiment to find what works.

Here are the results of the detail roughing. Yeah, I blurred part of the face as well. I think it makes it look a little more stenciled.

One final effect I like to add is a little dimensionality, by having the paint match the contours of the fence beneath it. To do this, I hid all of the layers except the fence, then went over to my channels palette. I picked the channel that had the greatest contrast between the wood surface and the black spaces between slats. For my image, that appeared to be the red channel, though that could be different for you if you used a different base image. I duplicated this channel, then gave that new channel a levels adjustment to leave me with just the black spaces between the slats (a little of the wood texture is fine as well). Invert the channel, and make a selection of it.

With the selection still active, add in a Solid Color adjustment layer, filled with white. The selection automatically becomes the layer mask. Unhide the fence and face layers so you can see what’s happening here. With our new white masked layer selected, use the arrow keys to move the white pixels over to the left. I only had to nudge it a few pixels; depending on the resolution of your image, your mileage may vary. Set this white layer’s blend mode to “Overlay”, and reduce the opacity of the layer to about 20 or 30%. You should see that the painted face now has some highlights where the wood slats round over. Now here’s the cool trick: in the layers palette, make a selection from the face layer’s pixels, invert the selection, and in the layer mask for the overlay layer, make that selection black. That will prevent the overlay from lightening the “unpainted” wood.

That’s it for this tutorial. Add a comment here and let us see how you used these techniques to turn an average Joe into a socialist icon. ¡Viva La Revolución!

Click the image for a larger view of the finished piece.

So you want your logo to appear spray painted on an urban background without the hassle of all that property destruction, huh? Here’s a simple way to get that freshly-tagged look and still stay out of lockup for the night.

First off, lets assemble some pieces. We’ll need a background image, our logo, and some assorted graffiti art. For the background image, I’ll be using this corrugated metal wall, available from iStockphoto:

The logo we’ll be using is this little number, a little vector art I created just for this occasion. You can use a vector illustration or raster art (provided it’s already big enough for your final output). I find that simpler, monochrome images work best, but you should experiment.

Lastly, I purchased a vector file from iStock as well to serve as additional image elements. Using a vector file is cool, because the art is extremely extensible - you can resize it infinitely without any kind of degradation, you can change colors, really do whatever you need, and it never loses quality. The vector I purchased was this one. Here are some of the pieces I extracted from that file (watermarked because this file is not freely available. Please purchase a copy for your own use).

Alright, let’s start. Open your background file, and paste in your logo. Rename that layer to “logo”. For the purposes of this tutorial, let’s assume that your pasted logo is a single color, as is the case with the house logo. Assuming that it is, the first thing you’ll want to do is open the “Blending Options” palette for that layer. In the section labeled “Blend if…”, move the black slider for “This Layer” over a few notches. That’ll turn off everything on the logo layer that is black; in other words, all visible pixels on that layer will become invisible.

Invisible logos are not that exciting, so lets give it some style. I gave the layer a layer style of “Gradient Overlay”. I picked a nice red gradient. If you want the actual colors in my gradient, they were [178,1,1] on the left side, [210,71,64] at about the midpoint, and [210,64,64] at the right end. You could use a solid color overlay as well, but I like the subtle variation that a gradient gives. After you’ve defined your gradient, set the style’s blend mode to “Multiply”.

Now we’re getting somewhere.

This is a good start, but we’re not done yet. Next, I duplicated the logo layer, and set the new layer’s gradient style blend mode to overlay instead of multiply. I brought back that layer’s opacity to about 50%. Next I put the two logo layers into their own folder set, and set that folder’s opacity to 75%.

If we were to stop here, we’d suffer from one of the biggest problems I often see in raster-vector composite work. Namely, that the vector elements look a whole lot like they were composited in to the image. The factor that is most responsible for this is the fact that the vector elements still have those perfectly crisp edges. I don’t care how skilled a stenciler you might have had tagging your logo onto innocent surfaces, there’s no way it’s coming out that clean. So we need to rough it up a little.

Step one is to use a layer mask. I started scratching up the hard edges using some grunge brushes. You could also do it with clever application of some native Photoshop filters, but I’ll save that for a future tutorial. You’ll want to be careful at this stage. Some logos will hold up to this kind of distressing better than others. Besides that, some clients may have very specific requirements as to what can and cannot be done with their logos. I’ve done work for clients who wouldn’t even allow the 3-degree rotation I applied to our little house icon.

The next stage of roughing it up is to use those vector spray paint splotches we licensed. Again, bring them into Photoshop as black pixels. Be sure to put the splotch layer into the same folder as the logo; that will ensure that the layer mask we created before applies to the paint splotches as well.

We’ll once again hide the black pixels and replace them with a gradient fill as we did for the logo. The way to do that, this time, is to right click on the logo layer (the first one, not the copy), and select “Copy Layer Style”. Then right click on the paint splotch layer and select “Paste Layer Style”. The specifics of where to put the splotches and how opaque to make this layer will depend greatly on your file. It’s easy to go overboard with paint splotches, so experiment and see what works best for you.

That’s all there is to it! Urban flair without any incriminating paint on your fingertips!

One of the best ways to market your stock photography on iStock is to provide buyers with links to similar images. Many iStockers group together similar images; those using the same models, those taken at one iStock event, those that fall within a certain theme (like “My Coffee Images”, “My Business Images”, “My Colonoscopy Images”, etc.). Lacking any hard data (or even soft data) to support this claim, I’ll go ahead and pretend that setting up links to similar images has accounted for 32.8% of all my sales. Why not?

A lot of iStockers - especially those new to the game - have trouble with the code and setup required to do something like this. Fear not, amigos, I’m here to help. In general, I’d say there are three methods available to the iStockphoto contributor for this kind of job. These are the one-off, the private lightbox, and the search.Before we dive into these, though, lets take a minute to discuss code. Since each of the methods discussed here involves providing a link, we’d better learn how to do that. iStock uses a method called UBB to allow contributors to write code. UBB code uses tags in [square brackets] to indicate that the browser should display something special, like links. The way to tell UBB to generate a link is with the [URL] code. In its general form it looks like this:
[url=http://www.something_or_other.com/directory/page].

It has a matching end tag that looks like this: [/url]. Between those two tags, you put the text that you want to become linkified. So, if you write code like this:
[url=http://www.myersonphoto.com]Myerson Photo[/url]

You’d wind up with this:
Myerson Photo

Simple, no? Images work in a similar way. You have an open tag and a close tag: [img] and [/img]. Between those, you’d place the url of your image. The fun comes when you create an [img] inside the open and close tags of an [url]. So let’s get started:

The One-Off
The one-off is nothing more than a link to one specific picture in your description. This would be useful if you have two variants of an image; a black and white version and a full-color one, for instance. Or a horizontal crop vs. a vertical one. For each image, you’d provide a link to the other. The link in this case would go directly to the image detail page for the other image. That would look like this:
[url=http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=1788872] My Other Cool Image [/url]
Alternatively, you can use an image in place of the “My Other Cool Image” text, using the [img]...[/img] code, above. The image you use can be anything. You may use an image in your own web hosting space, in some free image hosting place, or on iStockphoto itself. If I were linking directly to image #1788872, as above, I’d probably use that image itself:
[url=http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=1788872] [img]http://www1.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/1788872/2/istockphoto_1788872_book_afire.jpg[/img] [/url].

What the h*ck?! Where did that nonsense inside the [img] tags come from? Pretty easy. I just right clicked on the iStock thumbnail for the image, and selected “Copy Image Location” (I’m using FireFox. If this were IE, I’d right-click and select “Properties”. The URL of the image would show up in that window).

The Private Lightbox
Lets say you want to link not to one other image, but to a whole lightbox of images. This would be useful to showcase all of your images that feature the same model. The crux of what you do - URL tags surrounding an image or some text - is the same. The devil, as they say, is in the details. This time, you’ll use a different URL inside the URL tags.

Firstly create your lightbox. Throw any and all of your pertinent images in there. I’m going to take this opportunity to get up on my lightbox soapbox for a minute. The collection of images that you put into this lightbox represent a perfect opportunity to use a PRIVATE LIGHTBOX. Private lightboxes are just like public lightboxes. The only real distinction is that they won’t be found in a lightbox search. This is a good thing. Your collection of your images should not be searchable. Never fear; It’s still viewable by the public. All you have to do is tell people how to get to it, which is precisely what we’re doing here.

That said, create your private lightbox and view it. See all those swell images in there? Nice work. Go to the address bar of your browser and copy the location. Paste that into your [url=] tag, and you’ve linked to the lightbox. Nice work. An example of that would look like this:
[url=http://www.istockphoto.com/file_search.php?action=file&lightboxID=569463] All Pictures of Jamie [/url].

Alternatively (as you well know by now) I could use an image instead of text:
[url=http://www.istockphoto.com/file_search.php?action=file&lightboxID=569463] [img]http://www1.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/1277389/1/istockphoto_1277389_businesswoman.jpg
[/img][/url].

That second example ends up looking like this:

The Search
The final methodology for grouping and linking images is my favorite. The search is cool because it automatically updates itself anytime you upload a new image that belongs in it. You don’t even have to maintain a lightbox. It’s what I use to group and link my business pics, my coffee pics, my book pics, my school supplies pics, you name it. Because it’s based on iStock’s keywords and search capabilities, it is self maintaining. If I upload a new school supplies image tomorrow, it’ll be found by my school supplies link as soon as it’s approved and active. It takes a little more knowledge than the other methodologies, but nothing we can’t handle.

The first step here is to view your own portfolio. While you’ve got all your images returned, do a “search within” to return just the images you’ll want linked in this method. You might have to do a Boolean search to get just what you want (”books not library”, for instance, or “books and prayer”). Once you’ve got the search, and it returns the right images from your portfolio, copy the URL from the browser’s address bar. You’ll see a lot of stuff in that address, including a couple of key elements: “userID=xxx”, “within=1″, and the search terms you used. You may see a lot of weird characters as well - percent signs, plus signs, and numbers. These are just the HTML URL way of displaying parentheses, dashes and other such characters that have a way of confusing browsers. Don’t sweat it. You should be able to copy the address wholesale and copy it into the [url] tags as above. By now you should be an expert.

I hope these little management tips have been helpful. Happy iStocking!

A lot of folks first getting into digital imaging get tripped up on the concept of DPI - dots per inch - or resolution. I’ve been asked before, “What kind of resolution should I be looking for in a camera?”. On the iStockphoto forums, we often hear frustrated buyers ask why an image was 240 DPI instead of 300 DPI. The issue can be confusing at first, but I promise it’s all pretty simple once you get past an important initial understanding:

DPI is arbitrary.

That’s right. It doesn’t matter a whit. It may seem unintuitive. After all, isn’t more resolution better? Isn’t a high-res image priced higher on iStockphoto than a low-res image?

Lets look at some definitions. First off, there’s DPI itself. That’s Dots Per Inch. It represents, as you might expect, the number of dots in each inch of image. The Dots? Another definition. Dots are pixels, the smallest “atomic” unit of a digital image. Each pixel is a point of color. Together these points of color make up an image.

Lets look at a digital image. Take this small shot of a geek. It’s 400 x 400. That is, 400 pixels high and 400 pixels wide. If you were to open this image in Photoshop or similar image editing software, you’d be able to zoom in. And again. And again. Zoom in until you’re viewing this image at 1600x magnification. When you do that, it’s a piece of cake to see the individual pixels (each now as big as a block in this magnification).

So how big is this image? Sure it’s 400×400, but is that as big as a postage stamp? A postcard? A poster? Well, that’s where DPI comes in. When you print this image, your printer will output it at a given resolution, or DPI. That is, your printer will print a certain number of dots per inch. Most desktop printers these days will output somewhere between 300 and 1200 dots per inch. Professional service bureaus may output files as high as 2400 DPI.

That output DPI tells you how large our geek image would be. Lets say we’re using the image in a newsletter, printed at the local copy shop on a laser printer, output at 600 DPI. Our 400 pixel image would be 2/3 inch output at that resolution (400 dots @ 600 dots/inch = 400/600 = 2/3 inch).

2/3 inch is not a very big photo in our newsletter. What can we do? A few things, actually. We can lower the output resolution to 300 DPI. For a newsletter on typical bond paper, there won’t be a noticeable difference between 300 and 600 DPI. Making that change, our little geek grows up to 1.3 inches (400/300). Another option is to use a larger source image. iStockphoto (the only source for that geek image) sells it as large as 2850 x 4230 px. That’s significantly larger. You can also interpolate the image up to a higher pixel count, but that’s not a great idea (and besides, that’s a topic for a future tutorial).

When preparing your files for print, it’s best to match the image DPI to the final output DPI. This is a simple matter in Photoshop. Under the Image menu, select Image Size. From the dialog box that pops up, enter the desired DPI in the resolution box. Be sure to uncheck the “Resample Image” option. That will keep the pixel dimensions the same, and modify just the nominal DPI value. You’ll see what changes is the “Width” and “Height” values. They will decrease as DPI increases, and vice versa.

I hope this introduction to DPI has made some sense. Please feel free to leave a comment in the comment section if I’ve left anything unclear.