Noisy Images/JPEG Quality/Stock Sites

[JuSlaughter]

Hey All

I've recently applied to upload images to Istock and have had several sample images rejected because of noise or JPEG artifacts. What I want to know is are they being ultra-picky or do my images have too much "crap" in them for one reason or another.

Below is a 100% crop of a shot I took yesterday in the fog. Is this overly noisy or am I doing something fundatemaly wrong?:oops:

[DAMphyne]

It has noticable artifacts in the grey area. Jpegs show up the worse in open, single color areas. Everyone here is gonna tell you to shoot RAW and save in Tiff format, so as not to get artifacts.Try selecting the grey area and using a gausian blur, you'll see what the artifacts are doing to your photo. Of course, that's not the "fix" to your photo, but it will give you some idea of what they are referring to.

[JuSlaughter]

I always shoot in RAW but save to JPEG as thats what most sites want. I'll try your suggestions, thanks very much

[Twitch1977]

NeatImage, NoiseNinja or Noiseware would take care of that noise in about 5 seconds. I don't know about the following two but you can get a free 'home use' version of NeatImage on their site. ( http://www.neatimage.com/ ).

It's the one I use, I don't know if it's the best but it seems to get the job done for me.

Kurt

[PhotosGuy]

It doesn't look that bad to me as a web image. I'm guessing that a full resolution shot does look better?

ISO 200-6400 20D Tests (http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=269964)

[JuSlaughter]

Kurt, I'll give that a try. If its free, theres no reason not to i suppose.