Alamy rejected based on sharpness

I sent in my 4 test photos to Alamy and 3 out of 4 came back as "soft". Now I know they tell you not to sharpen the images any but I have found that unless I sharpen them up to 7 or 8 they don't look very good.

I took the shots with my 100-400L on my 40D. With auto focus and the IS kicking in I don't know how much more clear I can take a photo. The default setting on the 40D is sharpness at 1 I believe.

I have read some blogs about this and I see the reasoning behind having a photo too sharp, but I have to sharpen more then 1 or 2.

Anyone else run in to this? How far did you go to overcome it?

Thanks,
JJ

Are your shots actually soft? Can you post one of the rejected ones?

Here are two of them, as submitted. They were taken in RAW with sharpness set to 1.

The catus flower doesn't look the same after I resized it for the forum, but the butterfly is pretty close to how it looks.

I would normally push the sharpness up to 7 or 8 before I convert them to .JPG.

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They do look a touch soft to me. I think the problem with the butterfly is using the 100-400mm wide open at 400mm, even the very best copy of that lens would struggle to get a razor sharp image at f/5.6 on the long end (mine certainly would and it is a very good copy). I think the flower is simply suffering from a very shallow DOF with a hard to identify focal point. Try stopping down to f/6.3, I bet you see a vast improvement.

Both look soft to me, and the second one looks underexposed.

Resizing will make them look soft if you don't sharpen afterwards.
Post 100% crops of what you sent to Alamy.

Let me chime in, since I'm also interested in Alamy: in their instructions for your initial four shots, they should have all sharpening turned off and should be sized/resized to be a 48 MB tiff/large jpeg, correct? So, no in-camera/RAW sharpening applied, and they will be examining shots at 100%. Is this all correct?

They also reject oversharpened images. Your images above are soft not due to sharpening.

tonylong wrote in post #6979061
Let me chime in, since I'm also interested in Alamy: in their instructions for your initial four shots, they should have all sharpening turned off and should be sized/resized to be a 48 MB tiff/large jpeg, correct? So, no in-camera/RAW sharpening applied, and they will be examining shots at 100%. Is this all correct?

Alamy always examine at 100%

The 48M instruction seems to cause undue confusion. Its a 48MB uncompressed image (an image around 5032 x 3354 pixels). This will be a jpg image file (on disk) of around 3.5 to 5 MB, depending on the image data.

a RAW file is not sharpened in camera.

Curtis N wrote in post #6979011
Resizing will make them look soft if you don't sharpen afterwards.
Post 100% crops of what you sent to Alamy.

Depends on how you resize;some resizers give the appearance of being sharper. Please excuse me if some of my terms are a bit off, I mainly do video filtering/editing etc...

Bilinear resizing will soften images.
Bicubic resizing can look sharper or softer depending on settings.
Lanczos resizing is somewhat like bicubic but sharper, especially depending on the number of taps (lanczos 4 is rather common). For downsizing this can produce ringing.
Spline resizing is my preferred method, produces sharper images than bicubic but without a lot of ringing like lanczos.

There are more resizing methods. I use Avisynth for most of my major resizing, see herefor more info.

Apart from the obvious comment that Alamy must have a million similar images already. As the happy owner of a 100-400 I would never dream of using it these kinds of images. This is Prime lens/tripod fare.

When attemting to offer images to an image library, it is vital to believe that your image is THE BEST IMAGE YOU HAVE EVER SEEN. Because if you don't, neither will they.

If the image is run of the mill, then it must be technically perfect or will be rejected.