iPhone RAW pictures and QC

[orest]

Good morning, dear forum members.

Since my iPhone X supports RAW, I only use the Lightroom CC App to shoot and edit my pictures.

The results after saving edited RAWS as JPEGs are incomparably better.

100% crop shows details I could never achieve by shooting JPEGs directly.

Does anyone of you upload iPhone pictures to Alamy and if yes, is this a problem for QC?

 

Full size: https://www.dropbox.com/s/tu98e6qn1ifyc0f/2.jpg

 

Full size: https://www.dropbox.com/s/by12eotw0y95ebt/3.jpg

 

 

Full size : https://www.dropbox.com/s/2cmrvfo9ah7sh0d/1.jpg

 

Thank you and Kind Regards

Orest

[Sally]

No, ‘cos you can’t uload to Alamy. Only to Stockimo, and this forum is only for the former. 

[MariaJ]

AFAIK, photos from your phone are not suitable for alamy's main image library.  But you can check out their other avenue for such images:

 

https://www.stockimo.com/

 

 

[Joseph Clemson]

Uploading camera phone images through the normal Alamy route is a definite non-starter and a certain QC fail. You need to look for the Stockimo app which offers an alternative route to Alamy and a different QC system.

[TeeCee]

Whether you shoot RAW or jpeg in this matter is irrelevant, it's sensor size that dictates the matter.
To get the quality that Alamy can sell itself on, think in terms of a 1" sensor as an absolute minimum. Anything smaller (all phones, all superzoom cameras etc etc) are an automatic fail.

As said above, you can use S'mo for your Iphone pictures.

[Ed Rooney]

But thank you, Orest, for the look at the lovely images of your beautiful native land. 

 

I shoot both RAW and jpegs, by the way, and have never had a QC fail on a jpeg from my Sonys. 

 

Edo

[MDM]

Alamy  tend to change their guidelines about suitable cameras every now and again, trying to keep up with the changing times. The most recent guidelines specifically mention the iPhoneX and other high end phone cameras as still being unsuitable so that is basically the bottom line. That said I don't think there is any requirement to include EXIF data apart fron the first upload (unless that has changed recently) so one would have to wonder how many phone images have actually passed QC (I am not suggesting you do this).  

 

Looking at your 3 images at full size on Dropbox, then I would say that the top one is very good for a phone picture although the sky is perhaps a bit noisy.  You could improve this by downsizing or even better by taking it into Photoshop and blurring it very gently. The second one is also very good although there is a bit of colour noise evident in the shadow area of the mushroom. I don't know if this would fail QC in itself. 

 

However, the third image above would be heading straight for QC failure as there is a very high level of noise in the shadow area on the left side where you have clearly opened up the shadows way too much. The sky is also a bit noisy but I don't know if this level of noise would be unacceptable - I don't tend to test this out myself. 

 

 

[Thyrsis]

Orest, you have posted links to 3 large unwatermarked images onto a public forum! 

Once you have the answers to your query I would suggest you delete them?

[Matt Ashmore]

3 hours ago, MariaJ said:

AFAIK, photos from your phone are not suitable for alamy's main image library.  But you can check out their other avenue for such images:

 

https://www.stockimo.com/

 

 

 

And if images get accepted by Stockimo then they end up.... in Alamy's main image library....

 

I personally think that Alamy should really drop the supported camera thing and judge images on their own merit. I think the supported camera idea is likely a mechanism for filtering images that are not suitable more easily.. but camera technology (be it embedded in a phone) has moved forward greatly. I know that Alamy still call out the latest iPhones as being unsuitable but i do sometimes wonder why given that images accepted through Stockimo end up in the Alamy collection anyway.

[Niels Quist]

7 minutes ago, Matt Ashmore said:

 

And if images get accepted by Stockimo then they end up.... in Alamy's main image library....

 

I personally think that Alamy should really drop the supported camera thing and judge images on their own merit. I think the supported camera idea is likely a mechanism for filtering images that are not suitable more easily.. but camera technology (be it embedded in a phone) has moved forward greatly.

 

Yes, but mobile phones often sharpen images a lot - probably more difficult to re-edit for the buyer.

[Matt Ashmore]

9 minutes ago, Niels Quist said:

 

Yes, but mobile phones often sharpen images a lot - probably more difficult to re-edit for the buyer.

 

As true as that might be, once accepted through Stockimo, the images appear in Alamy.. so once it gets to Alamy, how does the customer know any different (apart from if they are clever enough to notice that the Image ID starts with an 'S' and that 'stockimo' is listed as one of the tags).

 

Looking at the top image posted by the OP at 100%, I am inclined to think that it is a bit soft for Alamy's normal QC and also has noise in the sky and maybe this is Alamy's point.

[orest]

42 minutes ago, Matt Ashmore said:

 

Looking at the top image posted by the OP at 100%, I am inclined to think that it is a bit soft for Alamy's normal QC and also has noise in the sky and maybe this is Alamy's point.

 

That's maybe the point yes.

Although I can see a lot of SLR pictures here, which are simply terrible.

Including much more dramatical problems than a noise.

I ask myself how did they pass QC  

[wiskerke]

19 minutes ago, orest said:

Although I can see a lot of SLR pictures here, which are simply terrible.

Including much more dramatical problems than a noise.

I ask myself how did they pass QC  

 

You mean something like this?

 

Firstly all images that come in through other agencies are not being checked.

There is a route for archival images, that can be really really bad, but are accepted anyway. Those do have a warning on their zoom page:

This image could have imperfections as it’s either historical or reportage.

Although in the past this warning has been more visible.

 

This is not an exceptional find. I found it while searching for "tree" this morning and clicking the new tab. Because of the strange result, I clicked on to the next page and this is on page 2 so was probably uploaded yesterday.

The bad quality and the sort of description suggests a sort of automated process maybe an automated upload even.

The contributor or the agency (the name is rather generic) has 238,668 images on Alamy. Most seem quite interesting and quite saleable btw.

It could even be this is only one pseudonym of someone with many pseudonyms.

I suspect he/she or this agency is doing quite well, why otherwise bother to upload this massive amount?

 

Anyway for this archival route one has to apply, and it's not meant as an upload route for phone images.

There are however agencies on Alamy that have mostly phone images (like RooM) so that could be a route if you're in this line of photography.

Images by agencies even phone images do not get a warning on their zoom page.

 

Thank you for uploading those images btw. I'm much for it, and have done it myself here on a number of occasions.

The image quality is quite good, but a bit rough.

The sensor is 7.01 mm x 5.79 mm (40.6 mm2) =  a 1/2.5"  but dpreview claims the active part is only only 5.6 x 4.2 mm which would mean a 1/3.5"-type chip. (teardown)(dpreview)

The images from my RX100's sometimes require a day or more work in Photoshop and they're 13.2 x 8.8mm = a 1"-type chip.

 

A lot of the image quality in phones comes from smart algorithms filtering the image hence the term computational photography.

I wonder what the original images are. In the mean time I propose this quick edit for your 1.jpg: Untagged-jpg. sRGB-jpg.

Both Dropbox; use the download button - not right-click download-as (because Dropbox uses it's own screen conversion). Load in a layer above 1.jpg and toggle on or off.

Differences: color noise; sharpness. These will be better if done from the original RAW. The blotchy sky would probably need additional work.

Sharpness applied twice: once in ACR (sky masked out) and once USM painted in. The brighter buildings could do with some additional work too, but this is a quick under 10 min fix.

As always be very careful with sharpening as some clients are still clever enough to use output sharpening as their last edit and others will just throw the image in their CMS which will usually apply a hefty amount of sharpening. If the image is sharpened too much to begin with, it will now fall apart totally.

So a good check is always to apply the default Sharpen filter in Photoshop after the edit is complete.

In this case I must confess my edit of 1.jpg has now gone just slightly too far at 100% (which is the requirement): after the Sharpen filter it's over sharpened, however still not falling apart.

So QC is actually still right even with the iPhone X under the best of conditions.

 

If this would be a really important image, that could not be repeated, I could think of ways to circumvent the phone ban. But otherwise I would not bother. My guess is that under worse conditions the image quality will go down quickly.

 

wim

[Bill Brooks]

I would suggest to orest that he takes his images on the highest quality camera available. His examples are images I would take on a high quality camera. However there is always room to take images on a barely suitable camera, if that is all you have on you at the time.

 

The best camera to use, is the one you have on you.

 

I use a Canon 5Ds most of the time, but a cell phone size Sony DSCRX100 old version 1 some of the time.

 

I am watching smartphone technology because I think it will soon be ready for prime time.

 

Thanks to orest for initiating some interesting discussions
 

[mickfly]

18 hours ago, wiskerke said:

 

You mean something like this?

 

Firstly all images that come in through other agencies are not being checked.

There is a route for archival images, that can be really really bad, but are accepted anyway. Those do have a warning on their zoom page:

This image could have imperfections as it’s either historical or reportage.

Although in the past this warning has been more visible.

 

This is not an exceptional find. I found it while searching for "tree" this morning and clicking the new tab. Because of the strange result, I clicked on to the next page and this is on page 2 so was probably uploaded yesterday.

The bad quality and the sort of description suggests a sort of automated process maybe an automated upload even.

The contributor or the agency (the name is rather generic) has 238,668 images on Alamy. Most seem quite interesting and quite saleable btw.

It could even be this is only one pseudonym of someone with many pseudonyms.

I suspect he/she or this agency is doing quite well, why otherwise bother to upload this massive amount?

 

Anyway for this archival route one has to apply, and it's not meant as an upload route for phone images.

There are however agencies on Alamy that have mostly phone images (like RooM) so that could be a route if you're in this line of photography.

Images by agencies even phone images do not get a warning on their zoom page.

 

Thank you for uploading those images btw. I'm much for it, and have done it myself here on a number of occasions.

The image quality is quite good, but a bit rough.

The sensor is 7.01 mm x 5.79 mm (40.6 mm2) =  a 1/2.5"  but dpreview claims the active part is only only 5.6 x 4.2 mm which would mean a 1/3.5"-type chip. (teardown)(dpreview)

The images from my RX100's sometimes require a day or more work in Photoshop and they're 13.2 x 8.8mm = a 1"-type chip.

 

A lot of the image quality in phones comes from smart algorithms filtering the image hence the term computational photography.

I wonder what the original images are. In the mean time I propose this quick edit for your 1.jpg: Untagged-jpg. sRGB-jpg.

Both Dropbox; use the download button - not right-click download-as (because Dropbox uses it's own screen conversion). Load in a layer above 1.jpg and toggle on or off.

Differences: color noise; sharpness. These will be better if done from the original RAW. The blotchy sky would probably need additional work.

Sharpness applied twice: once in ACR (sky masked out) and once USM painted in. The brighter buildings could do with some additional work too, but this is a quick under 10 min fix.

As always be very careful with sharpening as some clients are still clever enough to use output sharpening as their last edit and others will just throw the image in their CMS which will usually apply a hefty amount of sharpening. If the image is sharpened too much to begin with, it will now fall apart totally.

So a good check is always to apply the default Sharpen filter in Photoshop after the edit is complete.

In this case I must confess my edit of 1.jpg has now gone just slightly too far at 100% (which is the requirement): after the Sharpen filter it's over sharpened, however still not falling apart.

So QC is actually still right even with the iPhone X under the best of conditions.

 

If this would be a really important image, that could not be repeated, I could think of ways to circumvent the phone ban. But otherwise I would not bother. My guess is that under worse conditions the image quality will go down quickly.

 

wim

309,000 images from that contributor, with badly scanned descriptive text as well. 
Why would they want these in their library?

[wiskerke]

20 minutes ago, mickfly said:

309,000 images from that contributor, with badly scanned descriptive text as well. 
Why would they want these in their library?

 

Because it somehow pays their bills.

 

wim