Shutterstock Photographer Forum :: View topic

stockshooter · Joined: 20 Mar 2005 Posts: 3

Well I'm new, so please don't take this the wrong way ... I'd say do what ever you want in your effort to learn photoshop or for your personal enjoyment, but I just don't think it is worth the effort to try and make that into a saleable photo.

The goat is cute. What justified did in the last example is fantastic ... but I'm just not sure the return on your investment of time is worth the effort. Unless things are different here than other places I've tried ... goats just aren't the hottest selling type of stock image.

I don't mean to diminsh your enthusiasm, and I damn sure know what it is like to get so attached to an image that I spend way more time working on it than I should have (perhaps that is the trait I'm recognizing in myself). :-)

My advice would be to learn from your original image about how you would shoot it differently if you had the chance to do it over. Best of luck either way.

StuartE · Posted: Sun Mar 20, 2005 1:25 am

As an exercise in learning 'how', for the future when you need to know, this kind of stuff is great - but I'm in full agreement that I can see better uses of someone's time than trying to get the 'best' out of that particular goat shot - problem is, without obsessing over one or two shots, and trying to get the most from them, you don't learn how to do it next time, either... I look back at some of the stuff I did four years ago and cringe - hey, I can do that with stuff I did six months ago, too - but it's all part of a learning cycle that has got me to the stage of when my wife looks at the family portrait and says "can't you fix that and put a better background in...", I can - and hence all the time I spend on the computer is justified... :-)

Cheers,
Stuart

Justified · Joined: 20 Feb 2005 Posts: 22

I agree, no point spending days fixing a picture that may not get the returns, but as Stuart says, if you treat it a self tutorial, you will learn a lot and the time will come when a great picture that could potentially sell like hot-cakes needs a bit of tweaking to make it perfect, then you will already have that knowledge and the time spent working things out will be a lot less.