How to Buy Stock Pictures
by Philip Alldrit
Sooner or later, anyone who prepares articles for an ezine, newsletter, magazine or web site will find the need to illustrate their ideas and topics with a suitable picture. Including great pictures in your project can make all the difference to the way it’s received.
First thoughts are to surf the internet trying to find a picture that meets your requirements, but this is not always so easy to do, since most freeimages that are not copyrighted are usually of very poor quality, generic in nature, and may not be of the right content for your purposes. Purchasing from a stock picture library could offer professional quality images that offer a wide choice of subject matter that will enhance your efforts; also, you will have the agency’s permission to use the copyrighted image in your project without the fear of copyright infringement.
Before the internet, picture stock agencies had a roster of photographers submitting pictures for inclusion in the agencies library. The agency would then market their inventory by producing printed catalogs and searching through their library to fulfill client requests. Some of those same agencies now have web sites and offer pictures online; but the internet has also allowed individual photographers to sell and market their pictures directly and, so, there are now thousands of on-line stock picture sites to choose from.
Stock pictures are offered for licensing in two basic ways: Royalty Monitored or Royalty Free. First of all we’ll look at what is involved in the Royalty Monitored also commonly called Rights Managed method.
The Royalty Monitored license grants you non-exclusive and non-transferable use of the image for a particular purpose i.e. magazine advertising, brochure, flyer, packaging, poster, WEB site and so on. The price for using the picture is based on this usage for a given period of time and on the exposure that the picture will have, for example, regional or national; amount of media impressions, circulation, or printed quantity. If you want to use the picture for other purposes later on, then a new fee would be imposed. These fees are Royalties on using the picture. Rights Managed does not grant you exclusivity of use, the picture may be used by others at the same time, unless that is negotiated and usually a premium is charged for your exclusive use. With Royalty Monitored, one of the benefits for the user is that the agency will have a history of picture use, which can be of great importance when planning a national marketing program or to avoid using a picture your competitor has used.
Now let’s take a look at the Royalty Free license. Royalty Free does not mean the pictures are free! The Royalty Free license grants you non-exclusive and non-transferable rights to use the picture you purchase in as many projects as you like for a one-time flat fee which is based on file size (resolution) for a single picture or as a collection of pictures written to CD-ROM. There are very few restrictions on how the pictures can be used in your projects and those limitations are specified in the vendor’s Terms of Agreement and usually pertain to ownership of the picture and restrictions on reselling or transferring the picture. With Royalty Free pictures there cannot be any history of use provided by the agency, other than how many times it has been sold and in what size resolutions. But the benefits, of course, are the liberties of use with only one payment. There is the potential for a picture being overused, but one has to consider that there are literally millions upon millions of Royalty Free stock pictures now available.
Why is the price for a Royalty Free picture based on the resolution size? Well, to answer that I must first explain that, in this new digital age, pictures are resolution dependent. When you reduce the dimensions of a picture from a large size to a small size to fit your page, what you are actually doing, in fact, is throwing away pixel information to achieve the new picture size (which is why you should always make a backup copy of the image before doing this). While throwing away information to make the picture smaller iseasy, going the other way (larger) is not so easy. If an image is small in size to begin with, then making it larger will require more information to be added or else it will lose its sharpness and begin to look fuzzy and the quality will look poorer as it gets larger. This is because the few pixels of information in the picture are now being spread over a greater area. Some image-editing computer software programs can add the missing pixel information through a method of interpolation, which is based on averaging the extra pixels needed throughout the picture; however, this is not recommended for commercial purposes, because the enlargement still does not have the clarity and sharpness of an original picture taken at the correct resolution. Since higher resolution indicates a larger picture that has many more uses, the Royalty Free charge based on resolution is an appropriate remuneration for the potential of uses.
So how does one calculate how much picture resolution is needed? The resolution of a picture is determined by the amount of pixel information per inch multiplied by the dimensions which equal the file size. To keep this explanation really simple, I would say that picture usages will usually fall into two areas: print requirements or internet use. With print use, the standard is 300 dpi (dots per inch) by the finished dimensions and for computer screens the standard is 72 dpi by the finished dimensions. So, keep that in mind when ordering your picture. Most stock sites give the dimensions and resolutions available for each picture. For an exact calculation, and if you have access to an imaging program such as PhotoShop, it’s easy to go in the menu to open new image, enter the dimensions and the resolution required for your purposes, and then note the file size. If you find the picture you have just purchased is too small for your needs, you can usually upgrade for just the difference in price.
If the picture is to be used on a web site or displayed on a computer screen, keep in mind the resolution must be 72 dpi. If the resolution is greater, then the picture will display proportionately larger. For example an image that is 4” X 5” @ 150 dpi will display approximately twice as large (8” X 10”) on screen as a picture that is 4” X 5” @ 72 dpi.
Now we are ready to search the internet for a stock site that will have a picture to complement your project. You could open your favorite search engine and start by entering “Stock Pictures” then choose one of the stock agencies listed and do a refined search within that site to zero in. Or, what I think would be better approach is to refine your initial phrase and cut to the chase faster. Let’s say you need a picture of an orchid and you want it Royalty Free. Enter “stock picture + orchid + royalty free. Now you will get a list of Royalty Free stock agencies that have pictures of orchids in their inventory or, even better, Royalty Free stock picture sites that specialize in your topic.
Because the internet has created the opportunity for so many photographers to sell their work directly, there are many sites that are now specializing in a specific area of expertise such as travel pictures, underwater pictures or garden stock pictures. While the big, “have pictures of everything”, stock sites boast of having tens of thousands of pictures in their library, the actual subject categories that you are interested in, may well have fewer pictures than that offered by the smaller site that specializes in one particular subject.
Finally, some notes on the picture file format. When you purchase a picture over the internet it will most likely be delivered by email in the compressed JPEG format. This is a handy format that compresses the image, making the file size smaller for easier, faster delivery. When it’s opened it will return to its original file size. At this point you should make a copy of your picture and save it as a master-copy in a non compressed format such as TIFF. The reason for this is, when saving in a JPEG (jury photographic expert group) format, information is lost to reduce the file size. JPEG is called a lossy format. If you keep saving the image over and over in the JPEG format, it’s like making a photocopy of a copy of a copy... and the quality suffers greatly. Whereas, if you save the original as a TIFF (tag image format), which is a non-lossy format, then no information is lost and the file size (resolution) of the picture remains the same. The format of choice for internet (computer display) is JPEG. For office printing use TIFF. If you would like to have the original picture delivered as a TIFF, then usually this can be had by arranging with the seller to burn the image to a CD-ROM and then mailed to you. Some sellers, like Alldrit Studios Inc., Garden Stock Photography can upload the original TIFF image to their FTP server, where you can then access and download the image to your computer without going through the mail system.
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By keeping some of these points in mind, buying a stock picture can be a pleasant experience that will certainly help give your project a professional look. Pictures can help convey your message in an easy visual manor, add color and act a resting place for tired eyes when one is reading a long document. Humans are visual creatures – pictures are the first thing we look at
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