64ÌåÓý

One of the great things about 64ÌåÓýis that we don’t edit our content, we’ll accept images of pretty much anything as long as they pass our QC checks.

If you’ve ever had a submission fail QC, don’t worry, you aren’t alone! We’ve delved into the archives and put together a top 10 of the most common failure reasons, and how to avoid them.

10 – Compression Artefacts

Caused by applying too much compression when saving your images, or working on an image and saving it multiple times. Save jpegs at high quality and don’t save files multiple times over in a ‘lossy’ format when working on them.

9 – Noticeable Retouching

Zoom into your image to carry out any retouching, then check it at 100% to make sure it can’t be seen.

8 – Camera Shake

Shoot at a higher shutter speed than the focal length of the lens, use a support such as a ‘beanbag’ or tripod when shooting in low light or when a shutter speed lower than 1/60 is needed.  If your exposure needs to be long, use a remote release to eliminate the possibility of camera shake. Remember to turn off any lens image stabilisation options as these are generally for handheld use and can create soft images when used with a tripod.

7 – Over Manipulated

The file has been overworked giving it a broken up and/or unnatural appearance. Keep as much of your image processing in camera, just do the final tweaks in post-production make for a more natural looking picture.

6 – Out of Focus

The image is out of focus and doesn’t have a focal point. Apart from in the most extreme cases, even a shot which contains movement or motion blur should have a defined area of focus.

5 – Incorrect Exposure

Make sure your images have the correct exposure using the histogram. In Photoshop use ‘Levels’ to check this. For most images the black point should be 0 and the white point 255. As a rule of thumb we expect the black/white points to be within 5% of these values.

4 – Noise

Shoot at an ISO that is appropriate to the situation. If you’ve got no choice other than to shoot at high ISO you can use the noise reduction filter in Photoshop or Lightroom to help reduce this.

3 – Dirt/Dust/Blemishes

Try to avoid shooting at small apertures, such as f22 or smaller. Make sure you look over the whole image at 100% to check for any blemishes. Also keep your equipment clean, and remove any blemishes by using the clone tool in Photoshop.

2 – Chromatic Aberration

Coloured fringing which is especially evident on the outer edges of wide angle shots looks unsightly. This can easily be fixed by using the Lens Correction Tool in software like Photoshop or Lightroom.

1 – Soft Or Lacking Definition

We use this failure reason when it’s clear an image isn’t up to scratch, but we can’t fully determine why. This could be because it has failed for a combination of the above failure reasons. Or there’s no file info to view your shooting settings, making it difficult to pinpoint exactly what went wrong.  Like most of the failure reasons listed here, the best way to make sure you always pass QC is to check all your images in the same way in which we check yours, which is by viewing them at 100%.

Remember, we love seeing the wide variety of images that you submit to us. So, if your submission has failed have another look at it to see if any issues can be fixed, so you can send them again.

To get completely up to speed with the requirements, make sure you’ve read through our submission guidelines.