Post-Processing Guidelines

Our post-processing advice has been the same since we launched our collection: we aim for beautiful, timeless photos and videos. 

Processing for stock (especially Stocksy) might differ from how you would normally edit and present your work. Unlike client work where you deliver the final product, Stocksy's buyers need room to edit content to fit into their projects. Clients can add to processing, but it's much more difficult to remove post-processing effects.

We aren't trying to stifle your creative vision when we ask for more natural processing. The goal is to encourage an aesthetic that has the most potential to be valuable to our clients while maintaining artistic integrity.

Here are our main processing tips:

• Keep processing consistent. Avoid using different styles or presets across a series because this could prevent clients from buying multiple assets from a set.
• Keep the white balance and skin tones neutral/natural, and avoid oversaturating colours. Unnatural colours can add something special to an image, and we want you to experiment and be creative, but the more commercial a subject, the less these effects are desired. 
• Be selective when using trendy effects like vignettes, fade, added lens flares, fake film scratches, etc. We want to keep our collection timeless, and trendy effects can date a collection rather quickly. We will generally ask you to remove added effects unless it really adds something to the narrative.
• Please don’t add grain. Added grain can be used to address an issue (a little bit of added grain can help mask banding in a blue sky, for example), but it can lead to unhappy clients and refunds when it's used for aesthetic purposes. Popular presets often include added grain - please check your presets and make sure this is set to 0.
• In most cases, avoid black and white conversions. You can upload black and white content if that's your vision, but it has the potential to limit your sales. A client can convert something to black and white, but they can't restore colour. When processing in black and white, please avoid colour toning, such as sepia.

A note about film: many film cameras and expired films are part of what inspired vignettes, fades, colour toning, and other effects into the preset market. While these things generally shouldn't be added to digital creations, they shouldn't be removed from film originals.

Photo and Video

Ideally, when a series has both photo and video, the look between both asset types should be cohesive. If a consistent edit is not possible, you should try to match the photo and video and closely as possible without degrading the quality of either product type.