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What Royalty-Free Really Means

What Royalty-Free Really Means - Our blog pages is where we put important informations on Photography, social media and blogging in general. If you're a blogger looking for inspiration and ideas to improve your website, take a look at our original articles. #photography #photographytips #photographyinspiration #blogger #blog #blogging #tricks #stockphotodesign

What Royalty-Free Really Means for Imagery is not what most people think it is. Here’s our easy to understand explanation.

Unfortunately, when talking about imagery, it doen’t mean images are free. The term Royalty-Free should probably be renamed “Exclusivity and Time-Frame Free”. It would probably be less confusing..

In the old days, before the arrival of the digital cameras. Photographers used to sell photos “exclusivity” to company during a “certain period of time” for large amounts of money.

They didn’t had to sell a lot of photos, to make good a good living. They used to call this system “Royalty Managed“. Photographers “could not sell an image to someone else”, during that time period.

When Digital cameras came into the market and became affordable to most people, things changed a bit.  More and more people were able to make and sell their images on the internet, and images offering exploded and exceded the demand. When it happened, prices went down abruptly.

To compensate for the lower prices, photographers started to offer their photography, without the exclusivity or time limitation, at much lower prices.

That way, they could offer the same image to many more people at the same time. They call this new system “Royalty-Free”, when in fact, they should have called it “Exclusivity and Timeframe Free”.

Legal trouble

People that don’t understand the real sense of royalty-free can find themself in big legal trouble very fast. Company like Getty Images Collection sues people that use their photos without permission, very fast and quite hard. Even if you already have the images in your possession, you still have to pay rights to use them.

And Images that have logos on them, can only be used for promotional purpose. Like this one:

What Royalty-Free Really Means

Companies like Istockphoto, Getty, Shutterstock, Fotolia and all the others, are selling their Images as “Royalty-Free”, but none of them are free.


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Read our other blog postings, for more useful hints on photography:

What an “HDR” Images really is.


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What HDR (High Dynamic Range) is.

What is HDR - Our blog pages is where we put important informations on Photography, social media and blogging in general. If you're a blogger looking for inspiration and ideas to improve your website, take a look at our original articles. #photography #photographytips #photographyinspiration #blogger #blog #blogging #tricks #stockphotodesign

What HDR (High Dynamic Range) is ?

In fact, it’s pretty simple.

It’s making one picture with the luminosity of two or more pictures. You take different pictures of the same subject at different luminosities. Then combine them to make an HDR.

Here’s an exemple:

What HDR (High Dynamic Range) is

As you can see, we took the highlights on the darkest image (in Blue), and the darkest section on the most exposed Image (in Red). Then combine them on the midlle image to have a more balanced Image.

Here the real case Image Result:

HDR final Result

As you can see, there’s no really dark or white sections on the resulting Image. We kind of stretched the luminosity details of the image. HDR “High Dynamic Resolution” is just a technical term for “Stretched Luminosity” effect.

For this image, the Software used was Photomatix Pro.

HDR can have different degrees. Since it can be overblown easily, at Stockphotodesign, we’re trying to make them look, as natural as possible. Therefore, we’re limiting the effect for maximum results.

The image below is an exemple of overblown HDR. You might like it, but it’s just not a useful image.

Overblown HDR

We have a wide variety of HDR Images. Here’s a Sample from our Portfolio:


As you can see, the effects are not overdone. They are added precisely, just to make the image pops out.


Also, read our blog on Royalty-Free Definition


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What HDR (High Dynamic Range) is.


If this Photography Tip post helped you, then please dont forget to share it. We appreciate all retweets, likes, and +1s.