Belgian taxes for stock photographers

I thought it might be useful to share how taxation works in Belgium.

Remark: This is not an official tax advise and I am not responsible for any misunderstanding. I simply share what I learned from my accountant and what works for me.

Stock photography falls under simplified light taxation that applies to art/copyright works.

That means you don't need to register a business (even self-employed is not necessary), you can declare the income as your personal.

The tax applied is 15%

You are allowed to declare 50% of your overall stock income as your cost, so 15% is taken from half of your income (up to the ceiling of 13,840 Eur for income 2009 - and you can declare 25% of income as cost for the second 13,840 Eur).

On a practical side - if you are filling paper tax declaration you need to request tax office to provide you the second part (that is usually used by business); if you are filling your tax online in tax-on-web you can enter data directly.

You declare your total income per year in Euro in field 1190; and half of the a mount as cost in field 1191 (if your annual income is <13,840 Eur).

How to count the amount: Typically you don't receive any supporting documents from stock agencies (unless it's a German one). So just write down yourself every dollar amount that you transferred during reporting year from stock sites to your paypal account (or to your bank account or whatever method you used); and convert every transaction to Euro using historical exchange rate on that date (find in internet). Of course you keep Euro amount if you are receiving money from European agency. Then sum all Euro amounts and use it your for declaration. Attach your calculation to your declaration.





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Vacation

It's hot here at French Riviera, but sea is warm and nice :)




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Photo editing - how to reduce artifacts

Artifacting is a native issue of digital photography. It appears on nearly all digital photos - sometimes a little, sometimes strong. Microstock agencies don't like artifacts, istockphoto is particularly known for that.

Artifacts is something quite easy to address if you apply a systematic approach. I am getting nearly 0 rejects for artifacts for the last +/- 12 months if not longer:

• shoot exclusively in RAW , not too high ISO
• good exposure, particularly no underexposure, and no pulling shadows up
• very little or no sharpening when processing RAW
• if converting RAW to separate file before opening in photoshop use TIF not jpeg

in result you should see very little artifacting (BTW check on the edge of shadows at 400%-500% zoom).

What I am doing next with 100% of my pictures is applying TopazLabs DeJPEG filter (photoshop plugin). There is an old free version and there is up to date commercial one (which isn't expensive). The "official" purpose of the plugin is different, but it helps very nicely to remove that little artifacting. The key is to apply DeJPEG at very low settings, don't overdo it. I made several presets for different degree of artifacting/noise; and I am thinking about making a tutorial about that when I have some time.

When applied at minimal settings, DeJPEG filter smooths areas without detail while keeping details sharp, and adds a very little noise. This is an example (crop enlarged to 300%):


the version "more DeJpeg" not only smoothened stronger, but also has more noise added.




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CEPIC microstock conference in Dublin

I came back from microstock conference organized by CEPIC in Dublin on the 8th of June. Took some notes and some videos - will post after get them processed.




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16bit vs 8bit editing in photoshop

The question discussed many times and still often asked - whether to process RAW files in 16 bit or in 8 bit mode?

The answer depends on quality of the source file and the intended use of the image. When you work with well exposed photograph and don't edit it intensively, the difference between 8bit and 16bit isn't significant. However in case you need best possible quality there is a difference.

Even if you save the final result in 8-bit file (e.g. JPG only supports 8-bit mode), there is a difference depending how you edit your file.

Whether it's a big deal or not is rather subjective.... but the difference is pretty obvious.

I made a simple example - took a well exposed image, didn't apply very much editing, didn't have too many layers. There are 2 frames in the animated gif: one is the result of 16 bit editing, converted to 8 bit at the end; the other frame is result of 8-bit editing - i.e. same file was first converted to 8 bit, then editing applied. It enlarged to 400% to make the difference more visible.



In case you have underexposed image, in case you have higher ISO, in case you apply intensive editing - you will see much bigger difference between 8 and 16 bit. But even this example above is sufficient for me to do my editing in 16 bit.


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