Tudor Rating System
Quality guide in photography
Introduction
This guide is an attempt to standardize the common understanding of quality in photography. Despite the large area of subjectivity, there is a need to bring all elements together into a recognized established and valuable system which brings all aspects together and eliminates 90% of subjectivity.
Having a standardized system is also an education path which helps photography students to get their attention towards the important aspects of photography and make their work better.
This guide will be subject to constant improvement as information will be collated over a period of time and more people will adopt, refine and use it
Description:
Tudor Rating system is assigning a numeric value, or a mark to 3 separate aspects:
- Content = how interesting is the content, quality of the story, how is the subject presented.
Content will be first categorized into a specific photography field and analysed within that field.
Categories to be separated and not compared to each other
– street photography
– landscape
– photojournalism – events
– portraiture
– children
– newborn
– weddings
– product photography
– sports
– automotive
etc
For each category the 1 will be assigned to the most uninteresting image presented in a poor quality and the 10 will be assigned to the most interesting one
For example
- self portrait in a bathroom , half naked taken with a phone camera in low light – will receive a TRS (Tudor Rating System ) mark of 1 out of 10
- a portrait which is presented in an interesting visually appealing method that reflects personality as intended TRS mark 10 out of 10
For each person a 10 will be probably different than the others as there is always subjectivity, taste and visual education playing their parts, and that applies to each mark.
The system will work better with at least 5 different people assigning their own rating , including the image author, and the final TRS mark for content will be the average
- Composition – language – how the story is presented. This aspect breaks down and analyses the visual components of the picture in relation to each other and assesses the knowledge and understanding of composition.
In terms of composition a 1 will be assigned to an image taken randomly with no consideration of composition, and a 10 will go to an images which follows several compositional elements in the same time creating a visual appealing arrangement. For example a an image combing rule of thirds, rhythm or repetition, perspective lines and diagonals in the same time, using balance to establish the very well positioned subject.
- Image quality – how good you are with your camera settings and how good is your equipment. This aspect analyses the core visual quality of an image, such as sharpness, colours, contrast, depth of field etc.
TRS mark 1 will be assigned to an image taken with a phone, a low quality camera, in low light, grainy , dark or in such a way the subject is confusing and un-appealing, and a 10 will be assigned to an image perfectly executed by an experienced and skilled individual with high quality equipment.
Since this is also prone to subjectivity if you would hand the image on a wall in your living room for the rest of your life, that would be a 10
Final TRS Mark = (Content + Composition + Image Quality)/3
The above is a guide and it does not content any examples intentionally to allow any user to interpret images in their own way.
The accuracy of the value will increase if there will be at least 3-5 different individuals using the system and provide independent assessments
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Fantastic! I appreciate your effort to help guide people like me to rate images!
Me, I am more into video capture/edit, image editing (not shooting as much) & website building, but my new girlfriend is a photographer and needs me to rate 4 photo sessions of girls in studio shots. (well over 100 images) I wasn’t entirely sure how to go about this so… “OK Google” and here I am.
The reason I am writing this is because I thought of something. It would be nice to have an MS excel template (or something) to help me rate these images. (a place to do it)
For getting multiple photo names into editable text (potentially time consuming), I take a screenshot of the file-list of images (in Win7 explorer’s “list” view) and use OneNote to “Copy Text from Picture”. Paste it into MSwordpad (so it will list vertically). Then Cut/paste into a txt file for saving. From that, I would need to figure out how to put it into a rating chart that needs to be developed. If you had a “Rating Chart” template, I would be able to skip right to the good stuff… “Rating these photos”.
As of now, I have to jump through the hoops of “how am I going to list my ratings”. ugh!
However… I am very impressed with your website and youtube videos! Good job man! “Happy Shooting!” (in my case, “Happy rating”) Heh!
~Thrasher
I like so much your system and because of that I introduced it to my friends and to some Facebook photo groups. I’m an engineer and I’ve already studied statistics. So I’m aware in some occasions there are parameters that even isolated could ruin a sample(a photo in this case). For example: main subject out of focus(in few new kind of photos this is happening for purpose, but I think is an exception). Unfortunately some of my friends don’t agree with my thought and insist to apply in a strict way the grades for the 3 main aspects of the TRS. I’d like to know your opinion. Thanks in advance for your attention. Greetings from Brazil.