re: color and making judgements about color
re: color and making judgements about color
- Subject: re: color and making judgements about color
- From: email@hidden
- Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 14:12:01 -0600
Hi,
In November there was a thread about making judgements about the image
color based on content.
You know the old reference : As John Gnaegy wrote:
"If I take a picture at sunset, I want that nice yellow of the sunset,
I don't want it made objectively correct so it looks like a setting sun at
noon."
Dennis W. Manasco added this observation:
"Judging a photograph from an artistic perspective is important, but
there are many instances where adherence to the original subject is
essential."
Here's a real world story of my experience in Madrid Spain the week that
these comments were posted to the list. (Lucky Darrin Young, what a
beautiful country and a remarkable place!)
While on a museum tour the guide stops in front of a painting by Pablo
Picasso. It's a portrait of a seated lady in a wedding dress. The guide
tells that Picasso was under fire by critics who claimed he couldn't really
paint - just make strange marks on canvas. Picasso paints this portrait in
the conventional manner - traditional looking pose, traditional anatomical
construction - to silence the critics. And yet, to prove a point, he
deliberately paints with strange hues to make the skin color green and the
wedding dress blue. While the techniques and rendering may conform to "the
norm of the day" the coloration clearly did not.
After the tour I visited the museum gift shop to buy a few postcards to
commerate my visit. There on the rack was a card of the Picasso "bride"
painting. Yet the colors had been altered so that the flesh tones were -
flesh colored, and the wedding dress was - white!
One can only speculate what happened when some poor production person
opened their scan/capture file and saw the strange colors on the otherwise
"normal" painting. They must have thought the lighting for the photo shoot
was incorrect, or the exposure to film was poor, or the scanner/capture
person was insane, or the embedded profile was way wrong, or it had been
color converted once too often with a bad profile, and they probably spent
all day getting the image file to look "correct". They might even have a
sample of the work in their portfolio as "before and after".
The upshot - it is VERY COMMON to find color museum reproductions that in
no way resemble the original. (I have seen this on more than one
continent, and in many famous museums.) It makes you wonder whether the
museums care. And it underscores what can happen when artistic judgements
are used in the absence of a color accurate rendition to match (or at least
some decent notes).
After I left the museum I stopped at a kiosk to buy some post cards. There
on the rack were cards depicting all different parts of town. I bought
three cards - all of different streetscapes. Curiously, all three had the
EXACT SAME cloud formations amid a perfect blue sky. As I said, a
remarkable place. I hope all of you get a chance to visit some day.
(Now back to the almost never ending discussion about Epson printers and
their challenges... ;-)
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