Re: color and making judgements about color
Re: color and making judgements about color
- Subject: Re: color and making judgements about color
- From: Adam Kellie <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 11 Dec 2002 08:50:30 -0500
--
As a museum employee helping to color manage the digital and print
representations of our collections, this story: 1) doesn't surprise
me, and 2) surprises me...
As John mentioned, I can imagine a scanner operator or printer
without knowing the artwork 'correcting' for the strange colorations,
but the reply of 'who cares?' is naive. - It is my opinion that the
accurate representation of cultural properties is *much* more
important than say, getting the hue of an Oldsmobile accurate. So
it's not just 'a Picasso on a postcard', but something that was
printed to look like an object that artist constructed to look *the
way it does*! (In this situation to react to critical comments,
John's tour guide said- he made choices with color that it is not our
right to change- would you tell Picasso how to paint to sell more?-
come on!) (I say if you want it to look different, you paint it!) Any
artist's intent is obvious- to display his or her artistic
possibilities- whether that is in the form of an original, a marketed
postcard, digital image, published image or otherwise- the point at
which a production person changes that, a subversion of artist's
intent has taken place unnecessarily.
The action of a production person dramatically changing this image
infers that that person 1) did not trust the integrity of the
original file, its' creators or institution of origin, 2) was not
familiar with the original art, and 3) was not in any sort of
communication with the museum or gallery about proofing, and
therefore took it upon themselves to make a new, 'normal' looking
Picasso. If the intent in producing a postcard was to sell as many
as possible, why not choose something else?
In the museums where I work, representing reality is of the highest
priority. We have had some very good results with a tightly managed
workflow, (lights, neutral backdrops, profiles, etc- modified ISO
3664 environment). Of course snags pop-up occasionally, but there is
nothing that replaces a proofing/correction stage in the image
acquisition phase to get to the best representation of reality
possible. Gift shop items are produced to match matchprints, and
proofing is done at many stages of all publications/productions.
There is also no replacement for some familiarity with the original,
whenever possible (viewed, of course, under appropriate lighting).
I offer, then, that many people care, and that the average Joe on the
street will notice a difference. (People *do* look at their postcards
in the galleries next to the originals- all the time! In fact, a
recent exhibit here had a few different printings of a Reubens
postcard, for folks to notice the differences in representation!)-
All of our color management work's intent is not to sell, but to care
about the accurate representation of materials someone feels is
important, after all, right? - or am I being naive, too...
Best-
Adam Kellie
Harvard University Art Museums
Imaging and Color Management
John Gnaegy wrote:
> 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!
Ha! That's funny and sad at the same time, a good example of manual
correction gone horribly wrong.
No... manual correction gone right. The idea was probably to make a postcard
that would SELL on the shelf. The theory here is that far more people would
buy a postcard with clean flesh tones and a white dress than one with green
flesh tones and a blue dress. Since none of the postcards would be held
against the original anyhow, who would care? For the purests at heart, I see
your point that it does not match the original artists intent... but then
again we are talking about a Picasso on a postcard here. I don't quite think
that was Picasso's intent either.
John Rawlins
From: John Gnaegy <email@hidden>
To: colorsync users <email@hidden>
The idea was probably to make a postcard that would SELL on the shelf.
Maybe that was the intention, but if so it bothers me. Then again...
Yeah, maybe Picasso didn't know what he was doing. Market research
shows consumers don't like models with fragmented faces, you can't tell
if they're looking at you or away from you, it's creepy. We need a
Defragment filter for Photoshop so we can piece together the faces of
his subjects so they look normal, like they're seen from one viewpoint.
Otherwise we just can't use these paintings to sell cars.
And what's with all these black and white movies, haven't they been
colorized yet? That whole first part of the Wizard of Oz has to go.
And I'm pretty sure Citizen Kane would be a hit as Citizen Candy Kane,
with lots of reds and greens.
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