Re: Black Bodies and Suchlike Magical Stuff
Re: Black Bodies and Suchlike Magical Stuff
- Subject: Re: Black Bodies and Suchlike Magical Stuff
- From: Nick Wheeler <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 9 Nov 2003 13:37:26 -0500
On Saturday, November 8, 2003, at 09:39 AM, Derrick Brown wrote:
Id rather do than theorize here.
On Saturday, November 8, 2003, at 10:34 AM, Andrew Rodney wrote:
That's the bottom line. The other question is how much time and work
will
the "average" photographer spend to get the color appearance in a file
he/she wants? The debate among many photographers today in this regard
is
still "to shoot RAW or not to shoot RAW" which in itself splits up how
to go
about dealing with the color files. NOT all Photographers by a long
shot are
embracing RAW (mostly due to either education, a bad experience with a
RAW
converter or the workflow hit you get in a RAW workflow).
And strive for better tools. We are getting there but have a way to go
(especially with respect to building camera profiles IMHO).
Derrick, Andrew:
This is it precisely. Here we see a problem and we as early adopters of
the technology have to hack our way to a solution. We work at the
application level with the tools available. We may not be able to make
a hammer, but we have to use one every day. If we can't find a hammer
we use a brick and moan and groan loudly until finally someone comes up
with a hammer.
I am reminded of George Adam showing Mark Doyle and I his early Monaco
development (before Colorsync). George came over one day to show us the
latest iteration of his product. We would always end up wailing,
moaning and gnashing our teeth about why was Adobe using the monitor
color space as its working space and how that made no sense at all and
it sure wasn't the same as the Fujix or Scanner color space.
George would simply say: that's the way it is and we have to work with
it and shut up already. So we did the best we could. We worked with
that space and our reptilian minds finally developed little routines
that would get us into it from the scanner and out of it to the
printer, and it all worked after a fashion.
Obviously Mark and I were not alone, and lifting our heads out of the
primeval swamp we noticed folks a lot smarter than us were working on
the same problem. Along comes Colorsync, Live Picture and Colorblind,
tools change, consciousness grows and ultimately Adobe adopts a
flexible RGB workingspace architecture with paths in and out. Praise
the lord, and fast computers.
We are in a similar fix with the camera now, stuck between things as
they are and things as they could be. My initial post was simply to
remind the casual reader of this list that almost every post on the
subject of dealing with raw files has some validity and is worth
exploring. There is no one right way. There is a software architecture
in place that we have to understand and work with, there are a lot of
paths through that architecture.
As the more clever among us discover the better paths, that knowledge
will work its way back to the manufacturers and better tools will
evolve. Right now we're stuck with bricks. To argue that a red brick is
better than a brown one is to miss the point. Try them all.
My guess is that at some point in the future we will be able to
accurately describe or calibrate the behavior of a camera, or be
provided with such. Then we can custom tailor transformations from that
calibrated behavior into a known and user definable RGB working space.
The Phase One and Adobe products that I have seen are certainly a step
in the right direction.
One of the arguments has been how you go about figuring the behavior
thing out. I sure don't know, there's that little problem of the
scanner bulb constantly changing. Derrick is right, we can argue til
the cows come home about white balance and gray balance, it doesn't
mean diddly in the world. Try everything and see what works best. I
think by guess and by gosh for the moment. From the heated discussion
of this topic it should be obvious that no consensus currnetly exists.
The problem has been that the manufacturers want to provide us with
something like the film experience when we buy a digital camera and
they don't want to introduce any complexity into that experience. But
no one wants to be stuck with a narrow range of film choices when
buying a camera. They should know better, maybe there are acceptable
calibration standards.
Again, try to think of these batch conversions from raw to working
space as being something like film and filters. Sometimes you'll want
Velvia, sometimes EPN, sometimes the Gold 200 that comes with the
camera. The tools are available to get started on that project now.
They're a little blunt, like a brick.
Best wishes,
Nick
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