Luminous Landscape Forum
Equipment & Techniques => Medium Format / Film / Digital Backs – and Large Sensor Photography => Topic started by: Boris_Epix on April 13, 2008, 02:02:46 am
-
What I'm having a hard time understanding is why color is so terrible with DSLR's and MFDB's. And why manufacturers don't offer more options when it comes to color reproductions (styles or color profiles). I find myself doing selective color manipulations, paint with light, painting in shadowskin-tones, etc that I rarely ever do with film.
With film my stuff looks rather natural. With DSLR's and MFDB's my work suddenly looks all digital flat or freaks out. I have a hard time to find a balance in the colors that is pleasing to me while still looking natural. So I tend to go to far. Sure some customers like that and even book me for that look. But I prefer the rich skintones film provides.
I guess it's hard to talk about colors and feels so some examples if you care:
Unretouched film pic (I like the skintones on this one)
[attachment=6103:attachment]
Finished pic
[attachment=6104:attachment]
Isn't that kinda amazing? I didn't even need to tune the skintones.
Another film shot. Paint with light and some liquify but no colorchanges
[attachment=6105:attachment]
And now the unretouched digital file
[attachment=6106:attachment]
And the finished file:
[attachment=6107:attachment]
It's painful to see movies with great colors and skintones and then you shoot with a 50k$ MFDB/camera combo or Canon 1Ds level cam and you first need to tweak the RAW settings, then continue to massage the file in photoshop to make it look like my wifes Fuji P&S delivers from the start.
How can it be that the RED One digital video camera outputs a file with pleasing skintones like this and the MFDB needs lots of work to get there?
http://www.red.com/skin/img/gallery-still/005634.jpg (http://www.red.com/skin/img/gallery-still/005634.jpg)
And the crazy thing is that the base RED ONE costs only 17k$ for the base camera which is quite a bit cheaper than the stil picture MFDB's à la PhaseOne P45+ (which is just a back without the camera). And it shoots 30 frames per second at 12 Megapixels not just 1 shot about every 2 seconds like the p45.
Anyway... back to still photography: Have you ever compared the current covers of fashion mags to the covers a couple years ago? Virtually all look more or less the same today. Very flat and unnatural. Pale skin looks particularly terrible. The same pale person shot on Astia, Provia or whatever film you like looks much richer and healthier. I guess aside from the brightness level of the skin it has a big deal to do with a pleasing color shift in the different tonalities of the skin that is present in film images.
It should be easy for PhaseOne/Leaf/Sinar/Hassy to get some engineers/developers/color dudes to work on PLEASING straight out of camera color profiles, right?
Cheers
Boris
-
What I'm having a hard time understanding is why color is so terrible with DSLR's and MFDB's. And why manufacturers don't offer more options when it comes to color reproductions (styles or color profiles). I find myself doing selective color manipulations, paint with light, painting in shadowskin-tones, etc that I rarely ever do with film.
With film my stuff looks rather natural. With DSLR's and MFDB's my work suddenly looks all digital flat or freaks out. I have a hard time to find a balance in the colors that is pleasing to me while still looking natural. So I tend to go to far. Sure some customers like that and even book me for that look. But I prefer the rich skintones film provides.
I guess it's hard to talk about colors and feels so some examples if you care:
Unretouched film pic (I like the skintones on this one)
[attachment=6085:attachment]
Finished pic
[attachment=6086:attachment]
Isn't that kinda amazing? I didn't even need to tune the skintones.
Another film shot. Paint with light and some liquify but no colorchanges
[attachment=6088:attachment]
And now the unretouched digital file
[attachment=6089:attachment]
And the finished file:
[attachment=6090:attachment]
It's painful to see movies with great colors and skintones and then you shoot with a 50k$ MFDB/camera combo or Canon 1Ds level cam and you first need to tweak the RAW settings, then continue to massage the file in photoshop to make it look like my wifes Fuji P&S delivers from the start.
How can it be that the RED One digital video camera outputs a file with pleasing skintones like this and the MFDB needs lots of work to get there?
http://www.red.com/skin/img/gallery-still/005634.jpg (http://www.red.com/skin/img/gallery-still/005634.jpg)
And the crazy thing is that the base RED ONE costs only 17k$ for the base camera which is quite a bit cheaper than the stil picture MFDB's à la PhaseOne P45+ (which is just a back without the camera). And it shoots 30 frames per second at 12 Megapixels not just 1 shot about every 2 seconds like the p45.
Anyway... back to still photography: Have you ever compared the current covers of fashion mags to the covers a couple years ago? Virtually all look more or less the same today. Very flat and unnatural. Pale skin looks particularly terrible. The same pale person shot on Astia, Provia or whatever film you like looks much richer and healthier. I guess aside from the brightness level of the skin it has a big deal to do with a pleasing color shift in the different tonalities of the skin that is present in film images.
It should be easy for PhaseOne/Leaf/Sinar/Hassy to get some engineers/developers/color dudes to work on PLEASING straight out of camera color profiles, right?
Cheers
Boris
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=189132\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
You raise a lot of points and some are valid, some are just the changing of the times.
In regards to magazines and all print, advertising inlcuded, in general there is more post work done and more done outside of the photographer's direction, which means even if you tweaked your raw file to look like nc100, usually the retoucher is taking direction from "their" client hence they are working to the clients color pallete and retouching has become a repeition of what was done before, or done by a competitor that had results.
Now as far as the Red, it seems to shoot a great detailed file, but I doubt seriously if that Peter Jackson image doesn't have some post work done, (if it didn't it honestly needs some).
Just working in non linear editors, regardless of retouching changes the look, from avid to FCP depending on colorspace and preset gammas.
Now the final topic, movies. The movie industry seems to have more standards for effects and color and seems to share more readily. You can walk into technicolor and say, "i want the look of the movie 7 and they'll tell you, shoot _______film, underexpose 1/2 stop and we will process with skip bleach and during the telecine, tweak the reds by -20. (I'm not exact on this, but that is essentially the sceanrio).
Also movies, even B grade movies have a lot of money put into the budget for finish out.
Personally I don't think most digital looks any more or less film like than film, other than we all have the ability to work it harder in post and it's very fast and easy to overwork an image.
Also since we are starting from essentially a clean sheet, we don't have the transpaency or contact sheet to lay next to the computer to try and match how the look nthat was originally generated.
Also most of us work in a closed loop and rarely share beyond our own walls, unlike the cinema industry.
What I do know is digital has put more workload on many photographers where now we are the photographer, film processor, scanner operator and retoucher, or we just hand the raws over to the clients and let them do as they wish which usually produces a more generalistic look.
Still, I find most of the newer processor, lightroom, V4 do a much better job out of the can than the previous conversions from the original cs1, c1, etc.
What I find more difficult with digital than film is I'm working a lot of setups, especially on locaiton it's harder to match the films from the different ambience light and color from each setup.
One thing I've learned to like about V4 is if you select your final images they can all be brought up into a window side by side and you can tweak each one individully to match the previous and subsequent image. (Maybe lightroom does this also).
To me a lot of films seemed a little dumber (which is good) than digital and picked up less ambient bounce.
JR
I think the hardest thing for the manufacturer's is to get a common read from thier users.
On one hand some want a linear file with nothing added, just a flat image they can work deep, while others want a certain "film look" right out of the camera or straight into the converter.
What I don't understand is why there are not generic films that are trully embbed as "looks".
I know some converters have these but few seem as consistent and as close of a match as the name might suggest.
-
These examples do look horrible, so horrible even I get the urge to run back to film and I haven't touched it in 10year!
Personally I haven't had so much trouble with skintone the last couple of year but before it was horrible.
I agree with James that it is weird that there aren't a lot of good canned profiles that you can easily apply to the raw files.
The film examples do look really nice though.
-
Hi!
Color essentially exists in the brain. If you want natural capture you can just expose a color-checker in the same light and run the ACR-calibration procedure using some of the usual scripts. That should take you as close as you can get, with reasonable effort, at least in the measurable sense.
Your artistic perception is something different. It is perfectly possible to create a picture with "correct" rendering and then apply some kind of film look. There are plugins for that.
Erik
Here are some color calibration scripts:
http://fors.net/chromoholics/ (http://fors.net/chromoholics/)
http://21stcenturyshoebox.com/tools/ACRcalibrator.html (http://21stcenturyshoebox.com/tools/ACRcalibrator.html)
And an article comparing three scripts
http://www.photoactivity.com/Pagine/Artico...l%20sole_en.asp (http://www.photoactivity.com/Pagine/Articoli/023%20Calibratori%20al%20sole/Calibratori%20al%20sole_en.asp)
What I'm having a hard time understanding is why color is so terrible with DSLR's and MFDB's. And why manufacturers don't offer more options when it comes to color reproductions (styles or color profiles). I find myself doing selective color manipulations, paint with light, painting in shadowskin-tones, etc that I rarely ever do with film.
With film my stuff looks rather natural. With DSLR's and MFDB's my work suddenly looks all digital flat or freaks out. I have a hard time to find a balance in the colors that is pleasing to me while still looking natural. So I tend to go to far. Sure some customers like that and even book me for that look. But I prefer the rich skintones film provides.
I guess it's hard to talk about colors and feels so some examples if you care:
Unretouched film pic (I like the skintones on this one)
[attachment=6085:attachment]
Finished pic
[attachment=6086:attachment]
Isn't that kinda amazing? I didn't even need to tune the skintones.
Another film shot. Paint with light and some liquify but no colorchanges
[attachment=6088:attachment]
And now the unretouched digital file
[attachment=6089:attachment]
And the finished file:
[attachment=6090:attachment]
It's painful to see movies with great colors and skintones and then you shoot with a 50k$ MFDB/camera combo or Canon 1Ds level cam and you first need to tweak the RAW settings, then continue to massage the file in photoshop to make it look like my wifes Fuji P&S delivers from the start.
How can it be that the RED One digital video camera outputs a file with pleasing skintones like this and the MFDB needs lots of work to get there?
http://www.red.com/skin/img/gallery-still/005634.jpg (http://www.red.com/skin/img/gallery-still/005634.jpg)
And the crazy thing is that the base RED ONE costs only 17k$ for the base camera which is quite a bit cheaper than the stil picture MFDB's à la PhaseOne P45+ (which is just a back without the camera). And it shoots 30 frames per second at 12 Megapixels not just 1 shot about every 2 seconds like the p45.
Anyway... back to still photography: Have you ever compared the current covers of fashion mags to the covers a couple years ago? Virtually all look more or less the same today. Very flat and unnatural. Pale skin looks particularly terrible. The same pale person shot on Astia, Provia or whatever film you like looks much richer and healthier. I guess aside from the brightness level of the skin it has a big deal to do with a pleasing color shift in the different tonalities of the skin that is present in film images.
It should be easy for PhaseOne/Leaf/Sinar/Hassy to get some engineers/developers/color dudes to work on PLEASING straight out of camera color profiles, right?
Cheers
Boris
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=189132\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
-
- I could show you film shots with poor skin rendition and digital shots which look great. You can't prove anything with one or two samples, especially for different scenes.
- video footage is usually run through post production processes so unless you know the history of the image it means nothing
- I wasn't impressed with that Red image anyway
- one thing I noticed was how poor the dynamic range was on the film samples. It can be attractive for some images but destroys others. Perhaps you just happen to like a specific film's look but any film can be immitated with digital. it's just a matter of the right post production.
- by the way, I like that image of the girl at the window. Beautiful.
-
Film has a different look but to be honest I like the colors of digital better in being neutral.
Calibrate your profile and shoot with a colorchecker or graycard and you are very natural in colors.
When I shoot slide or film I do love the look and feel of the scans but they are far from natural (or at least what I call natural).
Maybe I'm just used to the clean look of digital
Let me say by the way that I love both files, I sometimes shoot film just to get a certain film look, especially BW highASA are great, and I love the Portra look.
But when it counts on neutral colors I use my digital (aptus).
With the 5D I never was really content with the colors by the way, it was good but always a bit too harsch or a small shift (even with a profile).
The leaf has up untill satisfied my need.
And the fun thing with MF is we can shoot both.
-
The RED pictures look also flat when they arrive in post.
You have to load a LUT into the camera to make the picture look good from scratch or shoot in REC 709 mode. RED also shoots RAW so its always good to shoot it as flat as possible and protect your highlights so you have more room to play in post.
Today, Photoshop or Color (FCP) is your filmstock. I can create every filmstock I like in post.
But you are right, the files should look good right out of the camera.
Somehow I like more all the possibilitys I get in post. OK it is time consuming and not always fully paid but I like tweaking my stuff. 10 years ago I did it in the darkroom, now we do it in, you know.
Tim
-
<CROPPED>
On one hand some want a linear file with nothing added, just a flat image they can work deep, while others want a certain "film look" right out of the camera or straight into the converter.
What I don't understand is why there are not generic films that are trully embbed as "looks".
I know some converters have these but few seem as consistent and as close of a match as the name might suggest.
James: Yes, I believe the point would be that the canned profiles are not as good as I'd expect them to be for the amount of money we pay for such tools. Some shooters I know paid less than half their MFDB's price for their car they depend on. And while MFDB's are cheaper than film (but then comes the extra time for computer equipment, processing, backup and storage) a car has many more parts that need to work to keep you on the road. Let's say color profiles are the brakes of the car. Why can't we get better brakes for the backs?
And yes I agree style comes from individual creative decisions. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't get a good starting point out of the box already.
In theory you should be able to work as a photographer without Photoshop. Or are MFDB companies just in the biz to expand marketshare of Adobe Photohop?
Why do we shooters have to do the homework of the MFDB companies?
Cheers
Boris
-
In theory you should be able to work as a photographer without Photoshop. Or are MFDB companies just in the biz to expand marketshare of Adobe Photohop?
Why do we shooters have to do the homework of the MFDB companies?
That's a rather naive perspective with today's technology. In the days of film, color decisions were made for you by guys in lab coats on Rochester or somewhere in Japan. With digital, one of the advantages is that you can "make your own film" with color settings in the RAW converter, but this means that you are now responsible for deciding the color look of your images. Take the time to adjust the Calibrate tab in ACR or the color settings in your favorite RAW converter until you get a look you like. This will take some time, but you only have to do it once.
If you use ACR, you can automate the process of adjusting to get neutral, true-to-life colors with the scripts previously mentioned, and then use that as a starting point for creative adjustments.
-
That's a rather naive perspective with today's technology. In the days of film, color decisions were made for you by guys in lab coats on Rochester or somewhere in Japan. With digital, one of the advantages is that you can "make your own film" with color settings in the RAW converter, but this means that you are now responsible for deciding the color look of your images. Take the time to adjust the Calibrate tab in ACR or the color settings in your favorite RAW converter until you get a look you like. This will take some time, but you only have to do it once.
If you use ACR, you can automate the process of adjusting to get neutral, true-to-life colors with the scripts previously mentioned, and then use that as a starting point for creative adjustments.
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=189191\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
Jonathan: Naive is not a word that needs to fall in this conversation. And if it was then I would have to say it's naive to assume things can't be improved.
Things improve.
But manufacturers need to know that this is an area that needs to be worked on. Digital still photography has a lot of room for improvement in the high-end. On the low-end we already have agencies eat the cake by sending interns out with a small DSLR.
Let's be honest.... isn't it a bit insane to convert a file to 100+ MB 16bit TIFF. Send that to the client/retouching house and they completely redo everything. In my book I want to send a DNG to the retoucher when I'm not doing the retouching myself. The work should be done once. Example: If I adjust the file towards the blue, then the retoucher adjusts toward yellow the file was degraded in quality already.
The retoucher should get a chance to extract the best data from the data. And the RAW file should look pleasing to start with. I hate to tell the customer: Yes, that's RAW. We need to change it. Color will look better later. And then listen to them that film looked (more) right to start with already on the lighttable.
Cheers
Boris
-
Jonathan: Naive is not a word that needs to fall in this conversation. And if it was then I would have to say it's naive to assume things can't be improved.
Its a valid point to make when you are complaining about a problem that has been solved for some time now.
In my book I want to send a DNG to the retoucher when I'm not doing the retouching myself. The work should be done once. Example: If I adjust the file towards the blue, then the retoucher adjusts toward yellow the file was degraded in quality already.
The retoucher should get a chance to extract the best data from the data. And the RAW file should look pleasing to start with. I hate to tell the customer: Yes, that's RAW. We need to change it. Color will look better later.
You can do that easily right now. All you need to do is configure your preferred color settings in ACR, and save them as your default. That can take considerable time, but you only ever have to do it once. When you convert your RAW to DNG, the DNG metadata will be tagged with YOUR default conversion settings. And if you open the DNG in ACR, you can tweak the defaults however you like, and any settings you change will be saved back to the DNG metadata. Then you send your DNG to the retoucher/client, and they open the DNG, they will see the exact same image you did when you sent the file. But the RAW file data has never been changed, only the metadata tags indicating how it should be processed.
It's doubtful you're going to get a manufacturer to create a set of defaults that please you out of the box. Every photographer has a different idea about what "aesthetically pleasing" color is, and there is no way to please everyone with a few factory presets. Capture One, for example, is well-known for giving its conversions a "filmlike" look. Some photographers love it, and others hate it. You can't please everyone with a few presets; your best option is to familiarize yourself with your RAW converter so you can get the color and tonality you want out of the box with little or no additional processing in Photoshop.
-
Jonathan: Naive is not a word that needs to fall in this conversation. And if it was then I would have to say it's naive to assume things can't be improved.
Things improve.
But manufacturers need to know that this is an area that needs to be worked on. Digital still photography has a lot of room for improvement in the high-end. On the low-end we already have agencies eat the cake by sending interns out with a small DSLR.
Let's be honest.... isn't it a bit insane to convert a file to 100+ MB 16bit TIFF. Send that to the client/retouching house and they completely redo everything. In my book I want to send a DNG to the retoucher when I'm not doing the retouching myself. The work should be done once. Example: If I adjust the file towards the blue, then the retoucher adjusts toward yellow the file was degraded in quality already.
The retoucher should get a chance to extract the best data from the data. And the RAW file should look pleasing to start with. I hate to tell the customer: Yes, that's RAW. We need to change it. Color will look better later. And then listen to them that film looked (more) right to start with already on the lighttable.
Cheers
Boris
[{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a] (http://index.php?act=findpost&pid=189198\")
I think it's come further than you think. When I started with digital capture the only two processors for the files were photoshop cs1 and in this case Kodak and both were limited in what you could do prior to photoshop.
The thing I've noticed is all of these cameras respond differently to particular lighting and subject and then in color and tone change depending on how you process them.
So to build your own presets you would have to take the same camera, digital and film and shoot a combination of nc100 flash-3/4 soft light, nc100-flash-no diffusion, nc100 flash and ambient-mixed with high background light and a lot of other combinations such as ambient shade, direct daylight, tungsten, hmi, etc. etc. etc.
If you own multile cameras such as Canon and Leaf, or Phase and Nikon, or in my case Canon, Phase, Nikon and Leica, (and in the past Leaf) you would have to do it with all and the process would be maddening.
I do understand where you are coming from as it can be enormously frustrating and confusing.
Early on with digital capture I shot one large project in LA and Miami , (studio and location) where the client wanted primarily film and digital as backup.
Shooting transparency Kodak epr and the original Canon 1ds the film looked better out of the camera than the Canon file, though in 90% of the cases having the film as a base it was a quick wb and tone change in the converter to emulate the film, though in 10% of the instances, it just was impossible and required photoshop and a series of layers to get closer.
Now the processors and better and more full featured, but still require a lot of slight adjustments to get it close to film.
For some reason I think film just didn't vary as much from soft light to hard, ambient shade to flash but this just may be that the presets in the converters were too general.
I think most of the difference between film and digital is the broad customer base. A still life catalog photographer probably wants exact colors, where I shoot people and want a more global and less sensitive color look and I know that both can be achieved, but a broad preset like portrait daylight, or product daylight, really is to wide to get there.
Not to cut the makers any slack, because they could write these presets, though it would take a lot of different films, cameras, lenses, lights and a lot of time.
Now to give the retoucher one file that has everything is usually not possible. I usually process out a high rez tiff and even if I go to photoshop, that is the look I want to acheive and I send it in combination with the raw, so the retoucher can mulitiple process out parts, or hold hightlights, etc.
Though I will say using all the cameras and backs I have used, there is no one holy grail of "film like" look.
Well, except the Leica. It looks like 35mm black and white film, but which one? . . . I'm not sure.
[a href=\"http://russellrutherford.com/fashion/pictures/%A9russellrutherford_p%23189_2.jpg]http://russellrutherford.com/fashion/pictu...d_p%23189_2.jpg[/url]
Then again black and white is pretty easy to emulate.
JR
-
I still (vaguely) remember shooting film and going into a wet darkroom to process the images of course that’s going on 30 years ago. When I took up photography again I went right into the digital world. Now I shoot and go directly into my “digital darkroom” to process the images. The only thing that’s changed is that there are no more chemicals and I now have a better workflow. I never expected the film image to come out exactly as I wanted it without some measure of post processing – just the same as with digital. One of the major benefits to digital is that there’s more manipulation available now.
Just my 2 cents worth…..
don
-
I occasionally think to myself that, while I greatly appreciate the convenience and low noise (grain) of digital, I miss the color and tonality of film. But then I run across an old film shot of mine and I wonder why I'm nostalgic for it. On these occasions, I can clearly see how much better my digital shots are than my film shots, in almost every way, including color. I hope the reason is that I've become a better photographer since my film days :-) But sometimes I also wonder if my fond feelings for film are just nostalgia, and nothing but nostalgia. So it goes.
Regards,
Mort54
-
There are a variety of issues at work here.
Some time ago, a little company in Denmark called Phase One asked me to supply a variety of looks for the six top dSLRs of the day. 6 cameras and a variety of looks, and then they wanted to pay me about $15 per buyer of an option pack. I looked at this, figured out that something was wrong with the pricing decided to do a test by asking them to take responsibility for the profiles if somebody sued, and also sell me a camera at dealer price. They refused to do either and I didn't supply the look profiles. This tells you exactly how important color is to the companies. I've given up trying to sell color to the MF crowd: They don't get it. It has no value to them.
Let's say color profiles are the brakes of the car. Why can't we get better brakes for the backs?
And yes I agree style comes from individual creative decisions. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't get a good starting point out of the box already.
In theory you should be able to work as a photographer without Photoshop. Or are MFDB companies just in the biz to expand marketshare of Adobe Photohop?
Why do we shooters have to do the homework of the MFDB companies?
Cheers
Boris
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=189187\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
-
James: Well you know it's two different things to be able to do something and to just find it done. Yes we have more choices when it comes to converters. But all of the converters have different shortcommings. And quite honestly they all could benefit by some of the features OTHER raw converters provide.
I bet everybody would love it if the files that show up in the rawconverter were already at least as good as a point&shoot color and contrastwise. And then go from there.
IT IS POSSIBLE. Point&Shoot have it.
I started having always some pictures with nice colors next to my retouching computers for reference. I don't recall that I ever had to do that with film.
With film the files just pop up on my screen like this after the scanning:
[attachment=6109:attachment]
You have some very good and valid points.
I feel the difference with light is not just hard or soft but already small angle changes have a great deal of influence on the final look with digital. Film was also less sensitive to that. And yes... digital picks up color casts from surroundings very quickly. Sometimes I make use of this by placing colored flags close to the subject.
MORT: Yes you're right on that. Grain and resolution and possibly the dynamic range in absolute numbers are much better with digital. And film speed - talk about ISO 25'600. But somehow digital gives blown skies or mushy shadows that need to be fixed (double conversion in raw of the same file then masking and similar tricks) when film just gave you a pleasing pic to start with. Sometimes even without flash/fill/reflectors/diffusors.
Technically digital may be dozen times better. But where is the feel, the style, the effortless getting straight to the point where you can start improving in post.
This is an unretouched shot scanned on a Imacon 949 that was not corrected in Flexcolor or retouched in Photoshop. I just opened it now 2 minutes or so ago to resize it for web.
[attachment=6110:attachment]
Now show me your best uncorrected, unretouched digital pics to compare.
Talking about colors kinda has no point.
And thanks to all that provided their honest opinion to this possibly to provocative titled thread.
Cheers
Boris
-
Boris with all due respect but you are cutting corners here.
Ofcourse a digital untouched file is different than film.
Remember that with film you have a different look on every film.
You can see this as a little bit of photoshop already in the film stock.
The digital capture can be seen as the most natural capture you can get, after that you have to give it some work, you have to set at least colortemp and maybe some profile.
When you compare this to the work you have with film I cannot see the problem.
When I shoot film I :
Shoot film
Bring it to the lab
Pick it up 3 days later and pay 5.00
Scan it on my scanner, which takes app 4 minutes per scan
And than store it.
When I shoot digital I :
Shoot and it's transfered to my PC for instant viewing.
After the shoot I get the look I want and copy this to all my pictures and batchprocess this, total time less than 10 minutes for the WHOLE session.
After that the process is the same as with film, go into photoshop to do the rest.
Film is beautiful, heck I use it for the same reasons you love it, instant effect.
But the workflow for film is WAY longer and more expensive than digital which is almost instant.
I have to admit however that I'm well into colormanagment and profiles for what I do, so maybe that saves a lot of time.
-
With film, you get color from a company who are selling you nothing but COLOR. The film has bad color the company woulda gone broke. That's what film is all about - color and quality control. With digital you get a camera, and then you get a Raw converter written by some huge company with zillions of other things on its mind. The main thing on the mind of all these companies is how fast they can get you to upgrade. What d'you expect ? If the quality from the converters is so bad, why d'you put up with it ?
If you want decent color, start by using the Raw converter from the company that made your camera - the camera manufacturer software tends to have crappy workflow but very good quality.
Edmund
James: Well you know it's two different things to be able to do something and to just find it done. Yes we have more choices when it comes to converters. But all of the converters have different shortcommings. And quite honestly they all could benefit by some of the features OTHER raw converters provide.
I bet everybody would love it if the files that show up in the rawconverter were already at least as good as a point&shoot color and contrastwise. And then go from there.
IT IS POSSIBLE. Point&Shoot have it.
I started having always some pictures with nice colors next to my retouching computers for reference. I don't recall that I ever had to do that with film.
With film the files just pop up on my screen like this after the scanning:
[attachment=6109:attachment]
You have some very good and valid points.
I feel the difference with light is not just hard or soft but already small angle changes have a great deal of influence on the final look with digital. Film was also less sensitive to that. And yes... digital picks up color casts from surroundings very quickly. Sometimes I make use of this by placing colored flags close to the subject.
MORT: Yes you're right on that. Grain and resolution and possibly the dynamic range in absolute numbers are much better with digital. And film speed - talk about ISO 25'600. But somehow digital gives blown skies or mushy shadows that need to be fixed (double conversion in raw of the same file then masking and similar tricks) when film just gave you a pleasing pic to start with. Sometimes even without flash/fill/reflectors/diffusors.
Technically digital may be dozen times better. But where is the feel, the style, the effortless getting straight to the point where you can start improving in post.
This is an unretouched shot scanned on a Imacon 949 that was not corrected in Flexcolor or retouched in Photoshop. I just opened it now 2 minutes or so ago to resize it for web.
[attachment=6110:attachment]
Now show me your best uncorrected, unretouched digital pics to compare.
Talking about colors kinda has no point.
And thanks to all that provided their honest opinion to this possibly to provocative titled thread.
Cheers
Boris
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=189282\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
-
Boris,
I see where your coming from about film but looking at your examples, the contrast, the color might have a film look, but their still will be a lot of post prodcution involved to clear up the red arm that is in open shadow and the red banding in the transitional areas.
On a broad look, yes it is out of the camera film like, but piece by piece there is still work to do on a computer, wheter by you or a retoucher.
This example is as much a comparision of c1 3.8 and V4 as it is anything.
[attachment=6115:attachment]
Personally I like to start tethered and hit as close to my color and look before I start shooting, which only takes a few seconds. With the P30 I always underexpose just slightly and then open up in the software settings and all the captures coming in pick up tha look.
For finish out, I now use V4 for various reasons, mostly I like the look and secondly I can match and grade images from different sessions on one screen.
I don't miss film now that I have stable converters. In the early days batching out thousands of images for jpegs was a nightmare, now it's pretty much set the color, make the corrections and apply.
If I'm in a stable envrionment like studio or large production location usually the film I make on the computer tethered is the direction I stay with.
Also in the last days of my film experience I found the labs in LA to be all over the place, at least in E-6 and in C-41 you were at the mercy of whoever made the contacts. If you had good symmetry with the lab it worked ok (and definately was easier than digital post), but if not it was a process of go back and try it again.
Now what I would like to see is better digital polaroid in a portable mode. Not just that the medium format lcds are bad, (and yes they are not very good) but even the great Nikon lcd can trick you as what's on the back of the camera is not the same once in the computer.
I would love to see great camera lcd's that matched the processing profiles in the computer.
JR
James: Well you know it's two different things to be able to do something and to just find it done. Yes we have more choices when it comes to converters. But all of the converters have different shortcommings. And quite honestly they all could benefit by some of the features OTHER raw converters provide.
I bet everybody would love it if the files that show up in the rawconverter were already at least as good as a point&shoot color and contrastwise. And then go from there.
IT IS POSSIBLE. Point&Shoot have it.
I started having always some pictures with nice colors next to my retouching computers for reference. I don't recall that I ever had to do that with film.
With film the files just pop up on my screen like this after the scanning:
[attachment=6109:attachment]
You have some very good and valid points.
I feel the difference with light is not just hard or soft but already small angle changes have a great deal of influence on the final look with digital. Film was also less sensitive to that. And yes... digital picks up color casts from surroundings very quickly. Sometimes I make use of this by placing colored flags close to the subject.
MORT: Yes you're right on that. Grain and resolution and possibly the dynamic range in absolute numbers are much better with digital. And film speed - talk about ISO 25'600. But somehow digital gives blown skies or mushy shadows that need to be fixed (double conversion in raw of the same file then masking and similar tricks) when film just gave you a pleasing pic to start with. Sometimes even without flash/fill/reflectors/diffusors.
Technically digital may be dozen times better. But where is the feel, the style, the effortless getting straight to the point where you can start improving in post.
This is an unretouched shot scanned on a Imacon 949 that was not corrected in Flexcolor or retouched in Photoshop. I just opened it now 2 minutes or so ago to resize it for web.
[attachment=6110:attachment]
Now show me your best uncorrected, unretouched digital pics to compare.
Talking about colors kinda has no point.
And thanks to all that provided their honest opinion to this possibly to provocative titled thread.
Cheers
Boris
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=189282\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
-
If you want decent color, start by using the Raw converter from the company that made your camera - the camera manufacturer software tends to have crappy workflow but very good quality.
Edmund
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=189299\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
Edwin,
I don't know where you get the camera company software has crappy workflow. Some do, some don't, some are rock solid, some flaky.
I use all the converters for my cameras, and for the phase from time to time go to LR, or Raw Developer, but 95% of what I do can easily, be done in 3.78 or V4 and done fast.
JR
-
Edwin,
I don't know where you get the camera company software has crappy workflow. Some do, some don't, some are rock solid, some flaky.
I use all the converters for my cameras, and for the phase from time to time go to LR, or Raw Developer, but 95% of what I do can easily, be done in 3.78 or V4 and done fast.
JR
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=189306\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
James,
The name my parents wrote on the certificate was Edmund
Quite a few people who shoot onto cards seem to prefer the single-software workflow with LR or ACR to the better results from Leaf or Phase software - as can be seen from the queries about color in these threads.As for Canon's DPP whose results are superb, I've never met anyone who uses it for large batches.
It's clear that people are now judging "camera color" as "Lightroom color" for a lot of prosumer cameras
I wouldn't call any of the manufacturer software fragile, just a bit a pain to use. For what I do (frequent white balance, profile and curve adjustments), C1 keeps making me switch tabs, drives me crazy. Quality is good, though.
Edmund
-
...
-
With film, you get color from a company who are selling you nothing but COLOR. The film has bad color the company woulda gone broke. That's what film is all about - color and quality control. With digital you get a camera, and then you get a Raw converter written by some huge company with zillions of other things on its mind. The main thing on the mind of all these companies is how fast they can get you to upgrade. What d'you expect ? If the quality from the converters is so bad, why d'you put up with it ?
If you want decent color, start by using the Raw converter from the company that made your camera - the camera manufacturer software tends to have crappy workflow but very good quality.
Edmund
You know Edmund...
I'm kinda on the same page there with you.
Many people believed that the 3rd party raw converter PIXMANTEC.com RawShooter had a great user interface, was very fast and efficient, convinient, ahead of other raw processors in many areas (that's why Adobe bought them) but the color many people didn't like.
Solution:
Pixmantec’s RawShooter | Color Engine (powered by technology and intellectual property licensed from Etcetera Consulting) provides a great alternative to the standard “internal” camera color profiles included within RawShooter for each supported camera. The plug-in software is easy to install, use and maintain, regardless of the photographer’s experience or skill level. The RawShooter | Color Engine Plug-In is available as a software download at http://www.pixmantec.com (http://www.pixmantec.com) for $59.00. Future Upgrade versions to Color Engine will be available for $29.95 for existing users. This first Upgrade is being made available for free, as a thanks to the early adopters of RawShooter | Color Engine.
So yes I believe that "better" profiles are inevitable. Nothing comes for free though. If I'd get the PERFECT profiles I'd happily spend 1000 $ on them. And every sensible MFDB shooter that spent probably way over 20 k$ on his system should too. MFDB has an edge over other equipment in very few areas (wait... isn't it just resolution and dynamic range?) so it MUST have great color to start with.
But reality is that people are cheap when it comes to add-ons and software. They spend what they have for hardware but on software people are shy.
Now I don't know your expertise with color and I would assume this effort to take more than shooting some color charts under different lights and creating a custom profile for it but instead doing a concentrated effort and studies on a scientific level on pleasing colors and color balances. Often slight color casts are very pleasing.
I believe most people don't want to capture the colors as they are. Our captures should look BETTER than reality. On a dull day you want more sparcle. More warmth to the skin. Have reddishness removed from the face and green/blue venes adapted to the surrounding skin color.
Accurate color is for art reproduction. But if you get paid 5 figure dollar amounts to shoot clothes that cost 2 figure amounts you don't want to show how cheap the fabric is and how washed out the colors look in real life.
There should be several different profiles available that represent different film looks or styles. Kinda like choosing the right film for the task. We didn't often use Velvia to shoot people... did we?
But also with colors and styles MFDB companies sleep (or in the case of Hasselblad are DEAD with their one crappy profile does all approach) while Canon seems to see where this is going. PICTURE STYLES will give an additional layer of creativity. Granted, currently picture styles seem to suck for the most part but it's a start.
I guess in the end it would be nice if you could tweak skin tones seperate from the rest of the picture. If you shoot a reddish, pale model you automatically give it a bit more warmth and more greens to compensate. But now the background has a cast. So you need to convert two versions and then overlay/mask out some bits.
Damn... I'd spend an additional 10'000 $ if digibacks would greet me with pleasing color, rich skintones (even on pale european people) immediately after setting the whitebalance (which should be auto and working at least as well as on Canons anyway). It would cut down post tremendously (in regard to color correctioin) and give me time to focus on the next shoot or have more time for retouching.
I wonder what these 80 Phase One employees do all day long... I know they are not fixing my color or bringing wireless image transfer like they promissed over 2 years ago. And it seems they don't announce new products/roadmaps 18 month in ahead as they said.
Cheers
Boris
-
I guess in the end it would be nice if you could tweak skin tones seperate from the rest of the picture. If you shoot a reddish, pale model you automatically give it a bit more warmth and more greens to compensate. But now the background has a cast. So you need to convert two versions and then overlay/mask out some bits.
Damn... I'd spend an additional 10'000 $ if digibacks would greet me with pleasing color, rich skintones (even on pale european people) immediately after setting the whitebalance (which should be auto and working at least as well as on Canons anyway). It would cut down post tremendously (in regard to color correctioin) and give me time to focus on the next shoot or have more time for retouching.
I wonder what these 80 Phase One employees do all day long... I know they are not fixing my color or bringing wireless image transfer like they promissed over 2 years ago. And it seems they don't announce new products/roadmaps 18 month in ahead as they said.
Cheers
Boris
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=189359\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
Have you tried using the Color Editor in Capture One Pro? Its very easy-to-use color profile editing software and you can isolate tones for correction.
I think if I were a manufacturer it makes more sense to create profiles that can reproduce a scene as close to actual colors as possible and allow the users to edit to their liking from there. My idea of pleasing tones might be different from someone elses...
-
Have you tried using the Color Editor in Capture One Pro? Its very easy-to-use color profile editing software and you can isolate tones for correction.
Yes I have. But I don't feel the current implementation in 3.x is sufficient, intuitive or userfriendly. The small area in the color editor bugs me. It's like the old NIK Color Efex filter set where you probably see 2-3% of the entire frame in the preview at 100%.
The new Nikon software has something similar going on with the local adjustments but that is much more intuitive.
And honestly... I would prefer to use Lightroom mainly as my workflow and only use C1 for files that make no sense in Lightroom.
Maybe it would be a sensible feature if you could shoot a gretag mcbeth chart of every scene before you start shooting and then the RAW proggy would have a quick way to analize that (even when it's only a small part of the frame) and then apply corrections to the rest of the set's shots. The effort wouldn't be much bigger than placing a greycard into the scene.
I also understand that your taste may or may not match with mine. Right now I'm really into rich, saturated "film-like" skin colors. Digital however usually ends up much to orange. Already with the 1Ds MK2 you needed to desaturate skin to make it look realistic and "fashionista".
Cheers
Boris
-
I also understand that your taste may or may not match with mine. Right now I'm really into rich, saturated "film-like" skin colors. Digital however usually ends up much to orange. Already with the 1Ds MK2 you needed to desaturate skin to make it look realistic and "fashionista".
Run one of the calibration scripts for ACR, and the "reds too orange" problem will go away. It will significantly improve color overall.
-
I disagree with some of the points brought up about film being consistent color. As someone that has shot tens of thousands of sheets of film. It's like a great bottle of wine, each one is a little different. With film each emulsion batch has slightly different color, iso and reciprocity. Add in that each E-6 line is slightly different and you got something that can make your heart jump when they pull if off the rack.
Imagine shooting a Macbeth color checker with 100 sheets of film from 100 different emulsion batches in 100 different E-6 lines (If you could find 100 E-6 lines on this planet.) Every sheet would be slightly different. If that happened with any digital camera, people would freak.
Look, we used spend hours testing film to figure out which cc filters we need to neutralize it only for it to change the next week. It was not fun.
Now we have a 'profile' for all files for coming into Flexcolor that is based on what I visualize the images should look like. It's awesome, I can have Fuji greens and Kodak blues in the same shot. We get consistent color and iso without all the hassles of loading holders.
This goes for any camera: The camera companies just give us a starting place. Make your own profiles or looks, it's your responsibility to your vision, your images and your clients. Don't think linearly, film has some pretty crazy curves built into it.
Peace,
Weldon
P.s. I can’t resist one funny film story. I had been shooting 8x10 all day at the LA Harbor and we went to get in a boat to go to a different vantage point. The AD starts to grab my assistant as she falls off the boat. He wisely got a tighter grip on the case full of 8x10 holders and let her fall in the water. She was mad as a little wet hen but to this day LOVES the shots:)
-
I've been reading this and an article I ran across a while back came to mind. It was discussing the differences between a typical Bayer type sensor and other technologies.
The problem may be due to the fact that the sensor has a markedly lower dynamic range for the red and blue channels and as such it has to either compensate in-camera(and often blows it badly) or it comes out looking flat until you adjust it back to a normal value with the RAW converter.
http://photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=007RWm (http://photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=007RWm)
http://www.ddisoftware.com/sd14-5d/ (http://www.ddisoftware.com/sd14-5d/)
Read the article and ignore resolution but instead focus on the color issues.
Interesting if you look at the article in terms of this problem. Ie - not about "pxiels" but the ratios of each on the sensor. I have a feeling that the problem is with the design of the sensor itself and may require a totally new technology to fix.
Foveon's technology looks promising, but they are virtually dead in terms of new products. Nothing for MF, and nothing soon by the looks of it.
-
I disagree with some of the points brought up about film being consistent color. As someone that has shot tens of thousands of sheets of film. It's like a great bottle of wine, each one is a little different. With film each emulsion batch has slightly different color, iso and reciprocity. Add in that each E-6 line is slightly different and you got something that can make your heart jump when they pull if off the rack.
<SNIP>
Peace,
Weldon
I don't recall that anyone has made a statement that film has more consistent color. But then again I make a lotta statements and have a bad memory :-)
What I'm having a hard time understanding is why color is so terrible with DSLR's and MFDB's. And why manufacturers don't offer more options when it comes to color reproductions (styles or color profiles). I find myself doing selective color manipulations, paint with light, painting in shadowskin-tones, etc that I rarely ever do with film.
With film my stuff looks rather natural. With DSLR's and MFDB's my work suddenly looks all digital flat or freaks out. I have a hard time to find a balance in the colors that is pleasing to me while still looking natural. So I tend to go to far. Sure some customers like that and even book me for that look. But I prefer the rich skintones film provides.
I believe this thread is about bad digitally looking color. It's about "why can't we have pleasing color and many styles to choose from".
But as the thread starter I must say this thread has been pretty disappointing.
People just keep telling that you need to run this and that (homebrew) skript from someone on some internet page. Don't just talk about some skript that may or may not support Lightroom, C1, etc. but rather back up your results with pictures. What difference did the script make? Show before/after files.
The point is the manufacturers should do whatever the FORS script or custom calibration is supposed to do. And again... this is not about accurate color. Most people in this thread just talk about getting the color more accurate. I don't need accurate colors - I need PLEASING colors.
Some people are so quick to blame themselves and take over work that the vendor should get done. You expect your operating system to just work. You don't go out and reprogram it yourself to fix bugs.
You expect the brakes to stop your car without a script you find by chance on the internet.
Why would you need any script from the internet to fix your cameras/backs color?
I don't get it. You can get 10 or more well working used cars for the price of one P45+ back. Or 2-3 new cars. It's a lot of money. Should be enough money to get a perfect product in return (and if the FORS skript makes color perfect... why isn't it included with the backs?).
Someone made the very good point that the fine folks at Fujifilm and Kodak used to take decisions on how a film should reproduce colors. What is pleasing... what works as a look... what can the emulsion provide and what not. They had many decades of time to improve and engineers with tons of experience and expertise to do that. Why re-invent the wheel. Let the experts take care of it. At least the starting point.
There are always trade-offs. But film that looks bad/flat/ugly to start with is not getting sold. Simple as that. Nobody would expect you to shoot terrible film stock that needs 5 hours of fixing and retouching to get it to a finished photo.
Some are more saturated, some less. They gave us different starting points that often have been close to the final shot. But all have a use and proposition. Today with digital you have one flat raw file that you have to tweak to hell and back and people just accept it. The consensus is: Digital is flat and sucks to start with but you can make it whatever you want. You can define your own digital film emulsion.
It's not a CAN. It's a MUST.
But why? I waste so much time in the various raw converters and learn new converters all the time. For what? Often the embedded preview in the RAW is better than anything you can pull off after tweaking for 10 minutes. Particularly Lightroom and ACR do something to skin that just annoys me - it makes it all flat, boring and switches colors to mega-ugly. Worse than embedded. Why is it not possible to get the same look as a starting point to beginn with if the back/camera can embed it into the raw as a preview and then optimize from there? Or as said... emulate different existing films.
Cheers,
Boris
-
The point is the manufacturers should do whatever the FORS script or custom calibration is supposed to do. And again... this is not about accurate color. Most people in this thread just talk about getting the color more accurate. I don't need accurate colors - I need PLEASING colors.
Accurate color is a starting point from which you can easily whatever creative adjustments you find necessary to achieve "pleasing" color, whatver you may think that is. There's way too many divergent notions of what constitutes "pleasing" color for anyone to satisfy them with a few canned presets. Otherwise DXO filmpack or Capture One would rule whe world.
The main strength of the Fors and other calibration scripts is to get consistent and accurate color from multiple cameras. This makes matching the "look" of images shot with multiple cameras much easier. You can create your "pleasing color" look with an adjustment layer or PS action or whatever, and then simply run a batch process on all your RAWs. And if you buy a new camera, simply run the calibration script with the new camera, and matching the "look" of your previous work is easy.
-
I don't get it. You can get 10 or more well working used cars for the price of one P45+ back. Or 2-3 new cars. It's a lot of money. Should be enough money to get a perfect product in return (and if the FORS skript makes color perfect... why isn't it included with the backs?).
Welcome to the way "pro" equipment is. It's often made by small companies with little or no real experience in testing and mass production and so on, and then they charge you boutique prices for the few units a month they create. Audio is the same way. The second that you look at a mixing board, it's suddenly insane prices for what is obviously not even $1000 in actual materials.
Digital never looks correct unless you tweak with it. Done. End of story. It's because of how CCD and Bayer sensors physically work. Now, they could tweak it in-camera, and a lot of DSLRs do this with usually decent results. But none of the digital backs seem to do this, probably because they are marketed towards multiple cameras(jack of all trades, master of none). But you are correct, they could easily include a small CF type slot and sell a set of curves/adjustment points for each camera. They should, considering the insane prices. There are only a few dozen major cameras that accept digital backs, so it's not impossible to do, either.
Raw requires conversion. Just the way it is with digital, other than maybe Foveon's sensor, which is patterned to physically mimic film. But the resolution is seriously deficient, even for serious 35mm type cameras. 4.6 million true pixels is just too low to resolve fine details. But the color does look great. I keep hoping that they will make a real MF sensor with at least 20MP worth of actual pixels.
P.S. I never understood that, either. Foveon could have raked the competition over the coals by insisting that their 4.6MP was actual pixels. Instead we get silly claims by everyone.
-
Hi Boris, I think the first untouched film shot looks amazing, the "finished" version looks horrible, a beautiful woman made ugly by photoshop! She looks fake, why do people feel the need to do this? Are freckles considered ugly now?
Jason
-
Hi Boris, I think the first untouched film shot looks amazing, the "finished" version looks horrible, a beautiful woman made ugly by photoshop! She looks fake, why do people feel the need to do this? Are freckles considered ugly now?
Jason
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=190357\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
Have to agree with you there 100%.
Also, I don't share the opinion that 'MFDB suck so bad'?
How are you doing a grey balance? Presets? Not bothering?
Jo S. x
-
I respectfully disagree with some of the points made here. In the history of photography all we have ever been given is a starting point. From making wet plates to processing our own film to processing our own files. All four of the major players give good color out of the box, it's your responsibility to make it your own. I shoot with Hasselblad products but I could rent any back and get the same 'look.' If someone gave me canned looks or profiles, I wouldn't even install them.
I agree with your remark about pleasing color, we all need that. We shoot a grey card as starting point and tweak from there. Other than the sunny f16 rule there are very little constants. Every shoot is a little different, every model/product/house/wedding/car is a little different color. Canned profiles or looks would just be starting place you would have to change them anyway.
Boris, I would find some photos you do like and study them. Look at the tone, the relationship of the colors, the over all contrast, the micro contrast and the saturation of individual colors. Build up that internal vocabulary. Next translate that internal vocabulary to your raw convertor (any convertor) so you can control each nuance of your vision. We aren't born with knowing that a model has 5 points too much red in her face - we have to learn it
Peace,
Weldon
-
Boris, I would find some photos you do like and study them. Look at the tone, the relationship of the colors, the over all contrast, the micro contrast and the saturation of individual colors. Build up that internal vocabulary. Next translate that internal vocabulary to your raw convertor (any convertor) so you can control each nuance of your vision. We aren't born with knowing that a model has 5 points too much red in her face - we have to learn it
Peace,
Weldon
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=190382\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
This is what Kodak, Fuji and Agfa used to do for photographers when we shot film. There was a multitude of very distinct options that you could pick and choose from that vaied in color balance, contrast and saturation, both on a global level and selectively with respect to certain colors. The engineers at these companies did the color science work for you, and quite well, IMO. Now, the makers of the MFDBs basically give you one film and a whole bunch of chemistry(i.e., a raw converter) and tell you to mix up the chemistry whatever way you want to produce exactly the look you want. That's fine for some, but perhaps Boris would prefer to be just a photographer, not a color scientist with expert Photoshop skills, and have someone else give him 30 options in the form of presets that he could use as starting points and then selectively adjust.
-
Yes, the engineers did the color science work and it was a good starting place. However, I think film has been romanticized and over simplified. It was rarely consistent with color and iso – it varied from batch to batch and year to year. I constantly tweaked exposure and cc filters to get it where I liked it. My standard push was +1/2 to get the contrast I liked and I pushed in 1/8 stop increments all the time.
We have it so much better now it’s not even funny. I’m a photographer not a Photoshop guru – I just know it’s possible to get exactly what you want with a little effort. Maybe some of the color and Photoshop gurus could speak up on a good workflow to help him get the color he wants.
Peace,
Weldon
-
Yes, the engineers did the color science work and it was a good starting place. However, I think film has been romanticized and over simplified. It was rarely consistent with color and iso – it varied from batch to batch and year to year. I constantly tweaked exposure and cc filters to get it where I liked it. My standard push was +1/2 to get the contrast I liked and I pushed in 1/8 stop increments all the time.
We have it so much better now it’s not even funny. I’m a photographer not a Photoshop guru – I just know it’s possible to get exactly what you want with a little effort. Maybe some of the color and Photoshop gurus could speak up on a good workflow to help him get the color he wants.
Peace,
Weldon
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=190438\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
I think Boris makes some strong points for better presets and as we all know thereis more need for cross read from convertors.
Whatever you set in any converter with a p30 file won't match a Canon, or a Leaf, at least without a lot of work and going from V4, to lightroom to 3.78 is night and day.
I don't mind rolling my own, but once I roll it, I'd like it to stay lit.
Today I am batching some images for the web and put the large retouched images in lightroom to batch out jpegs.
The lightroom preview doesn't match the photoshop preview, with lightroom being more saturated and red.
Don't get it, don't really understand why one preview of a processed tiff will look different in a software suite, though I probably have some colorspace setting that is not correct or lightroom is just making up it's own brand of film.
Who knows?
Still, to compare any of the digital processes to film to me is a mute point. Film, at least in my world is as dead as Zed.
JR
-
The lightroom preview doesn't match the photoshop preview, with lightroom being more saturated and red.
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=190482\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
I hear you on that one. The LR preview (sub 100%) is less accurate saturation wise compared to the PS preview e.g. choosing defrindge all edges in LR really kills the colour and it's only reflected at 100% which makes it a pain to correct.
-
Whatever you set in any converter with a p30 file won't match a Canon, or a Leaf, at least without a lot of work and going from V4, to lightroom to 3.78 is night and day.
I don't mind rolling my own, but once I roll it, I'd like it to stay lit.
This is a strong argument for accurate color out of the RAW converter, and then applying creative color tweaks as a batch process in PS, or as a controlled deviation from "accurate" in the RAW converter. If you know how to go from "accurate" to "pleasing", then getting "pleasing" from any camera becomes a simple matter of running a calibration script to find the settings for accurate color (something that only needs to be done once per camera), then running the accurate > pleasing process.
-
This is what Kodak, Fuji and Agfa used to do for photographers when we shot film. There was a multitude of very distinct options that you could pick and choose from that vaied in color balance, contrast and saturation, both on a global level and selectively with respect to certain colors. The engineers at these companies did the color science work for you, and quite well, IMO. Now, the makers of the MFDBs basically give you one film and a whole bunch of chemistry(i.e., a raw converter) and tell you to mix up the chemistry whatever way you want to produce exactly the look you want. That's fine for some, but perhaps Boris would prefer to be just a photographer, not a color scientist with expert Photoshop skills, and have someone else give him 30 options in the form of presets that he could use as starting points and then selectively adjust.
I couldn't have said it better myself. And I obviously didn't otherwise we wouldn't still be talking about scripts, and every photographer reinventing the color wheel.
You really got straight to the point. Thank you. I love you man :-)
I use 645 & 6x7 Film, MFDB's and DSLR's (mostly Canons like the 5D and now added the 1Ds MK3 for it's high ISO ability). Funny thing is I bought a Canon 5D while I also owned a Canon 1Ds MK2 and a 1Ds before that. Why did I do that? Because the 1Ds MK2 sucked in many areas compared to the 1Ds (beside noise where the mark2 was much better). You know what? In some cases I feel the 5D gives much better pictures. And it's not just because of color or sharpness. It's just a entirely different feel to it. And while I'm sure you can correct a gretag mcbeth colorchart of both cameras to virtually the same they still have different properties and qualities that will apply in real life situations.
For gods sake I use(d) 5 or 6 different RAW converters. I'm getting tired of learning new converters. Some converters I used are not even available anymore today or in new versions that may or may not support the files shot with older digital cameras. And never versions can significantly change the rendition of previously converted files.
It's almost bizzare that some people talk about calibrating different cameras to give you the same result.
WHY ARE YOU SHOOTING A DIFFERENT CAMERA IF YOU WANT THE SAME RESULT?
I shoot different cameras and use different RAW converters because I want to offer a variety of styles and different reproductions of the same scene. It's like eating italian or french or at McDonalds. You can't have the same thing every day.
Now MFDB chef's... give us the italian, french, McDonalds (spot on), etc flavour color profiles :-)
And give a quick way to shoot a gretag mcbeth colorchart instead of greycards that can be applied to all pics from a set (to satisfy the color accuracy freaks *ROFL*). I may even like that at times.
Cheers and have a nice weekend
Boris
PS: And James is absolutely right about Lightroom's color problems. It kills me because at the moment it's the tool I feel has the best workflow for me and you can add pieces to it to make it really work for you. It gives great comic colors though :-)
-
It's almost bizzare that some people talk about calibrating different cameras to give you the same result.
WHY ARE YOU SHOOTING A DIFFERENT CAMERA IF YOU WANT THE SAME RESULT?
Hmmmm...maybe because different parts of the shoot need different cameras, like action shots that are best taken with a DSLR, and some studio stuff that may be best suited to MFDB, and you want the colors from both cameras to match when you send the files to the clients. Or you're shooting a wedding, and have a long lens on one body and a wide angle on the other so you don't have to screw around with changing lenses in the middle of the ceremony, and you also have an instant backup if one of the bodies emits smoke. Or maybe you've gotten a positive professional reputation based on a certain color look, and want to be able to duplicate that look when you upgrade your camera system without having to reinvent the wheel all over again.
There are many advantages to separating creative color adjustments from initial RAW conversion, so that a particular look is NOT dependent on a specific camera. What if you have a client that likes the "look" you've developed for one specific camera, and then that camera dies 2 hours before the shoot and you have to use your backup gear? Do you blow the client off (which you would have to do with your recommended methodology), or do you simply shoot with your backup camera and and deliver the desired images to the client (which I could do easily) without giving any hint that anything went wrong?
If you're using your camera to dictate the color of your images, you've completely missed the point of digital, rather like cutting wood with a chain saw without bothering to start the engine.