Both your examples are not intended to "compare" with the original scene nor with what you heard, obviously not live in 1920 anyway! They are intended to invoke a response in the brain that will "click". Many early acoustic recordings are of iconic performances and not hearing them in whatever current digital bit rate does not diminish their emotional impact. Likewise, to be extreme, seeing iconic work by HCB/Robert Frank in B/W does not diminish the impact of the work. Which of the two woods images best evokes that response? That is the "better" reproduction. Torger says the red of the bark, however subtle, is a trigger for that memory he has, and remember how elastic our memory is, and is constantly changing as well. How does this work if you never directly experienced the scene? I suspect you relate it to a close example you hold in memory, rendition of colour, however inaccurate, that triggers the "click" has worked, it may be a subtle change is enough to differentaite between a memory trigger and yet another picture of trees.
Yes, yes. What tried to say is that it is total bullshit to start talking about raw conversion, tone curves etc as if they actually mean anything - they have about as much absolute significance as the elasticity of a steel needle on a shellack record - they are necessary algorithmic transducers, employed in today's color capture process.
Now what does happen is that people get told, by our friends with the big marketing budgets, that this or that image is "artistic" because the vivid green of the foliage, and the bright orange weathered rendering of the deskbound "caucasian" american , or the lovely pale skin of the "asian" lady are memorable, culturally desirable, and thus consumers learn to love "Kodak" color, or "Fuji" color, and expect to see it in their imagery.
At this point, people in the engineering trades are stuck with finding ways to overlay totally artificial conventional color schemes over whatever data the instruments actually capture. But this is carefully hidden from the consumer, as Torger points out Having some tools out there which would allow people to play with renderings might actually allow the industry to evolve a bit in a positive way.
Btw, I do understand the psychophysics a bit, I have read the equations, I have taken courses, I have written a camera profiler and a whole profile editing suite, I have even sold hand-edited profiles, I have designed a measuring instrument, I have assisted a calibration company in their marketing efforts vis à vis major camera makers and imaging vendors, and I was an ICC member. I was one of the consultants involved in designing the Colorchecker Passport, which many of you use.
You know what all the big imaging companies are really good at? Making money. They know that getting a bad proprietary model adopted by their userbase and then generating follow-on vaue through lock-in is ten times preferable -for them- than having usable extensible color models out there. Do you think that an industry which cannot even agree on a common battery format is going to agree on a color model? These games have been played with raw formats and color renderings for years, and the head marketing guys who ensure the products are crippled by design are *really* the smartest kids on the block. And the smartest ones, the ones who have made the most money for their stockholders are not those found in Japan or in Europe, you know where they are.
I'm not saying that Torger or Erik don't understand engineering - they are doubtless ten times better at it than I could ever be. But the situation here is heavily constrained, and minor engineering differences just don't provide a really major change in user experience. Also, camera companies like Phase One or Nikon, Canon and Sony care quite a bit about the end-user experience. But they care even more about staying in business, and marketing spin - look at this very thread about whether a Credo back marketed by Phase One does or does not (
?) work with a camera just released by Phase One. Of course, Phase One could sell XF bodies to customers of Credo and P+, and the engineers no doubt did their homework, but the marketing guys know that it might be even more valuable NOT to sell all these guys bodies, or at least only to some and not just now.
The only place were genuine improvements in color can be expected to come from is the digital cinema world, because digital cinema sells the user an experience, not a product.
Edmund
PS. You want advice from a color professional on how to get better color? Hang out in museums a bit, go to a mall and look through the cosmetics stores, hang out with artists, go and take a couple of art courses. You won't get decent color if you cannot see it. I watch people
go to the local museum to look at the paintings; for me it takes half an hour to start seeing the color shades, they have usually walked out after 5 minutes.
