http://ononesoft.cachefly.net/video/photot...ne_advanced.mov
Phase One oughtta be taking notes...
Phase's c1 4.5 has this skin tone editor thing kind of like the color editor that has presets called honey dew or light melon or something like that.
it seems to work like the color editor and though I didn't give it much time I really couldn't get it to do anything that looked good, but I didn't spend much time on it.
Where you see a big difference in skin tones is when you work on location. All the color in all the digital cameras can change in a second just by the surrounding ambient color or light.
I do like the new C1 for processing files, it starts out with Canon, Nikon and Phase much closer to the look I want than lightroom. Actually sometimes miles closeer.
I wish Phase had taken a hint from adobe and made the interface easier as doing thousands of images and having to move from tab to tab for tone, color, sharpness etc. is much more time consuming than lightroom.
Still 4.5 is the closest I've seen in look and color for the Canon files compared to DPP which really gets the best out of the Canon.
Edit: After a large project when I sit down to process files it always hits me how consuming post production is. I'm not talking about shooting 50 to 200 frames in studio or with controlled light, but the jobs that are consuming that require multiple locaitons, multiple models and props and a thousand or so frames.
You know that your in for a grueling time sitting in front of multiple monitors, calibrating, tweaking, adjusting, moving, copying, processing, etc. etc. until you step back and add it up and every day of shooting equals at least 1 or 2 very long days of post processing just to get to the first view of web galleries.
I am fascinated about how in the transition from film to digital that all the analog color experts disappeared. Where did the guys that made film go, why did the labs disappear.
In the film days you could build a studied history with a film where you knew how it would react in almost any circumstance. You also had the same relationship with your "color expert" at the lab. You could drop off 400 rolls of film and a few polaroids and say you know make the contact with those brown skin tones, but like last time, let's try to get some light green snap to the highlights and though not perfect the first round of contacts would be pretty and predicable.
With digital every job is a roll your own new start. I use to save presets but I found few if any work on the next project, even if you use the same cameras and lights. Every times, it's a roll your own color, come back look at it and do it again.
I find the same thing with camera. You can shoot 5 brands of the same subject, put them into their proprieary software or 3rd part software like lightroom and you'd think 12 different photographers did the shot.
There is a reason there are 5 figure per image retouchers out there and it's not just because in digital we can cut and past and move stuff around. Now our relationships aren't with the film or the labs but with Adobe, Apple, Eizo and the retoucher.
Probably because I shoot under such varied conditions, but I find color to be the hardest thing to hit. I'll mess with an image until I'm almost there in the processor but I always find it amazing that once I get "almost" there I can just slam the saturation slider to the left and it has the most beautiful black and white look.
I agree with gwtif that the de sat look probably came about because it was just so damn hard to hit beautiful consistent color with a digital camera.
I'm sure some overburdened photographer one day just said screw it, I'll make the faces green and if they don't like it they can send it over to Pascal to fix it.
Somewhere some AD went "cool" lets go with the green and Lürzer's Archive, at-edge and CA mag became the post processing guide to the world.
A friend of mine recently said that you have to eventually step back and realize that we're really not shooting cameras anymore, but we're working with electronic devices. Like a a sat nav system they all can be good but they also can get very bad very quickly and you can find yourself in the South Bronx of life in an instance.
I know that somewhere here someone with a relationship with a camera manufacturer is going to say yea, but my EFIHD65LX mounted on an old twin lens Yashica using floppycolor software version 12 shoots great skin tones and throw up some over retouched image that has gone through 32 rounds of post production, but before that image comes up, post a link to the web galleries of the 500 frames that were shot sans retoucing post production.
There is a big difference.
Like everyone, I've pulled the magenta banding off arms, the yellow faces under backlit sun, built color back into an image just because a grey building was behind me.
But now I get it. I'm not using a camera anymore, I'm using a Garmin with a lens.
I really was hoping Kodak or Fuji would be the next professional camera makers. I'm sure they have thousands of laid of color experts that are playing golf in Phoenix that would like to get back to work.