Luminous Landscape Forum
Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Colour Management => Topic started by: keith_cooper on July 12, 2012, 05:00:07 pm
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I was recently looking at 'HDR Expose 2' and '32 float' from Unified Color.
Does anyone know of any decent technical info about their 'Beyond RGB' colour model? Strengths / weaknesses / realworld usefulness etc.
Whilst there's some info about it on their site http://www.unifiedcolor.com/technology (http://www.unifiedcolor.com/technology) it's all at a heavily 'marketing inspired' (i.e. vague) level of detail...
"Unified Color methodology solves many long-standing color science challenges and supports a unique imaging paradigm that offers powerful capabilities and new levels of efficiency."
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Strengths are great marketing speak. While having nothing to do with this supposably amazing color space, I wasn’t at all impressed with the results I got from HDR Express. Maybe I didn’t spend enough money and got “only slightly beyond RGB” in this product?
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I was recently looking at 'HDR Expose 2' and '32 float' from Unified Color.
Does anyone know of any decent technical info about their 'Beyond RGB' colour model? Strengths / weaknesses / realworld usefulness etc.
Hi Keith,
I remember Doug Kerr doing a bit of research on it, here (http://www.openphotographyforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=14383).
Cheers,
Bart
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Not sure what planet Doug is from, but I think he was calling BS on the Unified Color claims...
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Thanks for the link to that discussion.
From an initial read through it would seem that there may be some interesting feature hidden behind the marketing speak ;-)
Whether this makes any difference to the software and how useful it might be in some of my work, is an entirely different matter...
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Not sure what planet Doug is from, but I think he was calling BS on the Unified Color claims...
For those who don't know Doug, this (http://dougkerr.net/pumpkin/) should give a bit more background about Doug and his understanding of the fundamentals at play here. I've got to know him as a very nice person with a great sense of humour, and he does flavor his technically founded cirticism with a pinch of sarcasm (must have something to do with his Scottish line of descent).
Cheers,
Bart
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Checked out his site. I and tell from the area code that he is located in Texas. Being a Professional Engineer explains a lot. :)
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Whether this makes any difference to the software and how useful it might be in some of my work, is an entirely different matter...
Hi Keith,
There is certainly some merit in being able to change brightness without butchering color (to use colloquial terminology ;) ). Tonemapping needs to do a lot of that, to trick our 'eyes' into believing that what we see resembles the original scene.
I've been following the progress in Unified Color's software implementations, but it didn't convince me enough to part from some of my money, yet. With the recent developments in ACR/LR process version 2012, it will be even more difficult to make a difference, especially since things like generating the HDR data from exposure brackets seems to have improved in Photoshop as well. But that's a different subject.
Cheers,
Bart
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After trying it out for a while, I've written up a review that looks at some of what the HDR Expose 2 software does.
http://www.northlight-images.co.uk/reviews/software/hdrexpose2.html (http://www.northlight-images.co.uk/reviews/software/hdrexpose2.html)
Even after reading up some of the 'BeyondRGB' info, I'm still at a loss to provide any solid examples where it makes a noticeable difference, but I'll admit to being a relatively infrequent HDR user.
Thanks for everyone's input!