I own two of Dan's books. Looks to me they are all about
Color Correction without a lick of color management (he's kind of a color management denier). I can't find one "
Before" image in either book that appears it was captured by someone who has a clue about creating good images or image data. So if you as a pro photographer and find out that your uncle (who's day job is an accountant) was hired to shoot your sisters wedding or annual report (because he owns a DSLR), Dan's book will be a good read for your uncle. If any of those photo's in Dan's book were uploaded here for a critique, the poster might be laughed out of the forums.
Dan is the master at fixing bad images! There is a market and need for that. Probably not much around here...
My
material as you call it, doesn't at all approach
Color Correction. It's about color management! Yes, both have the word
color in them.
I put in the time because I think that the content is worth the effort. It helps you to understand what is going on under the hood in a way that the likes of Dog's journeyman material never really approaches.
That statement appears to me, perhaps others, to imply either you don't know the difference between color management and color correction or you do and haven't really looked into my so called material which indeed
never approaches color correction!
The basic issue I have is that (a) I think that ACR is no longer state of the art when it comes to demozaicing...
So perhaps you can provide us what raw converter you use that is
state of the art and maybe some examples of it and ACR. That would allow us to see your POV and better, attempt to illustrate to Adobe what work they need to do on their converter to make it more
state of the art. Least we forget your original post:
What is the state of the art for current cameras. and
Can anyone point to more up to date comparisons?...and (ii) there is more than one way of achieving something in ACR / Lightroom and the settings interact in unpredictable ways: you have to use several adjustments to get to the right answer, For example. increasing contrast seems to also increase saturation (which may be the "correct thing to do", but I really don't like saturated shadows..)
It's not unpredictable, it was designed that way for a reason!** The right reason
if we're to believe the large number of ACR users and the perhaps hundreds of thousands if not million of images processed through that product. FWIW, this contrast/saturation '
issue' has been a bone of contention of Dan's for years, I only hear complaints about it from his minions.
**From: Thomas Knoll <
member@adobeforums.com>
Subject: Re: Color reproduction in digital photography
Date: Tuesday, October 11, 2005 at 12:32:05 PM Mountain Daylight Time
To:
adobe.photoshop.camera.raw@adobeforums.comDelivered-To:
andrew@digitaldog.netA new message was posted by Thomas Knoll in
Adobe Camera Raw --
Color reproduction in digital photography
While developing Camera Raw, I experimented with a pure luminance curve (as Simon suggests). However, based on my testing results, I rejected this algoirthm since it produced results that were most often visually worse looking that the tone curve algorithm actually used by Camera Raw (which is a special hue-preserving curve, NOT three indepent curves as Simon incorrectly assumed). The saturation effects that Simon considers a defect is actually something that most users actually want.
