Accurate versus 'emotionally correct' colour.

The only flash I had then was flashcubes, and an Agfalux C flashgun.

 

Usually with flash, the near subjects are overexposed, and the background underexposed,

which is why I didn't think that one was.

 

 

This one you can see the foreground is lighter, and also the reflection in the window in the door.

Usually with flash, the near subjects are overexposed, and the background underexposed, which is why I didn't think that one was.

 

It's quite certainly from an on-camera light source, which I presume is flash. Perhaps you're not noticing the light falloff (from near to far) so much cuz the scan is so dark and low contrast. And your flash has some pretty severe side-by-side falloff such that the closest person (the girl, foreground left) doesn't seem so bright. But compare how dark the guy just above her head (orange-shirt guy) is.

 

I'm a little floored that a photographer doesn't recognize the on-camera flash here so let me point out a few clues that show this. The easiest way to determine where a light is coming from is to look at the shadows. If you look at the red chair next to the teacher's desk you can see that the back of the chair leaves a hard-edged shadow just below itself, on the blue side of the teacher's desk. So this shows that the light source is just slightly above the camera center line, and the light is small (the shadow edge is "hard").

 

Next, there is a guy near center, front, (he has a satchel on floor in front of him). You can clearly see his trousers immediately under the desk surface. Clearly the ceiling lights could not illuminate this; the fact that there is not a deep shadow suggests that the main source of light is not from above, but rather it is coming from the direction of the camera.

 

Another clue is to look at the far wall, near the top. It is fairly evenly illuminated. If the ceiling lights had any significant effect you would expect to see brighter areas on the wall nearest to the ceiling lights - there are no such bright areas. So apparently the ceiling lights do not even lighten up something only a couple feet away from them.

 

One last thing, and the one that immediately showed me that the ceiling lights would have almost no effect, is that they are not blown out white. In fact, they are barely brighter than some things in the scene. For example, note the small white table next to the teacher's desk; it is nearly as bright as the ceiling lights. (Nothing more needs to be said?)

 

Anyway, these are some things to notice with respect to the light sources.

Here is what they look like, and what I expect them to look like, with flash: foreground bright, background dark.

 

It seems that at ASA 200, a flashcube has a guide number of about 100, and with an f/2.8 lens could get to 30 feet.

But I might not have use f/2.8 to get enough depth of field.

 

From some other views, though, I believe that there is a window right behind me for the first one, though not a large one.

(Some of my California schools have a whole wall of windows.) This one, I think, is not lit from a window.

 

So, the first one might be both flash and window, each one filing in some for the other one, especially for the background.

Just some amusement, an escape from the serious stuff. :and the dangers of acholic abuse.....being pissed.

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82RSwzexhr0

some friends had already sent it to me on WhatsApp

If the photo is being taken for artistic use then emotionally correct is better, but if you're doing product photography or scientific work them accurate is almost certainly going to be required.

Of course emotionally correct can be a moving target depending on the viewer - I've found most people prefer a more vivid colour than I do something I often find garish. I generally prefer more subtle colour levels, that my Pentax cameras refereed to as 'Natural'. To some it seems more is better is a moto they try to apply to everything!

 

I shoot a fair bit of colour infra red, where the colours seen are quite different from visual - I guess these could be considered emotionally incorrect - again I prefer more muted tones, but can find several very different versions of the same shot work for me.

 

I can also put my hand up to admit I've shot things with the wrong white balance on more than one occasion. Sometimes deliberately to emphasise the emotional colour & at other times by mistake & effectively lost the shot.

Edited April 16, 2021 by petrochemist

Some (many) years ago I learned about VPS (Vericolor III) and that was then my favorite

color film, as it gives less vivid colors, which I considered more natural. Also, I always

liked Ektachrome over Kodachrome for its colors.

 

In the case of film, there are so many reasons for it to be not accurate, maybe it is surprising

that it works so well. The sensitivity spectra of the three layers, the dye absorption spectra,

and then the non-linearity between exposure and dye density. Given all that, it works

amazingly well. And besides that, with three colors you only cover about half of

the total gamut.

 

Digital might be better. The Bayer filters might be closer, and the way we view them might

be closer, spectrally and linearly. And we can matrix them any way we want, including

negative terms.

I can also put my hand up to admit I've shot things with the wrong white balance on more than one occasion.

As a student I once loaded up the camera with type A (tungsten) slide film in advance of a location shoot - thinking it would be lit by artificial light. Only to find when I got there that it had a huge skylight and all-round plate glass windows. The shots were all very blue, naturally.

They kind of worked, but I'd rather have had more 'lifelike' colour.

 

Years later I found that scans of those transparencies could be almost completely digitally corrected.

 

Write nothing off!

The shots were all very blue, naturally.

Naturally!

Years later I found that scans of those transparencies could be almost completely digitally corrected.

Unnaturally?

I have good collection of photo books and don't know any photographer, who wanted accurate or correct color, they all trying to develop their own look of the images.

Bet that cat had a serious hangover.

 

" I would say that some of the best, what you might consider "creative genius," pondered this mightily, trying to understand how color is seen and how to mix paints to create the impressions they wanted" Bill C.

 

Thought I was expressing that thought. Hey Ho. Think, the impression they wanted.

 

Accurate colour relates to commercial photography the end.

 

"Accurate color is not limited only to photography" Bill C

 

Many of the artists, we consider as creative genius, ignored such silliness. Indeed, they were always looking at new techniques, different ways, untrodden before to express their Art. Sort of feel Bill C , you are on a committee, blessed from above, to purvey the knowledge of the committees perception of true colour.

 

A special mission, from above, that has been blessed from him/her upstairs;)

Edited April 18, 2021 by Allen Herbert

I only shoot digital and in RAW. So unless I've got the exposure completely wrong, most things can be salvaged/adjusted in PP. So I repeat: for important (deliverable) photos, I always do a 'by the book' color correction (with tonal adjustménts). But my eyeball" adjustments (cooler, warmer, color balance) are definitive and depend on the photo. In general, I tend to go for slightly more warmth.

" I tend to go for slightly more warmth" Mike

 

Tut, tut;)

Sort of feel Bill C you are on a committee, blessed from above, to purvey the knowledge of the committees perception of true colour.

 

This is gonna be long and tedious, mainly for Allen. It's mostly about me and how I eventually got to be on the "true colour committee," in Allen's words, "blessed from above."

 

I made a full-time living in photography, originally wanting to be a photojournalist, admiring many of the Life Magazine photographers. I was able to buy my first serious camera, a used Rolleiflex, by shooting weddings for a local guy while I was still in high school. I quit the weddings when I took a traveling job doing high-volume portrait work- I thought it was time I learned to use professional studio flash; this was with long-roll portrait cameras, 70mm pro color negative. I had somewhere around 40-50 thousand portrait subjects - that's enough to fill a major league baseball stadium - under my belt when I moved into lab work. Don't think these are like school pics - these were every age group, infants to adults, and every single one you work hard to get good expressions.

 

I went into lab work "temporarily" to learn about the mysteries of color processing. Like everything else I learned ground up, ran processors and operated printers. When they had an opening in the QC department I was lucky enough to get in as wet-behind-the-ears tech. I learned the ropes from another young guy - our primary duties were in "process control," reading control strips, calibrating replenisher flowmeters and adjusting rates, etc., and collecting chemical samples for the chemical lab. My boss had a chemistry degree, and he got the company into bulk mixing, etc. I and my fellow tech did all the dirty prototype work, doing all the pilot mixes. A companion department was headed by a fresh RIT photo science grad, and I learned a great deal from him. I was finding all of this more interesting and challenging than actually using a camera.

 

Eventually I became the QC manager, the department now having a full-time chemist, a couple of general purpose techs who could do anything lab-related, a full-time product inspector doing semi-random inspection of the ready-to-ship product (under the supervision of the RIT guy, a statistics specialist) and a full-time inspector for our in-house camera repair shop - strictly our own equipment; the company owned literally thousands of portrait studios. The department did about anything photo-related that was not officially under another department.

 

New film/paper being considered? We did all the sensitometric testing as well as preliminary test shooting. My techs would set up an in-house test studio, etc. We'd get a variety of models, and shoot a wide exposure range - from maybe a couple stops underexposed to perhaps five stops over. The film processing department runs the film, along with a control strips, my techs make sure everything is good. Then everything is printed by one of the production departments. 8x10s to start. The "normal exposure" is hand-balanced for best skin color within "1 cc" color (this is by committee; there is some disagreement at the 1 cc level, but NOBODY disagrees beyond 2 cc). Next, every other exposure is hand-balanced to match the flesh highlights of the "normal exposure" reference. These are the basis for our film evaluations.

 

If it's a brand new film or paper we are typically part of a trade trial; I've been involved in something like a dozen of these with, for example, Kodak, Konica, and Fuji. Typically there will be 6 or 8 film and emulsion engineers from the vendor, along with a handful of marketing and sales staff who will be meeting with the company management. So the tech people will have brought a variety of pre-exposed test materials for us to process in our seasoned machines, etc., and they want us to print certain things. We have panel discussions about the results of our test shots, and they ask, can they get copies of our test prints? Certainly, what sizes and how many do you want?

 

I've been involved with the company's original digital printing efforts (before ICC profiles were a thing, I believe). I used to make the tonal response curves for dye sub printers in our field locations. Around this time a group in one of the production areas got one of the X-rite digital swatchbooks; they were working with prototype Kodak LED printers and presumably this had been recommended. And this was an eye-opener for me - in 3 or 4 seconds it could take spectral readings of a test patch (the later i1 units do this near instantly) and the ColorShop software would give results in CIELAB, or whatever you want- even as Status M densitometry. This is also where the Fred Bunting booklet came from - still about the best primer on color that I know of.

 

When high-quality digital cameras finally became available - they cost in the range of $25 to 30 thousand dollars US - we met with all the major players. We already had several dozen Sony cameras, also in the same price range, that were the first serious studio design cameras - these were running in a group of experimental studios. But they were a 3-chip design using a prism set-up to separate colors; consequently these were unlikely to ever become "cheap." So we partnered with a fledgling "hardware" group to build a ground-up digital camera for studio use. I was the primary color guy so began getting educated in the ICC systems. Anyway, on and on.

 

Eventually I got onto the true colour committee, only for photo.net, but still blessed from above as Allen puts it. In this capacity I can have people like rodeo_joe tell me about the usefulness of Macbeth ColorCheckers, or Glen explain about why or why not his flash photos were taken with flash.

 

Occasionally I think about bailing out of photo.net, but where else could I make the kind of money I do on the true colour committee? (This is tongue-in-cheek if it needs to be said.)

This is gonna be long and tedious, mainly for Allen. It's mostly about me and how I eventually got to be on the "true colour committee," in Allen's words, "blessed from above."

 

I made a full-time living in photography, originally wanting to be a photojournalist, admiring many of the Life Magazine photographers. I was able to buy my first serious camera, a used Rolleiflex, by shooting weddings for a local guy while I was still in high school. I quit the weddings when I took a traveling job doing high-volume portrait work- I thought it was time I learned to use professional studio flash; this was with long-roll portrait cameras, 70mm pro color negative. I had somewhere around 40-50 thousand portrait subjects - that's enough to fill a major league baseball stadium - under my belt when I moved into lab work. Don't think these are like school pics - these were every age group, infants to adults, and every single one you work hard to get good expressions.

 

I went into lab work "temporarily" to learn about the mysteries of color processing. Like everything else I learned ground up, ran processors and operated printers. When they had an opening in the QC department I was lucky enough to get in as wet-behind-the-ears tech. I learned the ropes from another young guy - our primary duties were in "process control," reading control strips, calibrating replenisher flowmeters and adjusting rates, etc., and collecting chemical samples for the chemical lab. My boss had a chemistry degree, and he got the company into bulk mixing, etc. I and my fellow tech did all the dirty prototype work, doing all the pilot mixes. A companion department was headed by a fresh RIT photo science grad, and I learned a great deal from him. I was finding all of this more interesting and challenging than actually using a camera.

 

Eventually I became the QC manager, the department now having a full-time chemist, a couple of general purpose techs who could do anything lab-related, a full-time product inspector doing semi-random inspection of the ready-to-ship product (under the supervision of the RIT guy, a statistics specialist) and a full-time inspector for our in-house camera repair shop - strictly our own equipment; the company owned literally thousands of portrait studios. The department did about anything photo-related that was not officially under another department.

 

New film/paper being considered? We did all the sensitometric testing as well as preliminary test shooting. My techs would set up an in-house test studio, etc. We'd get a variety of models, and shoot a wide exposure range - from maybe a couple stops underexposed to perhaps five stops over. The film processing department runs the film, along with a control strips, my techs make sure everything is good. Then everything is printed by one of the production departments. 8x10s to start. The "normal exposure" is hand-balanced for best skin color within "1 cc" color (this is by committee; there is some disagreement at the 1 cc level, but NOBODY disagrees beyond 2 cc). Next, every other exposure is hand-balanced to match the flesh highlights of the "normal exposure" reference. These are the basis for our film evaluations.

 

If it's a brand new film or paper we are typically part of a trade trial; I've been involved in something like a dozen of these with, for example, Kodak, Konica, and Fuji. Typically there will be 6 or 8 film and emulsion engineers from the vendor, along with a handful of marketing and sales staff who will be meeting with the company management. So the tech people will have brought a variety of pre-exposed test materials for us to process in our seasoned machines, etc., and they want us to print certain things. We have panel discussions about the results of our test shots, and they ask, can they get copies of our test prints? Certainly, what sizes and how many do you want?

 

I've been involved with the company's original digital printing efforts (before ICC profiles were a thing, I believe). I used to make the tonal response curves for dye sub printers in our field locations. Around this time a group in one of the production areas got one of the X-rite digital swatchbooks; they were working with prototype Kodak LED printers and presumably this had been recommended. And this was an eye-opener for me - in 3 or 4 seconds it could take spectral readings of a test patch (the later i1 units do this near instantly) and the ColorShop software would give results in CIELAB, or whatever you want- even as Status M densitometry. This is also where the Fred Bunting booklet came from - still about the best primer on color that I know of.

 

When high-quality digital cameras finally became available - they cost in the range of $25 to 30 thousand dollars US - we met with all the major players. We already had several dozen Sony cameras, also in the same price range, that were the first serious studio design cameras - these were running in a group of experimental studios. But they were a 3-chip design using a prism set-up to separate colors; consequently these were unlikely to ever become "cheap." So we partnered with a fledgling "hardware" group to build a ground-up digital camera for studio use. I was the primary color guy so began getting educated in the ICC systems. Anyway, on and on.

 

Eventually I got onto the true colour committee, only for photo.net, but still blessed from above as Allen puts it. In this capacity I can have people like rodeo_joe tell me about the usefulness of Macbeth ColorCheckers, or Glen explain about why or why not his flash photos were taken with flash.

 

Occasionally I think about bailing out of photo.net, but where else could I make the kind of money I do on the true colour committee? (This is tongue-in-cheek if it needs to be said.)

I appreciate your contributions to PhotoNet--I did some experiments with early Unicolor materials and Cibachrome as well. My conclusions at the time were that doing this well and repeatably would be beyond my capabilities without a lot of investment in machines and training, and that I was better off finding good labs to do my printing and color processing since I did not want to run a custom lab to justify the expense. I'm glad that you continue to respond to questions with your knowledge and experience; you are one of the reasons that I enjoy PhotoNet.

Thanks AJG, it's nice to hear that at least someone finds interest in my somewhat verbose posts.

 

Fwiw I've mostly shared your view that it has historically been more cost effective to have a pro lab doing your work, but that's not much of an option anymore.

 

Fwiw I'd say that a careful worker, given enough experience, could probably do high quality work at home, albeit at a much higher labor cost - probably on the order of ten times higher, or more. So it's not a very sensible way to do commercial work. But for someone with a lot of time on their hands... who knows? I'll be glad to answer any related questions I can, so feel free to ask.

 

Fwiw the later versions of VPSIII, then Portra 160, optically printed onto the appropriate pro papers could do beautiful work with studio portraits. When we did test shooting we could lay prints out in a color booth, then lay out some of the actual fabrics used in the shooting - they would be nearly a dead match. Color charts very close too. But again, it's gotta be on the pro papers. It took us some time before we could make digital prints, studio portrait work, as good as optical Portra prints in side-by-side comparisons. Most people wouldn't see this though - without side-by-side comparison either one can be plenty good. And digital is much easier.

@bill c. Though I understand very little of your post and the technology of color science, I appreciate your knowledge. Likewise people like digital dog etc. I've never had to exactly match a color existing in the world or in print media, line art etc. in order to share it with a printer or other creatives. But I have had to calibrate my monitors with each other and to a standard so when I had a service print a photo, it would look like the file I sent. That's what I always thought of as "color accuracy". From friends that design line art for printing and products they told me they often were required to use "call out colors" like Pantone or whatever is the required system so they know what their client gets is what they intended when matching colors to a product lie for instance without actually seeing it on their monitors perfectly. It's great to have some of the resources here on photo.net. of color professionals.

 

BTW, I used to shoot Portra 160 as well, one of my favorite films.

[ATTACH=full]1384518[/ATTACH]

Not sure what point is being made, but a good example of a sunset taken with AWB by the look of it. Which takes us right back to my original post.

In this capacity I can have people like rodeo_joe tell me about the usefulness of Macbeth ColorCheckers,

And where, exactly, did I do that Bill?

Edited April 20, 2021 by rodeo_joe|1

And where, exactly, did I do that Bill?

 

Sorry, I was thinking it was here. But it was a different thread...

 

Ah, but the 'different light sources' is the nub of it. No use holding your reflective card up against your editing monitor if the ambient light isn't what your chosen colourspace has as a white-point.

 

Looks like my link won't hop over there, but it was your thread called "Colour checker app?"

Looks like my link won't hop over there, but it was your thread called "Colour checker app?"

The thread in which you accused me of not knowing the use of a colour checker? And where you went off at a tangent completely ignoring the question I asked?

 

Reading a whitepaper on artificial colour comparators (or not) in no way addressed what was asked.

The thread in which you accused me of not knowing the use of a colour checker? And where you went off at a tangent completely ignoring the question I asked?

 

Reading a whitepaper on artificial colour comparators (or not) in no way addressed what was asked.

 

I don't recall making an "accusation," reference, please.

 

You DID ask, "Non-starter or worth pursuing?" then "Thoughts, please?" So I responded, "Non-starter." Then proceeded to give some of my thoughts.

 

But rather than hash it out here, why not just hop back to that thread? I have an alert set on it...

@bill c. Though I understand very little of your post and the technology of color science, I appreciate your knowledge. Likewise people like digital dog etc.

 

Thanks Barry. Re: understanding, I've almost completely lost my sense of what "regular" people or photographers follow, lingo-wise. In person I would always be asking, do you know what it means when I say such-and-such, then adjust the level of explanations up and down accordingly. In a forum like this, though, it's hard to judge. So you should always feel free to ask if want a different level explanation.

 

People have done that sort of thing for me forever, so I'm glad to carry it on. The whole thing of color reproduction, to me, is especially interesting. (I see "accurate" color reproduction as being the case where you have an original thing which you photograph, then make a print, and then compare the two side by side to see if they look the same.) What we're doing in photography is to take a real world object, with a continuous spectral makeup, then try to mimic it with a limited set of dyes, or whatever. It all relies on humans having three color sensing functions (aka, red, green, blue) then essentially tricking those responses so as to produce the same "appearance."

"View attachment 1384518

 

Not sure what point is being made, but a good example of a sunset taken with AWB by the look of it. Which takes us right back to my original post." rodeo_joe|1

 

Indeed, it does take us right back to your original post.

 

The photo was heavily manipulated and not AWB balanced colour. The point being, what is emotional colour, or, true colour? Neither, only what you perceive it to be.

 

"This is gonna be long and tedious, mainly for Allen" Bill C.

 

Thanks for sharing Bill C, I always enjoy reading a photographic journey and did not find it long or tedious.

Way back in photo school, they told us for a color error to be acceptable, it had to be in the warm direction. Gotta please the masses.