exacting

Digital color management, the path from camera to print (or monitor), is a winding road. Adrian Buckmaster, who specializes in polished and perfect fetish photography, so he should know, says:

"John Napolitano, an old friend and very talented art director, once likened colour management as something akin to driving a car with four steering columns, each driving its own wheel. When he said that, I fell about laughing as it is so true. In the intervening years, that characterization has not changed at all; in fact I would add that the four steering-wheels are now being run by four diabolical bipolar clowns, sometimes in harmony, but more often not."

Buckmaster's full blogpost, a review of the Epson R2880 printer, is here. I use a 2880, too, but since Buckmaster's work is necessarily more exacting than mine, he's more specific than I could be about the virtues and frustrations involved.

You can enter his work here. Leave the kids at home.

pix 02/21/10, cont.

Short post on what's wrong with those pix.
Workflow now is shoot RAW > edit RAW > convert to Photoshop > convert to jpg.
In real terms, that means shoot, download to computer, edit to look good on monitor, edit to look good on a print, edit to look good on the 'net.
I'm not bad at any of these stages now, and I'm pretty reliable going from shoot to print, but posting to the 'net magnifies my errors along the line. Even worse, Google Sites wasn't cooperating when I first tried to post it, and I made the jpg smaller and smaller to see if that was a problem. Fooey on Google Sites.
The big problem is noise. Look at the blue banner in the primarily yellow pic. Total confusion, smeary dotty color, when back in the RAW it was smooth and deep. The furling at the edges didn't look like dark trim.
The pic with the colored coats and the painted slats was shot on the fly. The kid turning around was a synchronicity - that pale round face nails it all together. It's substantially blown up, tho, and the focus is too soft to make a real picture out of it. Check out the noisy shadow on the legs of the pink tights as well. Something pleasant for a post, but not something that will improve with labor.
Some of the things I post here will be about process - probably not interesting unless you're trying the same kinds of things I'm trying. But the pix and writing about pix are for anybody with eyes to see.