Acme Educational Blog

Posted by  Vincent Versace

After

I really don’t like Jpegs, really and truly. But sometimes I have no choice, as is the case today. I’m in Boston in a wonderful Hotel, Jurys a place I highly recommend, but the internet….  It seems the world Wide Web has it out for me today. I’ve tried more times than Carter has little liver pills to download NX2.1.1 no luck.

I’ve found that experience is something you get about ten seconds after you need it. If experience has taught me anything it’s always give yourself an exit strategy. Particularly when you are shooting with a new camera that has it’s own software to open the files. So I set my camera to shoot JPEG+RAW, something I never really do. So I’ve been working on JPEGs.

These are the cleanest least noise (like no noise) least JPEG artifacted (none that I could fine) files I’ve ever worked on.

But the color…. Extremely accurate, amazingly so the amount of sensor color cas (ALL camera sensors manifest this no matter who makes it) is almost zero. The move to correct for this is so slight that it has me wanting to dance in the frozen slush filed tundra know as streets of Boston.

Why this is important is simple: All artifacting is cumulative and can be exponential. Anytime you do an adjustment to a file you are introducing artifacts because you are clipping data. So the less you mess with the pixels the better everything is. Because artifacting can be exponential it is important to minimize it at the very beginning. Color cast removal is the one of if not the first thing I do to a file. The math is simple, the less to remove the less artifact the more headroom I have later if I have to make “heroic” moves in retouching.

The image here will be part of/a chapter of my next book “Return to Oz: Following the RGB Road.” It will also be a/part of a DVD lesson from Acme Educational.

Here’s the before

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