> AG does thousands of commercial pics a year that
> he doesn't post process individually, but you can bet no
> display print of his recent farm implement series would go on
> the wall looking like the right out of the camera shots he
> posted.
Depends on what you call "right out of the camera". With color
shots, I tend to keep things halfway "real". B&W is blown all
apart, though. The bulk of the "commercial pics" are pretty
much straight out of the camera. If you get too hyperactive with
adjustments it really screws up the page layouts. It's best to
keep things relatively flat. If it hits a B&W halftone, your
exotic curves and off-the-chart saturation will really look
nasty. If you can mimick a good Fujichrome Astia shot, you're
doing well.
> I recall a recent post of his talking about something
> like "jerking the hell out of the curves".
Not sure that those were my exact words, but close enough. :)
It's really difficult for me to do a "fine-art print" of
something that I took recently. Other than the stock files, I
probably won't touch any of those farm implement shots for at
least a year. I'm just now getting around to some pictures I
took back in 1993. My own editing technique and knowledge isn't
there yet for some stuff. I have many pictures that deserve
serious printing that I'm still clueless on how to do.
Furthermore, sometimes technology hasn't quite arrived yet
either. Take the Grand Canyon pictures. I've tried six different
raw converters on those files so far. The latest version of RSE
does ok, but we're still one or two versions away. Maybe PWP 4.0
will do better. Meanwhile they will sit on the hard-drive.
Every new converter I try, I revisit those files to see if I can
get the tonalities better.
What Moose has done with the kitchen shots is pretty much what I
try to achieve in the same kind of pictures. I tend to prefer
the slightly warm, but not over-the-top. Digital camera images
seem to always have this bluish haze over everything. However,
before you crank out the blue, what you are looking at is
actually the flattening of the tonal-response. Film--especially
transparency film--has a non-linear response, but the response
gradient in the mid-tones is fixed to a specific slope. In
digital imaging, the response is more linear and the mid-tone
gradient is a much shallower slope. Hence the "haze" look. A
"Local Contrast Enhancement" process, which is actually just a
wide unsharp mask at low level, helps correct this tonal
response curve and make it more "film like".
BTW, if you want to really go nuts, try applying a different LCE
to each color layer with slightly different percentages. With a
little practice, you can "mimick" several classic films. A
little hint--if you alter one specific color channel to a very,
very wide, but extremely slight LCE prior to monochrome
conversion you can achieve the distinctive "Leica Look" to the
images. :) I'll leave it you to figure that one out--I
stumbled on it by accident.
AG
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