Well quicker than we thought, here is issue 3. It is just about like issue 1.
Issue 2 was essentially like this, but had hierarchical captions, placed at the recommendation of a respected colleague, hopefully to facilitate the readers' navigation through this lengthy treatise.
It didn't work. Then thing was like a love letter with numbered paragraphs. (I actually saw one once, from a general to his secretary.)
So I pulled then out. And here we go. No need to fasten your seatbelts.
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When the Color Parrot white balance measurement "device" (the predecessor of the current ColorRight product family) was introduced some months ago, I was very critical about the device and its manufacturer. By critical I don't mean (necessarily) adverse; I hope to mean "pointedly inquisitive".
I was baffled as to upon what principles, then (and yet) unknown to me, did the product rely in order to produce consistently "accurate" ("meaningful" is perhaps a more precise term) white balance measurements in a "from the camera position for the shot proper" technique.
Unlike our situation with many products, the developer and promoter of this new product, Drew Strickland, is a member of our community, and we had the opportunity to engage him in direct dialog on various matters of interest in connection with the new product. And I certainly did, often in considerable technical detail.
I'm afraid that I can't say that there was a lot of satisfaction for me in that process.
A lot of somewhat murky water passed over that dam. Soon, a new version of the device emerged, this one with a "masked" orifice. The manufacturer claimed that the masking increased the "targetedness" of the device (whatever that meant, and no clarification of that was ever forthcoming from the manufacturer).
This in turn was said to improve the ability of the device to produce consistent white balance measurement in the "from the camera position" mode (again, a notion for which I could imagine no explanation, but of course there are many things I don't know).
Recently, the ColorRight enterprise entered a new era, with considerable emphasis on an elaborated version of the device (the ColorRight MAX), which, in one mode, is intended to be used as an in-scene "white balance" target in support of post-production color processing (ideally during raw development, but perhaps even in the processing of JPG images).
Predominant in this new outlook was the notion that attaining what I have called "theoretically-ideal" white balance color correction was very often not our first priority. Rather, we would be most interested in making arbitrary shifts in delivered image chromaticity to provide the "most attractive" skin tone for human subjects.
Of course, this led to a somewhat schizophrenic promotional campaign, which essentially said:
- Use the ColorRight MAX for white balance color correction. It is more precisely neutral than anything else on the market, and thus will lead to the most accurate result possible.
- Accurate white balance color correction is not really what we most often need, so use the ColorRight MAX in another mode to conveniently arbitrarily depart from ideal color correction to get subjectively more pleasing skin tones.
It was almost as if we had accidentally seen juxtaposed the ads for the device from "Modern Forensic Photography" and "Modern Wedding Photography".
Now, after an initial flurry of the same kind of dialog that accompanied my "critical look" into the Color Parrot, I began to see an interesting thread in Drew's discussions. My take on it was this: a gratifying improvement in skin tone could, in a practical and very productive way, almost always be achieved by the application of one of six predetermined chromaticity shifts. We can implement that by the use of the six not-quite-neutral patches on the ColorRight MAX for a "pseudo white balance" process.
This notion was supported (I think not effectively) by reference to widely-accepted empirical numeric guidelines for "improving" skin tone. Learning of those was very interesting to me. I'm not sure, though, that I can relate the operation of the ColorRight MAX to those guidelines. Less interesting to me was the attempted encapsulation of these rather subtle guidelines into questionable slogans.
But none of those attempted "linkages" was really important. There are many empirical techniques that work well for me, and often attempts to explain them "scientifically" don't play (and may in fact be ill-founded, or maybe just badly articulated), but I don't care, so long as the technique works.
We might well expect that the premise for the selection of the six chromaticity shift vectors in the ColorRight MAX's quiver involves some "trade secrets", and I respect that notion. (This is after all "art", in both senses of the term.) Nevertheless, Drew has suggested that soon he will be able to present to us some further information on the premises underlying the device. And of course I look forward to that.
In any case, I feel that we have a vastly improved situation here compared to that of the earlier days of the Color Parrot. Today, I don't feel impelled to ruminate on whether the scientific principles are badly understood, or badly explained, or if there just really aren't any.
Rather, I recognize that the ColorRight MAX pursues a recognizably subjective result (against what may be arbitrary, and not-really-definable, criteria), and does it with the application of effects that, while there may be a very thoughtful basis for their choosing, are ultimately arbitrary.
For me, I most highly value candor (and after that, clarity of expression!). I'm pleased to see movement in both prongs of that direction in this product area.
I'm particularly gratified to find among all the "Wow! This is the best thing since sliced bread - one click and I'm rich" testimonials to the ColorRight MAX, some insightful discussions by professional portrait photographers that compare the results of the use of the ColorRight MAX to the results of well-followed numerical guidelines for "skin tone improvement".
At the end of the day, we need to remember that everything in the physical world operates by practicing the laws of science. We may not understand how, and may not need to understand how.
But in our field, where we by definition have science in the service of art, it's still best to keep in mind that the two coexist.
Suggesting that scientific concepts do not apply to the performance of of a "measuring instrument" is ill-advised, and making fun of concern over that is hazardous - some scientifically-trained people don't believe that "facts are no match for beliefs".
On the other hand, with dealing with an "empirical tool in pursuit of a subjective improvement", we can afford to be less concerned with science. Scientifically-trained people understand this.
There will be coffee after the service.
