My color correction idea ...

[mikewof]

Hi All,

 

I'm new to the forum, but I've been using Photo for about a year, gradually transitioning over from Photoshop, their subscription-only thing pushed me to move off their system. I'm giving about a another year before I can transition to Photo, but no definite timeline on Illustrator, I'm going to miss that one, but I haven't given Designer much of a chance yet.

 

Anyway, I'm a physicist, but I used to be a graphic designer, I worked at Pastore Depamphillis Rampone back in the 1990s, where Dan Margulis was my boss, the same Dan Margulis who now leads the high-end color correction courses. He taught me to color correct "by the numbers" which back then meant correcting in CMYK, often with the monitor set to black and white, so I could only rely on the numbers, not what I was seeing on the screen. Dan moved on to more advanced workflows with RGB and LAB, I kept in touch, I still consider him one of the best physics instructors I ever had -- even though he taught me color -- he taught me in a scientific way. But through the years, I found that even though Dan's CMYK techniques may not have been ideal for the top 1% of color professionals, it is perfect for 99% of the work I encountered, especially now that cameras/phones usually get a lot closer to better color than they used to. Now it's mostly fixing bad lighting, accentuating color to give a certain look, or just tweaking color to print better ... for this, Dan's original methods are excellent.

 

But now that I'm not a designer anymore, I don't make the salary I used to make. Physicists don't make the kind of money of graphic designers, so I still make graphic design rulers, color charts and font resources through my small company, Galaxy Gauge.

 

So here's my idea, I don't want to break any forum rules, so I'm asking about the etiquette first ...

 

I made a Kickstarter to show online, the simple CMYK color correction I learned so long ago, but I updated with physics-based targeting and control, also some laminated printed tools to help the process. The Kickstarter has received a little bit of interest, but not much so far ... it includes the instruction, color tools, gauges, etc.. I'm just a one-person company, is it okay for me to share the details of the Kickstarter with this community or is that a "buy an ad" kind of thing?

 

Thank you!

[R C-R]

I know nothing about the etiquette of what you might post regarding your Kickstarter project here, but I am interested in your thoughts about the difference between "color" as a physical property of light & "color" as the human perception of it. I earned a B.S. (no jokes please!) degree in Physics back around the time the last ice age ended, so this is something I have always been interested in.

 

As I'm sure you know, with very few exceptions the light reaching our eyes is composed of many different wavelengths in various intensities, & the photoreceptive cells in our eyes sensitive to color (the cones) are unevenly divided in both number & location in our field of view. Their spectral sensitivity to the red, blue, & green parts of the spectrum overlap & peak at different wavelengths. They are much less sensitive to light than the rods, which are not sensitive to color (but have their own response curve, which peaks in the blue part of the spectrum).

 

All this makes color correction "by the numbers" much less straightforward than it might seem. As it was once explained to me, the problem is there are a lot more numbers required to do this to model human color perception, & we don't know what they all are.

[MattP]

Hi Mike,

 

Welcome to the forums - and a big thank you for asking first, before posting things... :)

 

This forum is intended to be a support forum for users of Affinity products first and foremost. We don't (and I suspect never would) have any notion of 'buying an ad' as the sole purpose of the forum is to help people, not sell them something.

 

I can't speak for all people who moderate this forum, or on behalf of our users, but I can at least see that your product might be an interesting talking point to people here so I'll post the link to it on Kickstarter so that people can take a look, but I must make sure it's clear that neither myself or Serif are in any way linked to nor do we endorse the product. I figured that if we just leave it here, it's no different to a user finding the Kickstarter themselves then making a post on here to ask what opinions of it are...

 

If this thread does turn in to a sales-pitch of any form, then it will have to be deleted, but as long as it remains a topic about colour correction theory, then it's probably of interest to a lot of people here (as you can see from R C-R's response above, already)

 

Hope that sounds reasonable :)

Matt

[MJSfoto1956]

+1 on Dan Margulis' insights on color correction. I remember reading his books back in the 1990s. They changed the way I approached post processing. What's particularly synergetic for AF users is the ability to make curve adjustments in CMYK -- something he was a big fan of "back in the day". 

 

Michael