White Points, Black Points, and Places In-Between

White Points, Black Points, and Places In-Between

By far, the biggest problem that digital photographers face is getting the color right. If you've been photographing traditionally for any number of years, you've most likely learned how to expose images properly and you've assembled a collection of lighting tricks that have served you well. Before digital capture became practical though, you never really had to take much responsibility for your color rendering beyond choosing the right film emulsion for the color temperature of the light. If you shot negative film, you could leave everything up to the lab. Even if you shot transparencies, the lab was mostly responsible for delivering credible color based on what the film manufacturer created with a batch of film.

Nowadays, that's not quite the case. Even if you have all your printing done at a lab, you still must assume at least part of the responsibility for the exact rendering of the color in the digital file. Most photographers approach this as a problem in color calibration or color management. This is consistent with a traditional film testing approach -- you get a new batch of emulsion and you test it by taking photos through different colored CC filters: 025Y, 5M, 81A, etc. The idea is to find the particular bias of a certain emulsion and compensate for it. The concept behind digital color management is similar, although it's a bit more complex. The problem is that, with film, the basic tonal/color rendering is fixed at manufacture. The photographer/lab has only minor influence on the color rendering. Digital, on the other hand, is much more malleable. Hue, saturation, and value rendering can be manipulated to extremes. This kind of control is scary for the traditional photographer because the safety valve of fixed rendering is no longer present. The color can be anything you want it to be ... so what do you want it to be?

Many digital photographers attempt to replace that safety valve with a rigorous ColorSync color management system. By shooting targets of color patches and using software to build detailed color description tags for digital files, the idea is to create color that is accurate to the original scene. Debates about exactly how to do this are ongoing; there are many methods for creating accurate color. For some commercial photographers, this "accurate color" may be all they need because all creative color decisions will be made later on in the post-production phase of a project.

Unfortunately, accurate color is often boring color. For many people, as professional photographer Jeff Schewe likes to say, "Reality sucks." We are conditioned to expect an idealized Hollywood version of color in photos. This is not necessarily super-saturated Kodachrome-Velvia color, but usually it is a departure from strict accuracy.

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