Color, improving my photography, and other ramblings

Like so many others I've been very busy. As such, I haven't spent a lot of time here. The main reason is I'm essentially rediscovering photography. Over the summer I started to feel like I was in a bit of a slump. I was shooting, but not getting anything too exciting out of it. I thought that when I went to Yellowstone in Sept., I'd be re-inspired. That was mostly true, yet much of what I shot didn't "pop" the way I thought it might. I've recently had an epiphany. It's actually a bit of a story. Perhaps journey is a better word.

During the summer I discovered that Adobe bought Pixmantec. I was greatly distressed by this. Pixmantec seemed to be a company that understood photographers and very quickly made a name for themselves. What I didn't know was that Adobe had been working on developing Lightroom, a new aproach to digital photography workflow. They wanted Raw Shooter for it's RAW conversion engine. It intriguied me enough to start playing with LR b3. I was amazed at what I could do with RAW conversion and disapointed at it's DAM capabilities. It was slow as molasses, but still showed a lot of promise. I was especially impressed by the control over individual colors that it offers. Then LR b4 was released. Much faster, more tools, but still really crappy DAM capability. Not even close to ACDSee.

I began to use b4 for all my processing. My favorite thing about it is/was that I could do 95% of my processing in one tool. I would only use the GIMP for cloning, occasional dual processing merges, and other tweaks. Still my finished work was not what I thought it should/could be. What I didn't know was that LR uses the ProPhoto colorspace for developing and it was having a negative effect on my results. More on that later.

In the midst of all this there was a little bit of discussion over at Digital Image Cafe about monitor calibration and color management. I've always believed that this was more than an amatuer needed. I'm a technical person by trade, yet color management has always been a confusing mystery to me. Leave it for the graphics shops and photography studios. Well, I ordered some prints from MPix that didn't look like I expected them to. Mind you MPix does excellent work. So what was wrong? MPix or me?

I did a little reading on color management and decided that this was my issue. Calibrating my monitor was the answer. I bought the Spyder 2 Suite and thought that's all I really need. Now I'll be all set! Wrong! The Spyder turned out to be amazing. I now had rich, vibrant colors I didn't know existed. The moment of epiphany came when I looked at photos I've processed over the summer with LR b4. Some were washed out and flat. Others were so over saturated they looked comical. WOW! No wonder I've been struggling to get good results!

My first experiments were a disaster. When I'd open anything in ACDSee 7 or the GIMP that was converted from RAW in LR, it was washed out and flat. As I read more I began to realise that to make this calibration thing really worthwhile, all of the software in my workflow all had to support color management. The GIMP wasn't going to cut it. No ICC support. It's promised in the next version, but who knows when that will be. I resorted to an acedemic version of PS7, which I will have to replace at some point to be legal. Photoshop is the only photo editor I can find that has full color management support. I also bought the Pro version ACDSee which supports ICC profiles.

So that left me with Adobe LR for RAW processing. Fine. Except that it uses the ProPhoto colorspace. Not a bad thing persay except that right now you can't change this, and not all software supports it yet. When you save a file out as aRGB, it's flat looking. LR is in beta so I decided to look elsewhere. I found Bibble. Along with Sean Puckett's excellent plug-ins, Bibble is even more powerful than LR. I can do 95% of my processing work with it with a lot more control than I've ever had before. And I'm guessing it's a lot cheaper than LR v1 will be at release.

So now I've established a new baseline and am working on getting used to a new workflow. I'm also revisting some of my past work. Wow, I'm truly amazed at what I can do now. I still need to attack printing in my workflow. MPix provides ICC profiles on request. I can't wait to try it but I'm not quite ready for that yet. The Spyder Suite allows me to calibrate for my home printer, which I will use to do proofs.

I realize none of this is not going to make me a great photographer by any stretch of the imagination. But it's the next step of improvement. I'm getting closer to creating the vision I have when I click the shutter. What's next? I have no idea. All I know right now is that this past few weeks have been more exciting than when I started using a dSLR.