Same Time Color Correct

077 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)

When post processing your photos one of the most common tasks is color correction.  If you are using a pro photo product that does the color correction for you, then this tip does not apply to you.  However, if you are manually correcting the color of a photo, then you need to pick a time of the day that you perform your color corrections.  The goal is to improve your consistency, so it’s important to have not only the same environmental conditions, but for you to be physically in a similar state as well. I like to do my portrait color corrections about a half hour after I get up in the morning for these reasons:

1. I’m well rested, especially my eyes are well rested.
2. My office is on the west side of the house so I don’t have the morning sun streaming in through the windows.
3. I don’t have a lot on my mind yet, so it’s a more relaxing time of the day.

I wanted to put this to the test  so I performed color correction to the same image at different times of the day over the period of a couple of days just to see what the difference would look like.  The point of this exercise was not to make a value judgement as to which is the better image, but to see what the difference is between the images from different times of the day.  I had to do them several days apart so I wouldn’t accidentally remember what settings I used previously.

Testing manual color correction at different times of the day.

As you can see there’s a big difference.  Even though I did attempt to make the environmental conditions the same. I wanted the same amount of ambient light and made sure I calibrated the monitor before performing each color correction. There’s a pretty sizable difference.  In my case the morning version prints much better on my printers than the afternoon version.

I know you don’t always have the option of picking when you post process all of your images.  But if you can create a habit or build it into your schedule to do this work at the same time of the day under similar conditions, you will achieve more consistent output.

This question comes up a lot and with my recent backup array issue, it came up again.  In most cases your older photos aren’t the most spectacular photos you ever produced.  I dare say 90-95% of them you could easily label as garbage… but they are your garbage.  A couple of months ago some of Ansel Adams’ early negatives were found at a garage sale and have been reported to be worth over 200 million.  I doubt that’s truly the case since a lot of Ansel’s magic was in the darkroom creating the print.  It’s his early work, and wasn’t worth anything to him while he was alive, but it’s worth something to someone else now.  The same holds true for your photos, they will be worth something to someone in the future.

I know how devastating it is to lose a lot of photos, with a previous girlfriend going psycho on me and selling my camera equipment and burning all my photos and negatives.  So I have little to show from my film days.  This has made me paranoid in the digital age so I have backups of backups.

A little perspective

As a casual photographer in the earlier years of digital.  My Olympus cameras D360 and D40 spanned 7 years of usage.  In that time I produced 12,488 photos for a whopping total of 11GB worth of space with those cameras.  I had gotten a DSLR a while before they were retired, but I still used them for family and fun photos since they were convenient. Now, when I do a day of shooting I often produce 12-20GB of images.  Yes it’s much fewer files that are much larger, but if you look at it from an image mass point of view, 11GB is not a lot.

Organization

A long time ago I decided to store all my photos by date.  So today’s folder would be 20100902.  I do have several folders I put these in, so any work for my business goes in it’s own folder, artistic photography, family, and specialty projects all have their own top level folders so I can easily find them without the need for an image management program. I’ll also append a name or description of the folder so it’s not just a date but a date and a name.  This way if the new image manipulation killer app comes out tomorrow, I can easily add my library with little fear.

I know it’s now time for me to embarrass myself.  Since I posted my first digital photo, I’ll post a photo from my last day of shooting with my Olympus D40.   It happened to be at the circus.

Whatever happened to those cameras?  My Son and daughter got ahold of them and continued to use them for about 2 more years before they go so inoperable the became the subject of “I wonder what’s inside of one of these things” dismantling experiments.  Now my 4-year-old son uses my first DSLR.

Bottom line

There’s no real reason not to keep old photos.  I dare say in a couple of years you’ll be able to easily carry around your entire photo library, much like I can easily carry around my 7 years of using those two Olympus point and shot camera photos on 16GB flash drive with room to spare.

It’s amazing that something so virtual can have such a physical world impact.  Last week one of the drives in my Drobo reported as being bad.  I couldn’t replace it since the replacement drive just went in to upgrading the total capacity.  So I ejected the drive and began moving and removing files I didn’t need to take it from a 4 disk array to 3 until the warranty replacement came in.  Right as I was about to reach the threshold for the redundancy to kick in, there was a file system corruption and the Drobo was locked.  I could read the files, but could no longer add, edit or delete.  So my Drobo has been locked for 5 days while waiting for the replacement drives.  Today they came in and I’ve learned the following from this experience:

1. I have a lot of files, 162 thousand of them are just photos.
2. It takes a lot of time to copy those files from one drive to another.  12 hours just for the photos, the total time will be close to 3 days including video.
3. I’m very glad I have multiple backups of my important and not so important files.
4. I need to spend some serious time cleaning house, both virtual and physical, because when the Drobo is down, the office and the house gets seriously messy.

Sorting through all the photos I found the oldest digital photo I had, which turned out to be a picture of me right after the long flight to Switzerland, taken with an Olympus D360L by Doug Morris (no relation) on May 18, 2000.  That was over 10 years ago and I feel drained like I looked on that day.  That was a great camera for a point and shoot even though it was slow.  It had wonderful low light sensitivity, ran off “AA” batteries and could fit in a pocket if you didn’t mind a huge bulge that made people stare at you with weird contorted faces.

I’ve been asked on multiple occasions and quite often several times a week, why don’t I watermark my images.  The images I put on this website are licensed with the Creative Commons, Non-Commercial, Attribution licenses.  Which basically says you can take it, use it, reuse it as long as you don’t make money with it but give me some credit as the original artist.  But some of my  photography does get a watermark and that is generally hosted on my Zenfolio site.  These are photos I want to sell as artwork to help pay for the bills and a watermark is justified, I just wish I had a little more control on how and where the watermarks are placed.

Reasons to not watermark:

1. Watermarks are annoying and distracting to the image.
2. If someone wants to “steal” the image, they can likely remove the watermark anyway.
3. Automatic watermarking is often not well placed on the image, so you have to spend time to manually watermark.
4. The image may not hold specific value and you just want to share it.

Reasons to add watermarks:

1. A watermark is a notification that the image is protected under a copyright.
2. Watermarking is part of showing your brand.  (Actually thats were the term came from, branding your property.)
3. If someone does take the image and forward it to someone else, they will see it and go to your site based on your watermark.
4. There is also a notion that adding a watermark makes you appear professional.  I don’t know if I agree with this or not.

Some people may think that those that don’t watermark are saying that they don’t care about their photography and their art.  Other may think that those who watermark are snobs and control freaks.  Both of these may be true.  But I prefer to look at it this way, when I don’t watermark I’m being generous and wanting to share what I do freely but when I do watermark I’m asking for a bit of respect and consideration.

Which camp do you fall in, do you or do not watermark and why?