We always get asked how we get the great color out of our images here it is step by step. We are still doing things pretty much the same, (don’t fix it if it ain’t broke). We have made some minor improvements and added a lot more detail, so read on…….
We shoot EVERYTHING in raw. This is not a debate on raw versus jpg, this is what works for us. You will need to choose what works the best for you. There are a couple of things I would like to clarify for you about shooting raw. Contrary to popular belief it is NOT a crutch for those photographers that “can’t get it right in the camera”. It is a tool that will help you produce the very best images from digital capture. Secondly, I have heard over and over about the photographers that produce “perfect jpg files” Bull! – Perfect would mean that there is absolutely no color correction needed, no exposure adjustments needed, no contrast, saturation, or hue adjustments needed. Notice I said “needed”. A lot of “perfect jpgs” are printed with no adjustments, but that doesn’t mean that the adjustments weren’t needed to produce a better file. Anyway… if you are adjusting anything on your jpg files, it is better, and most of the time faster, to make those adjustments from your raw file. So if everything is better shooting raw, why shoot jpg? A lot of photographers will tell you that it is faster, as I stated above, if you are fixing anything on your jpgs, I believe raw is just as fast. Another argument is file size. With the price of memory cards, hard disk space, and the speed of the computers, file size is not the big drawback it may have been a few years ago, memory is cheap. So when deciding wheter to shoot raw or jpg, I would say this…Shoot jpg for anything that you would feel comfortable shooting with slide film, raw for anything you would normally shoot on negative film. So here is what we do…
Color management starts with the capture. We use Nikon D3 and D3X cameras and the amazing Hasselblad 3DII, set to capture in raw. We pretty much leave our white balance in camera set to 5500K (it really doesn’t matter if you are shooting raw). On the first frame of every new lighting condition, we take a close-up shot of our Spyder Cube or a whibal card. This frame will become the reference for shadow side color, highlight side color, black point, and white point. Every time the lighting changes, we shoot the cube, yes, even in the studio. Knowing the color temperature of your studio strobe is not good enough. Softboxes, lighting modifiers, and even your sets and backdrops change the color temperature of the light falling on your subject. If you are looking to get great color – shoot the cube!
Back up our Nikon D3/D3X raw files to DVD using Backup And Burn Software. Remove DVDs from the studio. Backup And Burn offloads the files from our Delkin Image Router 4 slot card reader, copies them to our raid hard disks, our back up hard disks, renumbers the files, puts them in the proper folders, creates any empty folders we need, backs up to DVD, AND prints the DVD label all at once, with little or no user input. This is an incredible time saver for PC users. MAC is not supported. Backup and Burn is no longer in business, get your B&B software from Delkin. Delkin says they will continue to support the software.
Process/crop/correct only the files we are going to show the client in Capture One Version 5. Let me be blunt here…. I am often asked how we get the great color out of our images. My answer is always the same, it is exactly what I am sharing with you on this page. Capture One is an extremely important part of our color. After explaining everything, I often hear I did everything you said, but I’m not getting great color out of lightroom…. You didn’t do everything I said! Lightroom DOES NOT PROVIDE THE SAME COLOR AS CAPTURE ONE! Sorry. It is a great tool, but it just doesn’t have the same color.
Open C1, select the folder of images. Go to the Q button(Quick). Use the eyedropper to click on the gray card or the cube, copy the settings, then select all of the images lit with that light source and paste the white balance settings. Individually adjust exposure on each image, crop to 5″x7″ @ 300dpi, and process. Fast and simple. For more information on this process, we have a new DVD that goes through everything step by step including the way we use the cube. The DVD will be available late 2009.
Do preliminary retouch on the 5×7 preview files, then import into Proselect Version 4. For the “pretouch” we lighten eyebags, tuck where needed, remove red where needed, and remove blemishes. The rest is done with Ken’s Proselect Actions. (Get The Actions Here)
Proselect makes a folder for ordered images, retouch those images, convert the psd files to jpgs using Imagefire’s I-Opener, then off to the lab. For retouch we have a complete set of actions that will turn ordinary files into extraordinary images. Ken’s retouch actions are receiving raves from everyone that uses them. (Get The Actions Here). If we have an image larger than an 11×14, we will pull the original (converted) full size jpg for retouch.
The retouched images then go to a 2 disk Dell RAID server with hot swap for permanent backup.
That’s how we do it. There are a ton of other things that go into making great images, all of which i have not yet mastered, BUT… I can tell you this… If you start with mediocre lighting, color, or exposure, the results will probably be mediocre. We call ourselves professional photographers, I believe that a professional should at least have control of four basic items, focus, exposure, color, and light. There are as many interpretations of these items as there are photographers, but the true professionals have control over the color, exposure, lighting, and focus in their images.
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