The EYEEEES

Hi all
Today I want talk about the equipment you need as a photographer in order to do corrections to you photos after you have taken them. This processing is also know as post processing or post for short. As my little one would say the EYEEES. Or in big person talk the eyes and to see what your photos should look like you need good eyes or monitors. And if you want skip this part I wont hold I against you.

The most important thing about post production to photos is your monitor. No matter what or how good a photo is unless you can see reasonably accurately what you are doing to it whats the point? You can make some guesses about what the colours actually are but unless you have a calibrated monitor It would be a little like picking out a colour at the paint store while wearing rose tinted glasses. Then getting very upset when you get home and start painting. The colour was not really what you wanted because of the rose tinted glasses you had on. Basically what Im saying is you need to see what you are doing. The other most important thing is making sure your monitor is calibrated no matter what monitor you have.

I now run dell monitors here at HQ and they are good value for money. Not the best monitors money can buy but way ahead of most of the monitors out there. Also on paper they dont really look that impressive but for my work probably the best money Ive spent in a long time. Here is the spec my dell monitors

The Dell 2209WA

Panel Type

IPS - In Plane Switching

Contrast Ratio 1000:1 (typical)
Dynamic Contrast Ratio 3000:1 (typical)
Brightness 300 cd/m² (typical)

Response Time 5 ms (typical)

The Samsung T240

Brightness 300cd/㎡
Contrast Ratio DC 20,000:1 (1,000:1) (Typ.)
Response time 5ms
Color Supported 16.7M

Why do they seem so similir on paper but I would pick the Dell every time. Oh and did I mention the Dell costs about twice as much. If you look carefully The Samsung supports 16.7 Million colours. It can only display 262 thousand colours. It cannot actually display 16.7Million colours but supports them. The Dell on the other hand can display all 16.7 Million colours. The reason for this is the technology between the two are different. In order to bring a product to the market cost effectively the manufactures have to use TFT technology. There is a lot out there to explain it I wont but right now its about the cheapest way to make a LCD monitor. The IPS method that Dell use is far better but costs more to produce. And because its hard for the general user to notice the difference between the two most users will pick the Samsung it cheaper and looks pretty good at first glance. Most users are not doing photographic work so it will be just fine for them.

Now Sales people want there product to seem better than the competition. So they have started to push this dynamic contrast ratio spec. they say its 20000:1 but Dont get fooled by that its only 1000:1 typical as they state. Some companys are trying to pass that off as to why they are better than the competition.

Its a little like when in audio systems manufacturers ratings suddenly changed to PMPO ratings. PMPO stands for Peak Maximum Power Output. It is the maximum power the system can put out for the tiniest fraction of a second. RMS which stands for Root Mean Square is a more realistic rating of the power the system can continually sustain. When sales teams are selling to the general masses they will resort to all manner of rubbish ratings to try make there product sound better than the competition. And for someone who does not know the difference between a 300W RMS system and a 5000W PMPO system the 5000W system sounds wonderful and probably a lot cheaper to. It becomes a no brainer 5000W for 50% of the price. It sounds wonderful but beware that 5000W is probably only 50W RMS system.

So one of the question you are pondering is why do all things on a TFT type monitor not look crappy if they only have 262 thousand colours to work with. 16.7 Milion / 64 = 262 Thousand colours. Well in 16.7 million colours to distinguish the difference in 64 colours of very similar colour and tone next to one another would be hard for anyone to do. So most of us will not ever notice. Unless that is it was pointed out to you and you were working with photographs. The manufactures of the TFT monitors have sort of over come the lack of colours by getting in what the colour the computer is actully wanting displayed on the screen and then going to a table and figuring out what colour to display on the screen that would be the closest to what the computer actually wanted.

The next piece of hardware is more important than how good a monitor you have be it TFT type even an old CRT type screen. It is a Calibrator. I have a calibrator to check that the monitors are giving me accurate colour. Those monitors I bought are not worth that cardboard box they came in if they are not calibrated. Remeber the rose coloured glasses I was talking about. Well the calibrator basically just checks to see your monitor is not showing you a rosey tinted picture. It is checking to see that blue is blue red is red and so forth. A calibrator will also work on the lowest end monitors out there and can at least get your colours more or less where they should be. When one gets their pictures printed its a good idea to check if your printing lab does regular calibrations on their monitors and printing labs. Trust me on this Ive had pictures with purple colour casts because nothing was calibrated at the Lab I used. The kicker was they would correct the pictures colours by eye trying to compensate for what the printing lad would produce.

OK If you have been sleeping now is a good time to wake up. To the post.

Yes the thing that is more agonizing than and a one eyed deaf geriatric witch doctor trying to perform a root canal with a blunt spoon and a chicken as a hammer. Why would a one eyed deaf geriatric witch doctor trying to perform a root canal with a blunt spoon and a chicken as a hammer? Who knows but then again this is Africa and some really strange things tend to happen here. The other problem is unless you use a point and shoot or use a Polaroid camera as Joey from the famous Gulf photo plus did you just cant escape it. Im also not talking the cases of 'OMG I screwed up and have to photoshop for hours here. Im talking about the photos that are good raw and to make them a great picture just requires a bit of enhancement. Most of the pros out there will tell you that they will spend about the same time in post as they will on a shoot. And remember these guys are capturing just about perfect photos on their shoot. You just cant get away from post. Anyway lets look at a photo that I did a little while ago.

In the original photo I was in the process of learning how to light a pure white background. OK cool what can go wrong? Well a little note for the first time lighters of white backgrounds - when you client rocks up and they are wearing white and all the subject matter is white you had better hope you have all the right tools to control the light. And the worst part about it is even if you have absolute control of every aspect of the light there is a pretty good chance that somethings got to be fixed in post. Heres is the original.
















A few things about this one. At the time of that photo I did not have a calibrated monitor if you read the technical bumf at the beginning you will know what Im on about. Things were a bit hit and miss. More miss than hit. What does this mean? It means I was blind. Not having a good monitor and some means of checking it is a bit like going skimp on the glass on the camera. You can get away with it for a while but it will eventually effect ones work. The photos post was done in just that manner, Blindly. Now also dont get me wrong here, on my first attempt I also did not know how to process the above photo properly so it was a collaboration of ignorance and crappy equipment.

And now the "I can seeeeeee" Post processed photo
















Ahhh Much better

I am much happier about this photo and I used to like it. But when I got the new monitors There were a few photos that I thought were great that after looking at them again on the new monitors I felt they were not so good. This was one of them. And how did I process this one differently. In the original I did a few levels and a bit of bit of fiddling with highlights and left it at that. In this one I first started out with some levels, lightened things up a little. Then onto the dodge tool. I saw this technique being used by Zack Arais to eliminate the background transitions. Heres how it works. Basically the background is close to white. By dodging the background it pushes the colours to pure white. At that point you have a perfect white background. I lately have been finding some of the pure white background stuff a bit to clinical so I added a vignette just to draw a little more attention to the centre and to give the picture a bit more depth.
Again the technical waffle is just a explanation of how hardware can help make things go horribly wrong in post and why.