Robert Randall wrote:
I'm assuming that you can modify the action and save it as a new one, correct?

Product Description

The New York Pack is a collection of fully editable Photoshop Action presets based on the works of acclaimed New York photographers and retouching houses. Photoshop CS6/CC or above is required for full functionality.

a note for everyone: Photoshop CS6/CC or above is required for full functionality.

Robert Randall wrote:
Interesting... I watched the video and was impressed by the variety of solutions within each action. Might be worth $40 just to plink around with it. I'm always up for a solution that saves me time. I'm assuming that you can modify the action and save it as a new one, correct?


Went ahead and bought the NY package thinking it would be an interesting waste of money. Applied the Annie 1 action and about crapped my pants. It was perfect for the test image and it saved me about two hours of back and forth color work.

Thank you for the new tool!

My pleasure – really glad to hear it!

Some of the tools are nice time-savers too – if you try the Smart version of Tonal Balance, you adjust it via the Gaussian Blur setting, and Opacity on the folder, that often saves what I could spend hours doing with dodge and burn.

Another one with the Norman filter (after and before) showing how it picks out skin tones.

anchev wrote:
Here is a LUT I made for the same thing in 5 minutes. You can download it and use it for $0 here:

https://goo.gl/miTmcg

It doesn't add the unnatural cyan tone to the skin tone. Remember it is made for sRGB only, using the input images shown. For different input it may need fine tuning.

I like your LUT for a number of reasons...

It doesn't implant a muddy fog layer on the file, and the Annie actions do.

You're right about cyan and the skin, your's is better.

I used the NY Action on a file I've been working on that was generated in Maya, and immediately upon application, the cast was eliminated, or so I thought. Using your LUT on the file showed that Annie's action was leaving a cast behind on both pre and non pre prepared files.

For some reason, the render engine I use imparts a red cast no matter what I do with the color balance, which I've found to be the case on most drum scanners, so I'm accustomed to dealing with the issue in PS. I usually throw some gross correction on the file just to see how bad the balance actually is. Sometimes, even with known white or gray values, it's difficult to determine the actual cast, mostly because my eye accommodates the cast after a certain amount of view time.

I appreciate what you've done, thank you!

Jim Lafferty wrote:
anchev - Very cool, thanks for taking the time and making it available. Haven't downloaded your process but...

You are welcome. Just to note - it may not be available forever as a link, so make sure you download it. Some years ago I shared a preset for the so popular and commented Gucci look from my photographer's profile but that link is no longer available and I lost the preset, so although many people contacted me asking for it I just don't have it. I will probably make a new one when I have time.

... it makes me curious to hear from you - how does a 3D LUT attack the problem of isolating skin tones better than, say, a combination saturation & luminosity masks? Is it a case of it being more effective or more efficient, or is it a better approach outright? I have treated the LUT thing as beyond me and kind of walked away from it but if your process is more effective I'm intrigued.

It is effective as it does what it should. Re. efficiency:

1) Mask = raster data = memory. Obviously using N layers with M masks is less efficient than using 1 layer without a mask.

2) When you have an action that creates masks from the base image, this means those masks are fixed and valid only for this particular input image. As soon as you change the underlying raster data (e.g. remove some pimples), you have to re-run the action, regenerate the masks etc etc. Time-wise inefficient, heavy, not flexible, old school.

In comparison:

A CLUT maps each individual color to another color directly and you don't need masks for this. When you have such a flexible way to convert one particular color (e.g. skin or neutral dark gray) to a target, then your whole color grading is done in 1 single step and 1 single layer, non-destructively, no masks. It is a procedural approach (like all adjustment layers), i.e. it doesn't depend on how you change the underlying raster data. It simply takes what is there and moves it in the color space accordingly. In real time.

Remember though that the same which I said before still applies - the output depends on the input, so don't look at this particular LUT as an universal solution for any image (same applies for any action set or other preset you may use). I am just mentioning it because there are too many threads "How to make this look" where someone tosses an image from the web and then we all know what happens. Here at least we had a starting point but remember that this starting point is also color graded. To have the same look and feel on your image you will need to first take your image to the same input as the one shown here. And that may not be possible, at least not easily. Raw converters themselves change color, camera sensors are not the same, light matters, lens matter, filters matter etc. To make LUT (or any other) presets which are widely usable with good consistency there must be color matching to targets and profiling (and camera manufacturers profiles don't help). But that is something huge as a topic and I can't possibly go into it deeply enough in a forum post, so I better not touch it.

Benski wrote:
I'm pretty sure you can't get there without masking.

I have shown you that it is possible. Mask are needed only for local adjustments, e.g. apply a curve on the face only, add a color gradient/vignette. Then you select or paint the masked region. But masks which are aimed to simply isolate a particular color in order to change it are completely unnecessary when using a LUT because the LUT itself can pick any point in the color space and move it.

anchev wrote:
I have shown you that it is possible. Mask are needed only for local adjustments, e.g. apply a curve on the face only, add a color gradient/vignette. Then you select or paint the masked region. But masks which are aimed to simply isolate a particular color in order to change it are completely unnecessary when using a LUT because the LUT itself can pick any point in the color space and move it.

What you've done just looks like a regular colour filter. How does it perform on that image of Michael Douglas?

Benski wrote:
What you've done just looks like a regular colour filter. How does it perform on that image of Michael Douglas?

The input image of Michael Douglas is different from that of Vanity Fair in terms of overall look. As I said both images are not raw but already color graded. If they were raw and we had profiling targets, we could color grade them with the same LUT and have the same result.

anchev wrote:
The input image of Michael Douglas is different from that of Vanity Fair in terms of overall look. As I said both images are not raw but already color graded. If they were raw and we had profiling targets, we could color grade them with the same LUT and have the same result.

That's exactly the problem I found tbh.

I was trying to make an LUT for use on set, but the problem is you need to know exactly where the skin tones are and where the background is. I tried with a shot similar to the Michael Douglas one and the LUT generator just created garbage, so presumably the skin's too close to the background colour.

Maybe you could get there with really perfect grading, but then why use a preset? The colour shift would be the easy bit. What Photoshop can do (that I didn't realise) is make educated guesses about what is skin and what isn't. And if you're sent 100 shots to retouch all lit in slightly different conditions, that's not just a time-saver. It's a week-long job or an afternoon.

Benski wrote:
It's a week-long job or an afternoon.

And it is a one click job if the photographer understands how color grading works and takes a shot of a color target in each different lighting. Remember that the purpose of post processing is not to eradicate the need for proper photography or color management.

anchev wrote:
And it is a one click job if the photographer understands how color grading works and takes a shot of a color target in each different lighting. Remember that the purpose of post processing is not to eradicate the need for proper photography or color management.

In nearly 10 years in the industry, I can only recall one photographer who shot with a colour chart. The unretouched Annie Leibovitz shots floating around are about the least technical digital photography you'll see.

I don't disagree at all. But I think if anything the move to digital's just made people less technically proficient.

Jim Lafferty wrote:
Meanwhile, I hardly see a shoot go by without a color card… but I've only got 8 years under my belt 

Some would say colour cards are a bit of a red herring. When you see the light spectrums people are working with (especially with more people using continuous – LEDs, fluorescent), you realise no one's really correcting colour properly .. Films like Blade Runner (full of neons and xenons), you'd get very strange results trying to flatten the colours with whole spectrums missing!

Benski wrote:
In nearly 10 years in the industry, I can only recall one photographer who shot with a colour chart.

There may be different reasons for this. Personally I bought my first colorimeter and IT8 scan target in 2002. That was 1 year after I used a digital camera for the first time. At that time we did a lot of print work in the studio so having a good color managed workflow was important. Today I don't use a color target because 1) I don't have one 2) I don't need to match my work to the look of another or even to the look of a previous shot I did. However if one shoots a calendar which must have a particular color look, and each of the 12 pages is shot with models at different locations, under different light conditions, using maybe even different cameras - it will save time ($) to use a color target. So the reasons for using or not using a color target may be different, even financial (good targets are not cheap).

The unretouched Annie Leibovitz shots floating around are about the least technical digital photography you'll see.

I am not quite sure what you mean by unretouched. Anything you see on the web is retouched in the sense - it is not original raw file downloaded from the memory card. As you probably know raw data is linear and quite green. The process of raw conversion includes applying a color matrix, white balance and gamma curve. And the result is something already touched. Even more - the popular raw converters such s ACR and C1 have built in curves which you cannot cancel using the software controls. So they are manipulating color data in a way which gives you different starting points. One cannot possibly create a preset which gives accurate end result when starting from something lit or converted in who-knows-what way. In the best case without a target for reference all you can get is an approximation with unknown tolerance.

But I think if anything the move to digital's just made people less technically proficient.

True. Maybe the problem is not the digital but the comfort and ease of use which every marketer today is trying to sell. I am not saying that things should be unnecessarily difficult but one cannot possibly learn anything when he is programmed to think in a lazy way, without exploring new things.

Benski wrote:
Some would say colour cards are a bit of a red herring.

Yes and no. I agree with you, generally speaking, and frankly most of my shoots tend to get processed by eye. But... if you're looking to maintain consistency within a shoot, across several setups (using the same key light especially) you're just creating hurdles for yourself if you don't grab a color card with each setup.

And for certain applications, like e-comm/catalog, it's just The Right Way to do it, without question. Leave the speculative, editorial subjectivity for just that: editorials.

I can tell you one large production company in NYC has taken most of the subjective, human perception out of their color work and it's exactly what their clients need/want.

anchev wrote:
I am not quite sure what you mean by unretouched. Anything you see on the web is retouched in the sense - it is not original raw file downloaded from the memory card. As you probably know raw data is linear and quite green. The process of raw conversion includes applying a color matrix, white balance and gamma curve. And the result is something already touched. Even more - the popular raw converters such s ACR and C1 have built in curves which you cannot cancel using the software controls. So they are manipulating color data in a way which gives you different starting points. One cannot possibly create a preset which gives accurate end result when starting from something lit or converted in who-knows-what way. In the best case without a target for reference all you can get is an approximation with unknown tolerance.

I do love the vividness of the colours on your studio work. Are LUTs a big part of your process?

I definitely appreciate your point on consistency though. The toughest part of the bulk jobs I get is always translating a look across shots with different light, different amounts of bounce and ambience. There are certainly jobs where I wish there'd been someone on set with a test card and light meter.

And there are these leaked unretouched celeb shots that come out once in a while. Of course how they're RAW processed will be the thing, but from my experience, when you're sent work from bigger shoots, where they've got a digital operator and retoucher on set, I'm often sent Tiffs rather than RAWs. And they're often totally underexposed and not white balanced at all. So I wouldn't be at all surprised if the retoucher working on these was sent shots in that state.

Jim Lafferty wrote:
Yes and no. I agree with you, generally speaking, and frankly most of my shoots tend to get processed by eye. But... if you're looking to maintain consistency within a shoot, across several setups (using the same key light especially) you're just creating hurdles for yourself if you don't grab a color card with each setup.

And for certain applications, like e-comm/catalog, it's just The Right Way to do it, without question. Leave the speculative, editorial subjectivity for just that: editorials.

I can tell you one large production company in NYC has taken most of the subjective, human perception out of their color work and it's exactly what their clients need/want.

In fact last year I did about 500 catalogue shots where, without a test card on each location, it was physically impossible to know what colour the clothes should be. So they sent me a big folder of fabric samples - and even then it's not easy to predict what they should look like in daylight, on a set, etc.

So certainly point taken there. But then I suppose more editorial photographers can get away with being much less technical. My favourite cinematographer (Christopher Doyle – Cheungking Express, Fallen Angels, In the Mood for Love) is one of these guys who breaks every rule in the book – shooting interiors on daylight film, with tungsten and fluorescent, with 3x Tiffen filters (warm promists, etc) – and there's no colour consistency between cuts or shots .. But you never notice, because they get the aesthetic so right.

anchev wrote:
Here is a LUT I made for the same thing in 5 minutes. You can download it and use it for $0 here:

https://goo.gl/miTmcg

It doesn't add the unnatural cyan tone to the skin tone. Remember it is made for sRGB only, using the input images shown. For different input it may need fine tuning.

I downloaded your free.cube......how do I implement it....where do I put it in photoshop to use it?

Benski wrote:
I do love the vividness of the colours on your studio work. Are LUTs a big part of your process?

I use only LUTs for all kinds of color work. There are a few images in my port which are quite old, for them I used different technique because at that time LUTs were still not available in Photoshop. I think I have mentioned this in threads many years ago, there is this thing called Jacob's Ladder which I used at that time. But it uses masks (which as I explained is a limitation) and a different color model which additionally complicates the whole process. So today it's only LUTs for me.

Frank Lewis Photography wrote:
Is the free.cube self loading or will I need to manually load specific items to their correct locations?

Just add a color lookup adjustment layer in Photoshop and point it to the .cube file as shown in the screenshot.

Will I be able to use this free.cube on any raw image file?

Read my earlier post in which I explain that input matters. Depending on the underlying layers you can get a different result. This LUT is made only for sRGB and without a color target.

I just want to be sure I'm not running off in a direction that will cause me a lot of stress and I yank out what hair I have left on my head.

If any answers warrant a PM rather than a long post, feel free to contact me.

Don't stress. I am preparing some more info to post.
If anyone has any particular questions feel free to ask, so I can include that too.

anchev wrote:
I use only LUTs for all kinds of color work. There are a few images in my port which are quite old, for them I used different technique because at that time LUTs were still not available in Photoshop. I think I have mentioned this in threads many years ago, there is this thing called Jacob's Ladder which I used at that time. But it uses masks (which as I explained is a limitation) and a different color model which additionally complicates the whole process. So today it's only LUTs for me.

Well masks give you artistic control; LUTs give you a mathematical model.

I don't think you have to be all or nothing.. In film grading, we use LUTs on everything, but there are a million situations where masks and curves are necessary.. With the Michael Douglas shot for example, using an LUT I couldn't avoid the skin process appearing in blotches on the chair, because there's usually overlapping colour with skin and wood.

If you want a preset that approximates the job of a retoucher, it has to be able to make qualitative and not just quantitative judgements. Or at least make editing the masks very easy. I like your LUT (actually more on the other shots than the Vanity Fair one) but it looks more like the Kodak preset from ImpulZ than the Annie Leibovitz look.

Benski wrote:
Well masks give you artistic control; LUTs give you a mathematical model.

I am quite cautious when the discussions turn into art vs non-art in the sense of something greater vs something dry, senseless, dead. That's why I would like to mention (as you may have noticed before, in other threads) that the original, etymological meaning of the word art is: skill acquired through practice. In that sense one can be a skillful mathematician too. There is beauty in maths, in chemistry, in everything if one has the skill to see it. And obviously if one is skillful he knows the right tool for the job. In that sense I think seeing itself is the greatest of all arts and for that one needs sensitivity, depth, exploration. Tools and methods are secondary, superficial. We have all seen what happens when people use tools and methods mechanically.

I don't think you have to be all or nothing.. In film grading, we use LUTs on everything, but there are a million situations where masks and curves are necessary.. With the Michael Douglas shot for example, using an LUT I couldn't avoid the skin process appearing in blotches on the chair, because there's usually overlapping colour with skin and wood.

It is not all or nothing. Masks have their role and purpose. Obviously with a LUT you cannot separate one color, i.e. (130, 140, 150) appearing in 2 different pixels. You can separate only two different colors (or make them one). But that is something no action can do either. It needs manual, raster level work.

If you want a preset that approximates the job of a retoucher, it has to be able to make qualitative and not just quantitative judgements. Or at least make editing the masks very easy.

I see a great danger in presets and all kinds of easy tools as a whole.

anchev wrote:

I am quite cautious when the discussions turn into art vs non-art in the sense of something greater vs something dry, senseless, dead. That's why I would like to mention (as you may have noticed before, in other threads) that the original, etymological meaning of the word art is: skill acquired through practice. In that sense one can be a skillful mathematician too. There is beauty in maths, in chemistry, in everything if one has the skill to see it. And obviously if one is skillful he knows the right tool for the job. In that sense I think seeing itself is the greatest of all arts and for that one needs sensitivity, depth, exploration. Tools and methods are secondary, superficial. We have all seen what happens when people use tools and methods mechanically.

Absolutely. I always bring up the ancient Greeks in response to people who say all art's 'subjective'. I think all great art strives to go beyond the subjective, to reach the divine – which in the case of the ancient Greeks was mathematics. And those rules – unlike styles and fashions – are still perfect. It's us, as viewers, who are imperfect. Or "subjectivity is an illusion" is another one I like.

Having said that, what makes Renaissance art look the way it does, vs CGI, says something about the imperfect nature of human expression. Great artists convey personality rather than just proficiency. There's a certain curse of the engineer, in that you start seeing things through a prism of rationale, rather than connecting (in that way so many of us lose after childhood).

It is not all or nothing. Masks have their role and purpose. Obviously with a LUT you cannot separate one color, i.e. (130, 140, 150) appearing in 2 different pixels. You can separate only two different colors (or make them one). But that is something no action can do either. It needs manual, raster level work.

I see a great danger in presets and all kinds of easy tools as a whole.

This is another thing I'm torn on.. I think we saw much more creativity in photography when photographers were limited. Likewise cinematography. Now, with Davinci Resolve or Photoshop, you can control every pixel.. Back in the days of Blade Runner and Solaris, you had film stock (presets) and crude colour timing. Yet people achieved so much. I'd be astounded if the new Blade Runner looked anywhere near as good as the original.

I'm capable of making my own colour processes, but I bought all the VSCO packs because when I work intuitively, I'm limited by my own habits and preconceptions .. When I use presets, I can try 60 different things, and find results I wouldn't have thought of, maybe no one would have thought of.

Like you say, the art can be in the seeing, not just the doing.. When I've got a folder full of Annie Leibovitz, Jean Ray, Roversi, etc. processes, I'm back in the realm of experimenting and viewing – rather than thinking, planning and designing. And art can't be all one and not the other. I think the perceiving is what we lose connection with when we learn too much.

Benski wrote:
Having said that, what makes Renaissance art look the way it does, vs CGI, says something about the imperfect nature of human expression. Great artists convey personality rather than just proficiency. There's a certain curse of the engineer, in that you start seeing things through a prism of rationale, rather than connecting (in that way so many of us lose after childhood).

btw I am an engineer

As for the other part - I don't think art in its deepest sense and essence needs expression at all. Expression is rather a side effect caused by the inward incompleteness the artist. That incompleteness forms the personality which has characteristics and can be described. But when you are full you don't need to express. There is only silence and in that silence flowers the beauty which cannot be expressed because it is beyond any characteristics or descriptions.

This is another thing I'm torn on.. I think we saw much more creativity in photography when photographers were limited.

It seems to me too easy and superficial that people tend to blame technology. Technology itself is not the problem. The problem is how we react to technology. It gives us an easy life, we spend less energy for things which required all our time in earlier centuries. But that easiness puts people to sleep as all they look for is comfort. Then the saved energy is wasted and all creativity is dissipated in shopping, browsing, taking selfies, throwing the next bomb, getting an Oscar and all that. We are so immature. Creativity requires one to be very serious, not in the sense of effort (which is another waste of energy) but in  the sense of observation... seeing.

Like you say, the art can be in the seeing, not just the doing..

Seeing is the doing. There is no doing without seeing. Without seeing there is only a mechanical activity, a repetition, like a robot. A computer can do that much better and faster if it is programmed properly. But the computer cannot ask "What is seeing?", "What is beauty?" and go beyond the question.

When I've got a folder full of Annie Leibovitz, Jean Ray, Roversi, etc. processes, I'm back in the realm of experimenting and viewing – rather than thinking, planning and designing. And art can't be all one and not the other. I think the perceiving is what we lose connection with when we learn too much.

Exactly. That's why I have been repeating in so many threads - no tutorials, no classes, no teachers, no names, brands, leaders, praising, enslaving oneself to a method, authority etc. Learn for yourself, explore freely. Of course technical knowledge is necessary to use tools but that is the end of it. The rest is something one should do on one's own, without repeating, without praising names, be it Leibovitz or whoever.

anchev wrote:
btw I am an engineer

As for the other part - I don't think art in its deepest sense and essence needs expression at all. Expression is rather a side effect caused by the inward incompleteness the artist. That incompleteness forms the personality which has characteristics and can be described. But when you are full you don't need to express. There is only silence and in that silence flowers the beauty which cannot be expressed because it is beyond any characteristics or descriptions.

I think that's a perspective.. Religious art comes from a place of glorifying the divine rather than the whims of the artist – in Eastern art, losing the Self and exposing the art would be the aim.

But many of most influential artists we plagiarise today (Annie Leibovitz's style is all borrowed from Renaissance art) were flawed, troubled, egocentric people who put a lot of themselves into their work, and maybe as a reaction to religious art of the time.

It seems to me too easy and superficial that people tend to blame technology. Technology itself is not the problem. The problem is how we react to technology. It gives us an easy life, we spend less energy for things which required all our time in earlier centuries. But that easiness puts people to sleep as all they look for is comfort. Then the saved energy is wasted and all creativity is dissipated in shopping, browsing, taking selfies, throwing the next bomb, getting an Oscar and all that. We are so immature. Creativity requires one to be very serious, not in the sense of effort (which is another waste of energy) but in  the sense of observation... seeing.

Absolutely.. There's a book I'm reading at the moment called Originals: How Nonconformists Move The World, which has studies on how and why our first ideas are often our best, and how our own familiarity with our own work distorts our perception of it. The more you stare at a picture, the more flaws you start to notice.

Crazy example: the first Die Hard film, Bruce Willis was a wreck. Struggling alcoholic, neurotic, collapsing relationship with his wife. And it's impossible not to like the guy.. Later Die Hard films, Bruce Willis is just a superman cop who punches people. And without flaws, there's just no one there. Not in the Buddhist sense, but in an empty sense. Photoshop can become an extension of art, or an extension of neuroses.

Seeing is the doing. There is no doing without seeing. Without seeing there is only a mechanical activity, a repetition, like a robot. A computer can do that much better and faster if it is programmed properly. But the computer cannot ask "What is seeing?", "What is beauty?" and go beyond the question.

I think bad photography is often too much doing and not enough seeing.. When you've got a studio booked, and you know what you've got to deliver, the whole day is just going through the motions.. Then there's this classic thing, where a photography looks at their images that evening or the next day, and realises: hmm, I'm not sure.

Then bad retouching: the classic going through the motions. They'll smooth skin that doesn't need smoothing. Brighten eyes that don't need brightening. Pageant photography. Surely people couldn't come out with those images if they were conscious of what they looked like?

Benski wrote:
I think that's a perspective.. Religious art comes from a place of glorifying the divine rather than the whims of the artist – in Eastern art, losing the Self and exposing the art would be the aim.

Religion is another word that is abused a lot. Perhaps this is the most abused word ever. Just like with art, reading the original etymology you will find out that it comes from re- (again) lego (gather). I have also read that it means re-link, which is the same an re-legere (re-read). So in the essence religion is exactly the process of re-discovery, restoring a link, making one whole, reconnecting. But see with man has done with both words: he has turned them into some abstract illusions, a belief to be followed blindly, schematically and all the conflicts and wars coming out of these illusions. Looking at all that it seems to me man is quite likely to be some kind of unsuccessful genetic experiment. But on the other hand we have a capacity which no other know living being has. So the art of living with it without destroying everything around us is perhaps the only art we need to learn. Retouchers, photographers, models etc. - professions widely seen as "creative" are actually destructive. We contribute to the sickness and neurosis: commercialism, consumerism and all the greedy destruction and brain washing. As you say: the good guy in the movies is so good that he kills 1000 other guys, just like that - because he is good. And that is already a standard thinking, something deserving admiration. A "wow" factor.

Just thinking...

But many of most influential artists we plagiarise today (Annie Leibovitz's style is all borrowed from Renaissance art) were flawed, troubled, egocentric people who put a lot of themselves into their work, and maybe as a reaction to religious art of the time.

Sure. A lot of the works are reactions. But a reaction is an echo, it is not creativity. It is either copying or opposition (which is again copying). The reaction itself is a form of neurosis. Conform or rebel. 0 or 1.

Absolutely.. There's a book I'm reading at the moment called Originals: How Nonconformists Move The World, which has studies on how and why our first ideas are often our best, and how our own familiarity with our own work distorts our perception of it.

Did you know that the word idea means to see? Again another one which we have turned into a conception, an abstraction. In that sense it seems to me absorbing the ideas of someone else prevents actual seeing.

The more you stare at a picture, the more flaws you start to notice.

Yes. But the self protecting mechanism of our brain works in a way which also gets us used to the stimulus and reduces the sensitivity. If you enter a room with a certain smell, in a few minutes you stop noticing the smell. Same with sound, same with light/color.

I think bad photography is often too much doing and not enough seeing..

Yes, that applies to bad everything, not just photography.

When you've got a studio booked, and you know what you've got to deliver, the whole day is just going through the motions.. Then there's this classic thing, where a photography looks at their images that evening or the next day, and realises: hmm, I'm not sure.

But you can go through the motions consciously. In my studio I often have a laptop with images showing certain poses and during the pauses the model goes and looks at some, so she doesn't simply wonder what to do. When you shoot commercially (i.e. for the purpose of mass destruction lol) that makes the process more efficient. But of course the best things happen without reference. This may happen in 1 image for the whole shoot, or not happen even in 5 shoots. It all depends on the state of the mind I guess. We cannot plan the magic and the creativity. If we are lucky it comes to us.

Then bad retouching: the classic going through the motions. They'll smooth skin that doesn't need smoothing. Brighten eyes that don't need brightening. Pageant photography. Surely people couldn't come out with those images if they were conscious of what they looked like?

The biggest problem comes when the client sends a set of bad images with a requirement "do your magic like before, you are good at it!"

Frank Lewis Photography wrote:
It took a while and I needed Anchev's help to figure out how to use the preset. I guess this is not the type of image you would use for this action but I am not a fashion photographer. It's a neat effect though. My many thanks to Anchev for walking me through how to use his software.

You are welcome Frank. Just to clarify: I provided just a LUT file, not an action. It is not actually software but a text file (you can open it with any text editor). So there are 2 different things which we discussed in this thread (in fact many more lol) - one is the actions by Benski and the other is LUTs.

anchev wrote:

You are welcome Frank. Just to clarify: I provided just a LUT file, not an action. It is not actually software but a text file (you can open it with any text editor). So there are 2 different things which we discussed in this thread (in fact many more lol) - one is the actions by Benski and the other is LUTs.

Well, it's very cool. The cube is now loaded into the adjustments layer 3D LUTS presets so it's ready to go anytime.

Benski wrote:

Some would say colour cards are a bit of a red herring. When you see the light spectrums people are working with (especially with more people using continuous – LEDs, fluorescent), you realise no one's really correcting colour properly .. Films like Blade Runner (full of neons and xenons), you'd get very strange results trying to flatten the colours with whole spectrums missing!

If by color cards your are referring to a gray card which are more for exposure than for color matching, I completely agree with the red herring assessment. Tools like the spellchecker and color checker passport are a different story.  Each sensors color sensitivity is different and products like the spellchecker compensate for this by measuring how the camera picks up several known color swatches for a given light source.

It is very true that solid state, discharge, and tungsten lighting are all different than sunlight making color managed workflows even more crucial.

That said, I highly doubt that the vanity fair group shot was lit with continuous light. That is my uneducated guess based on DOF and how these types of shots are generally lit and I could be wrong. Professional fashion work shot with continuous light (other than the sun) is the exception not the rule and its not likely to become the rule any time soon. Most fashion photographers use strobes, and powerful ones at that.

Continuous light can be a viable option for soft looks like boudoir, but not tack sharp images like the examples.

Cheers,
Noah

anchev wrote:
Religion is another word that is abused a lot. Perhaps this is the most abused word ever. Just like with art, reading the original etymology you will find out that it comes from re- (again) lego (gather). I have also read that it means re-link, which is the same an re-legere (re-read). So in the essence religion is exactly the process of re-discovery, restoring a link, making one whole, reconnecting. But see with man has done with both words: he has turned them into some abstract illusions, a belief to be followed blindly, schematically and all the conflicts and wars coming out of these illusions. Looking at all that it seems to me man is quite likely to be some kind of unsuccessful genetic experiment. But on the other hand we have a capacity which no other know living being has. So the art of living with it without destroying everything around us is perhaps the only art we need to learn. Retouchers, photographers, models etc. - professions widely seen as "creative" are actually destructive. We contribute to the sickness and neurosis: commercialism, consumerism and all the greedy destruction and brain washing. As you say: the good guy in the movies is so good that he kills 1000 other guys, just like that - because he is good. And that is already a standard thinking, something deserving admiration. A "wow" factor.

Just thinking...

Well just going totally off piste, I think this belief that consumerism, greed, commercialism.. are sicknesses, goes totally against any objective interpretation of the data.

If you look at these charts showing the decline of global poverty, or watch Hans Roslig's TED talk (The Best Stats You've Ever Seen), free markets, global trade, commercial interests have virtually wiped out global poverty in a single generation – you can see over a billion Chinese now are living nearly twice as long as they were a generation ago.

It astounds me we seem to believe poverty's increased and socialism is now needed. The figures couldn't paint a more different picture. Atlas Shrugged should be compulsory reading in schools, instead colleges are teaching Marxism. It's one of the strangest aspects of human nature.

Sure. A lot of the works are reactions. But a reaction is an echo, it is not creativity. It is either copying or opposition (which is again copying). The reaction itself is a form of neurosis. Conform or rebel. 0 or 1.

Well there are these concepts like creative theft and decontextualisation. 50 years ago William Burroughs was advocating creative theft and cutting up other people's work, and today half the music we listen to is samples and cut-ups. And the only measure is whether people still connect with it, and whether it's relevant to the world today.

But you can go through the motions consciously. In my studio I often have a laptop with images showing certain poses and during the pauses the model goes and looks at some, so she doesn't simply wonder what to do. When you shoot commercially (i.e. for the purpose of mass destruction lol) that makes the process more efficient. But of course the best things happen without reference. This may happen in 1 image for the whole shoot, or not happen even in 5 shoots. It all depends on the state of the mind I guess. We cannot plan the magic and the creativity. If we are lucky it comes to us.

That's it. I think that's what justifies photography as a medium. I think fine art is a better medium to capture and idealise beauty. Photography gives you the chance to capture chaos and unpredictability. Both parts of the human experience.

The biggest problem comes when the client sends a set of bad images with a requirement "do your magic like before, you are good at it!"

One of the biggest problems with retouching I think. Photographers assume you can add the extra 10-20% to the work, and stop chasing it themselves.

Noah Russell wrote:
If by color cards your are referring to a gray card which are more for exposure than for color matching, I completely agree with the red herring assessment. Tools like the spellchecker and color checker passport are a different story.  Each sensors color sensitivity is different and products like the spellchecker compensate for this by measuring how the camera picks up several known color swatches for a given light source.

It is very true that solid state, discharge, and tungsten lighting are all different than sunlight making color managed workflows even more crucial.

That said, I highly doubt that the vanity fair group shot was lit with continuous light. That is my uneducated guess based on DOF and how these types of shots are generally lit and I could be wrong. Professional fashion work shot with continuous light (other than the sun) is the exception not the rule and its not likely to become the rule any time soon. Most fashion photographers use strobes, and powerful ones at that.

Continuous light can be a viable option for soft looks like boudoir, but not tack sharp images like the examples.

Cheers,
Noah

Yes, Annie Leibovitz uses an Acute head (I think), usually in a cheap Photek Softlighter (are they $50?). Usually just the one light, and then she'll drag the shutter to mix in ambient. Handheld too, so some of her shots are quite blurred. Very untechnical. The technical side is certainly in the retouching.

Then again, many of the top Vogue, Vanity Fair, etc photographers do use continuous.. Paolo Roversi and Mario Testino maybe the best examples. I think they both use HMIs or old studio fresnels (often bounced to mimic daylight).

Roversi believes (and I relate) that strobes don't capture the soul in the eyes. Older photographs, where you might have really long exposure times, capture depth. Also softens expressions. Sometimes Roversi uses 10 second exposures and paints the light on with a Maglite.. Strobes can feel like a freeze frame, which risks looking clinical. I think a lot of the trend for retouchers to soften images comes from how unnaturally sharp and still they can feel. Long exposure can capture a passage of time.