Digital Light & Color

Hello Dieter, I use ACDsee Pro for RAW conversion. This program has a module called 'lighting' wich has a very intuitive interface to recover shadows and highlights to an extend that exeeds the normal recover functions because you can apply it to a limited tonal range. The result can be quite simila...

Hi Ian, I have wondered about this too. In most cases the 'hard edge' is not a problem for me, and when it is a problem I set softness to 100% and rework those edges that need a more gradual transition. But a softer, or maybe even adjustable transition at the edge of the 'primary disk' would be nice...

There are other DAM capable programs too, you might consider ACDSee Pro or Zoner Photo Studio wich both have quite usefull database functions. I started with IMatch but switched to ACDSee Pro because it is much easier to use and it comes with a very nice RAW converter. ACDSee does have some quirks, ...

In the ETTR discussion I can only add from my personal experience that it does indeed depend on the subject. As a photographer I have to decide wether the highlights or the shadows are more important and expose accordingly to the right or the left (in most cases it is to the right) About best captur...

"Minefield" is quite an accurate metafore for color management :) The way I look at color management and the use of different color spaces is to use them as tools to preserve colors I captured and to get the output I want. I shoot RAW and develop to 48 bit TIFF in ProPhotoRGB, after some e...

I suppose real black should not be clipped when converting color spaces, but very dark saturated colors will. And you are working on an uncalibrated monitor. Did you check the pixel values in the blocked area's with the readout tool? I am not sure about the black and white point compensation, but th...

As far as I understand it a camera profile describes the color gamut a specific camera can capture. This profile is allways somehow related to the lighting used while shooting a reference target. The general opinion on camera profiles seems to be that they are only usefull for studio shoots with con...

I am not an expert in this field, and it is hard to diagnose these things from a distance, but I have a few suggestions: - if you have no custom monitor profile and your monitor is not of a wide gamut type you should set Monitor Profile to sRGB (in general monitors are designed and manufactured to d...

I suppose the 'light falloff' function is looking for a circular brightness pattern in the image. When photographing a wall you are likely to have a lightsource above or sideways. Applying a gradient will adjust for this assymetry, but I think that the resulting falloff correction is probably not a ...

@tomczak: thanks for the link, that site also has an excel file with all the values of the colorchecker, very handy I succeded in printing my own version of the colorchecker by making a first print from a file with accurate RGB values, measuring the resulting RGB values for each printed patch, calcu...