where there’s smoke there’s fire

The Art of Color…Science?

by RC Jenkins (see previous guest posts)

Intro

Color science is an art.

And we’ve been getting a lot of crayons lately.  And not the stupid ones in the 4-pack from some kid’s party that are basically just plastic and break.  The good ones that just smear colors onto the page.

The biggest headline feature of the ZR is probably R3D NE (raw video format); but nobody actually cares about the technical format.  It might even be pretty much the same as .NEV.  What really differentiates it from .NEV is the color science that it contains.  (But what exactly does this mean…?  That was rhetorical.)

And not long before that, Nikon started rolling out “Flexible Picture Controls.”  And before that, were the Advanced Picture Controls, which were themselves more advanced than the regular Picture Controls.

And during all of this, we had the fanboys bashing Sony’s colors or praising Fuji’s ‘Film Simulations’ and Canon’s colors.  Which is always tinted a bit ironic when the same people brag about shooting raw and editing in Lightroom.  But that’s a different topic.  Or is it…?  Hmmm…

You can’t paint without laying down some primer.  So let’s put down a quick layer of primer on the raw material.  What are raws?

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