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The new autocolor
Baldy
Registered Users, Super Moderators Posts: 2,853 moderator
Onethumb rolled out new features this morning and perhaps the most significant is autocolor.
It's caused a six-month brain drain here as we tested, tweaked, & analyzed.
The bottom line is you'll have to be good to out-adjust auto adjust. It is nothing like the lame autoadjust routines you see in Photoshop.
It's based on i2e and the heart of the system is sensing pixels that contain memory colors: skin, sky, or grass/green leaves — the areas we use to judge whether the colors in an image are believable.
There's a terrible dilemma with digital photography: many of us used saturated films like Fuji Velvia for landscapes where we wanted rich colors, but we used other films like Kodak Portra for weddings because we knew oversaturated skin makes people look nuclear.
In digital, it's not so easy to choose a different look for the occassion.
We set i2e a little low on saturation because skin tones are what generate returns, but not as low as Ofoto goes. And i2e lets us retain vibrant non-skin colors.
We've tested it on hundreds of prints over months and I've never seen it wreck a print. I have used it to process 90% of our returns in the last 4 months and no prints have been returned that were processed with it. Some were critical 20x24 prints of brides for the mantle.
Disclaimer: I sometimes tweaked the settings of i2e for those special cases, which you can't do from the shopping cart.
We continually compared our output to a dozen labs and found the one we couldn't beat was Photoworks in Seattle. They're an i2e lab whose VP of Engineering is the former VP of Engineering for Adobe, who oversaw color management for Photoshop. We feel we are their equal, however, depending on the shot.
But all this talk is just smack until we see what it does to our return rate.
For those who want to know more about the technology:
http://www.express-imaging.com/products/i2e.htm
The bottom line is if you have the time and skill to produce excellent adjustments, choose true color. Autocolor will take good prints and make them good, mediocre prints and make them good, bad prints and make them less bad. But it can't make great prints.
It's caused a six-month brain drain here as we tested, tweaked, & analyzed.
The bottom line is you'll have to be good to out-adjust auto adjust. It is nothing like the lame autoadjust routines you see in Photoshop.
It's based on i2e and the heart of the system is sensing pixels that contain memory colors: skin, sky, or grass/green leaves — the areas we use to judge whether the colors in an image are believable.
There's a terrible dilemma with digital photography: many of us used saturated films like Fuji Velvia for landscapes where we wanted rich colors, but we used other films like Kodak Portra for weddings because we knew oversaturated skin makes people look nuclear.
In digital, it's not so easy to choose a different look for the occassion.
We set i2e a little low on saturation because skin tones are what generate returns, but not as low as Ofoto goes. And i2e lets us retain vibrant non-skin colors.
We've tested it on hundreds of prints over months and I've never seen it wreck a print. I have used it to process 90% of our returns in the last 4 months and no prints have been returned that were processed with it. Some were critical 20x24 prints of brides for the mantle.
Disclaimer: I sometimes tweaked the settings of i2e for those special cases, which you can't do from the shopping cart.
We continually compared our output to a dozen labs and found the one we couldn't beat was Photoworks in Seattle. They're an i2e lab whose VP of Engineering is the former VP of Engineering for Adobe, who oversaw color management for Photoshop. We feel we are their equal, however, depending on the shot.
But all this talk is just smack until we see what it does to our return rate.
For those who want to know more about the technology:
http://www.express-imaging.com/products/i2e.htm
The bottom line is if you have the time and skill to produce excellent adjustments, choose true color. Autocolor will take good prints and make them good, mediocre prints and make them good, bad prints and make them less bad. But it can't make great prints.
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Happy shooting.
-don
-don
Thank you for all the work - and for detailed info!
I'm looking forward to make a good use if this system!
Cheers!
moderator of: The Flea Market [ guidelines ]
No way to see what it would do? :cry I was naively thinking Auto Color Correction in photo tools is the new guy.. I guess, I was wrong..
The issue is we use Linux servers and so far their libraries have only been used in a Windows environment. We'd have to do recompiling, testing, debugging, etc. And then there's the issue of licensing costs, which EZ Prints had to pay the way we do it now.
I understand... Baby steps is "da approach" if you deal with hundreds of thousands of live customers:-)
Love the new stuff, thanks again!
If we used the i2e plugin in Photoshop to output a corrected file, would we then set our smugmug galleries to True Color?
Might as well ask this too... should we bother trying to make any corrections in Photoshop at all anymore, especially if we're confused about the process anyway, and/or we know our monitors are not properly calibrated?
-don
I'd be happy to purchase a Photoshop plugin for you to try. And yes, you'd use the true color option after.
I did one experiment with a high-volume pro two months ago, where she bought the image editor and I talked her through the settings. She's been pretty hooked since and I haven't seen any returns from her.
Thanks,
Baldy