So, has anyone else watched Steve Yedlin’s Display Prep Demo and the follow up video? I think he’s 100% on point and that it’s far past time for still photographers, camera manufacturers, and software engineers to start thinking through these same things. I thought this would be a good forum for a discussion about how his theses translate to still photography and, most importantly, what tools still photographers can use to author a similarly rigorous reference rendering for our own raw files.
I really appreciate this concluding passage from the “On Color Science” document. This is my goal and what I’m hoping we can work towards together:
This document isn’t a call to filmmakers to do lots of (or any!) color science tinkering while making a movie – not on set and not in post, but to avoid doing so merely by getting some ducks in a row before shooting. I personally use these techniques just to have everything set up the way I like it in advance, so that by the time I’m shooting I just use a light meter and traditional film lighting ratios – I don’t even use a calibrated monitor, let alone a cumbersome tent full of rack-mounted engineering equipment tethered to the camera. And then in post, color grading is focused and doesn’t spiral because much of the intent is already there in the starting point – in the core transformation – so it doesn’t have to be built from scratch shot by shot. In both production and post, I can be nimble and concentrate on the creative aspects of making a movie rather than on engineering.
I hope this text along with the Demo can be an inspiration to filmmakers: a reminder that we can be authors instead of shoppers. That we can be masters and not slaves of the tools we use. And that it is not beyond our grasp to understand the component attributes that go into the processes rather than letting vendors hand us turn-key systems that we don’t understand. Although it does take a little bit of education and shedding of preconceptions, it can be incredibly freeing without being daunting.