I expect many photographers will connect to the following situation. We’re somewhere — maybe even in a car — and suddenly we see that
magical light. There’s no other way to describe it. It’s usually late in the day, and it often comes with a tremendous variance in possible
color balances: deep shades already rich in blue, while at the same time the low sun does that thing only the low sun can do. And we feel compelled to say, pull over — I need to take a picture of that light.
Of course, what we really mean is that we want to take a picture of the landscape
in that light, but what we say is, that light. The camera is ready — fortunately — and we do take the picture, because we’re on some rural back road where stopping is actually possible. A few seconds later the light changes, and it’s gone. But we think: okay, that worked out.
Later, when we open the raw file — at least that used to be the case for me many years ago — the confidence that we captured what we saw starts to fade. What we get to see instead is some murky brown at best. And we conclude that this must simply be one of those things that photography cannot translate — that it’s an experience which does not carry over into the pictorial space.
However, if we are old enough, or if our experience of photography spans both analog and digital, we may recall that it didn’t used to be such a problem. Not with
slide film — especially with moderate filtration, since the slide
is the final image — and not with
color negative film either. But with
digital imaging, this has long been a tremendous difficulty.
And this, really, is one of the key areas where the concept of
Complete Color Integrity shows its benefits — both as an idea and as an implementation. Once we have
color integrity, we suddenly find ourselves with a surprisingly wide range of possible
color balances that still feel natural — and wonderful.
I am saying
color balances very deliberately here, not
white balances or
gray balances. Those latter terms have been misused and misunderstood for decades.
Color balance, of course, corresponds to what is often called white balance elsewhere — but its true purpose is not to make white white. It is to make
neutrals neutral. And in scenes that contain multiple lighting conditions, it lets us choose between them — to make one neutral, or the other, or neither, and yet arrive at a plausible, pleasing, and often surprising overall impression in between the two.
Late sunlight is one of the absolutely magical areas where this becomes evident. With the
ColorPerfect / Complete Color Integrity approach, we truly get a window to the world even under this light.
Years ago, I was reluctant to show examples in this category. When I said that the common raw processors didn’t handle such light convincingly, I always got two responses. The first: you just don’t know how to use them. The second: you want to sell a product, so you made your examples bad on purpose.
The first might even have been true — I
did give up using those tools because they clearly didn’t work. Later, when we began reinventing the process from the ground up, we found out
why they didn’t. And that’s where we are today.
I’m not at the office right now, but I have a beautiful comparison on my phone that I can attach here. It shows the
Great Buddha at Kamakura, Japan — who lost his hall centuries ago to a tsunami but withstood the water and now sits under the open sky. On the right-hand side of the image, the late January sun hits the hillside with its last rays of the day.
This isn’t so much about my processing, which I liked well enough when I finished it years ago — it’s about that
quality of light itself. The naïve
ACR rendition shows that same murky brown again, and no matter what one does, it never becomes anything that even
resembles late sunlight.
ColorPerfect 2 in PerfectRAW:
ACR of the day:
