Welcome to on.raw.photography — What’s the Vision?“What’s your main vision for the forum?” a long-time ColorPerfect user asked — and added: is this meant for photographers in general, or mainly for ColorPerfect users?
The honest answer: this place is clear in intent and open in outcome. I know what I’m aiming for, and I’m also curious where we take it together.
Freedom over dogma — giving people a real choice
Conventional editing can break color integrity surprisingly fast. If edits stay tiny, the harm may be negligible; once they grow, our perception of light and color often bends in ways we never intended. ColorPerfect provides a framework to sidestep those traps. But this is not about enforcing a single “correct” workflow. There are valid artistic reasons to step outside color integrity — as long as it’s deliberate. What I would like to avoid is people wrecking color by accident because they were never given a real choice. That happens a million times over every day. This forum (like the software) exists to enable that choice: to make the principled path available, intelligible, and easy once learned — while leaving room for intentional departures.
Identity & scope
ColorPerfect lets people turn color negatives into luminous positives with ColorNeg, and with PerfectRAW overcomes limits in camera firmware and standard pipelines. But without a camera, there is no color negative. And without the adjacent topics — gear, scanning, repro rigs, lenses, lighting, darkroom craft — there’s little point in perfecting the digital darkroom alone. Why would you care about color integrity if you didn’t care about photography in the first place?
So yes, this is in some sense a general photography board — but always under the ColorPerfect roof. Everyone who comes here, we expect to share that interest, even if their entry point is different.
The goal is twofold:
- to provide a home for existing ColorPerfect users
- to welcome other photographers who may arrive for wider reasons and then discover what’s possible with ColorNeg, PerfectRAW and Color Integrity in general
This community is meant to be the niche where ColorPerfect belongs. And in this niche, scope stretches naturally: from hacked Canon compacts running CHDK or iPhones shooting DNGs in the “best camera is the one you have with you” spirit, all the way to 4×5, 5×7, 8×10 view cameras with movements, Scheimpflug, and the whole ballet of optics and plane geometry. In digital days in particular, many don’t realize the sensor need not be parallel to the lens plane — and the worlds that open when it isn’t. That breadth is why the forum structure is broad: ColorPerfect is bound up with the whole art, not just a single step in the chain.
The forum structure is a first draft; if I missed something, we’ll grow and adapt together.
Why a forum here (and not on social media)?
Years ago, a ColorPerfect group on Flickr had energy but also noise and confusion. Explaining without turning into the “color police” was hard — and the platform wasn’t ours. We were offered moderation but declined; the user-to-user approach was right at the time. Years later I feel if there’s going to be a modern community, it should be ours: not rented from a parent company, not optimized for outrage or velocity, but a slow, positive, generous place where signal is allowed to be signal. Please read the Forum Rules & Code of Conduct — short, human, and enough to keep focus.
How we’ll find our people (outreach)
- Ship the door: the forum link is inside the macOS MakeTIFF and ColorPerfect 3.x DMG images and Windows ReadMe files so newcomers land here first.
- Point here: we'll link to the forum from ColorPerfect.com.
- Community-forward CP3 release: once things stabilize enough, early access for community members will mean day-one usage creates day-one knowledge.
- Invite one colleague: if you know someone who cares about color integrity, invite them personally.
Empty rooms don’t invite conversation. As we come out of the thickest beta work, the first ColorPerfect 3 release will be community-forward: early access here for users who opt in, so the forum starts with real voices and real knowledge. After twenty years, I don’t know how many of our early users are still active; that uncertainty is a good reason to gather and listen.
Practical platform boundaries
Part of this forum’s role is to surface what matters in practice. A concrete example: Is anyone still scanning on hardware chained to old PowerPC Macs, and would you miss native CP3 builds there? For now the plan is sensible rather than archaeological: modern macOS (including Intel-era systems back to 10.6.8) with Photoshop CS5/CS6; on Windows, the CS line right down to CS2 continues to work well. If truly ancient targets matter to enough of you, we can talk — but nostalgia won’t be our default engineering plan.
What success looks like a year from now
A living archive of principled workflows; a few classic threads you can send any new user to (“start here”); Early Access notes that read like engineering diaries rather than rumor mills; people meeting across film/digital lines to solve practical problems (holder design, illumination, DNG edge cases, downstream color-management traps); and the quiet confidence that appears when users stop breaking color by accident — because they finally have the language and tools to choose otherwise.
— Christoph