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Calibration, JPEG v. RAW

Lesson 7 from: Efficient Lighting & Post-Production

Jared Platt

Calibration, JPEG v. RAW

Lesson 7 from: Efficient Lighting & Post-Production

Jared Platt

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Lesson Info

7. Calibration, JPEG v. RAW

Lesson Info

Calibration, JPEG v. RAW

obviously we wanna have a calibrated monitor so I'm gonna I'm gonna quickly show you the process of calibrating a monitor um the first thing that you need is the actual calibration equipment but you also will install the software and I'm not actually going to finish the calibration here because I don't know exactly what it would do to people out in tv land like you know we don't want to like mess up the tv land situation there so we're going toe were going to show you what it's like to calibrate and it's so simple it's just choose to display you choose the display that you want to calibrate I will take this little unit here and uh I'm going to hang it so I you can see that it's saying start the measurements so this is what color currently looks like on this monitor and there's a little start button and I simply click the start measurement and it tells me hang it in this place on the monitor so I goto I'm going to use this monitor here and I hang this so that it fits right on the monito...

r has got a little wait back here and I just hang it right in the middle of the monitor and then I hit okay and hit next and now it's it's just cycling through all these different colors and and brightness is and it's just seeing what this monitor here not this one but this one is doing and then it's going to adjust things until and here you can see that it's asking me so some monitors it can control the monitor itself some monitors it can't so it just depends on what kind of monitor you have if I were doing this all the way through I would then adjust this and you can see that saying this is what the brightness currently is and it wants you to bring it down into the middle so you would just push the brighton his knob on yours until it hit the middle because it's measuring it currently and then as soon as you're done hit next and it would cycle through some more and then as soon as it's done it creates a profile you say that and that's it so it's very simple it takes about two minutes I don't want to go any further in this because I would mess up our color calibration system that we have for online and and all that but once you're done um with it it would just create a profile that profile gets saved in your system preferences and then you use that profile um for all of your monitor for the next you know weak or two and then you put it on again and just keep calibrating it and that's a z z it is to calibrate now this one the eye the eye one display also can calibrate projection screens so if you have a situation where you if you do projections in your office you know to show you to your client you can calibrate that projection as well you just aim it at the projector screen and it reads the reflection and it'll calibrate the projector so that you're getting true color there too because most projectors look awful have you noticed that like you put put your images on a projector and it's like too contrast and blown out and it looks weird bluish and it's just horrible so calibrate a and it'll look just like your monitor yeah um I think the color monkey is like one forty nine and then the iowan display is like a little over to something like that they're they're they're worth the money because then you know what you're looking at if you have a mac does there do you guys have max okay you have a mac you khun you could do a pretty good job calibrating it with the if you if you go to the display and we'll pretend we're going to do it here if you go to the system preferences and go into the display settings us and you go to color and you calibrate a and you do the expert mode and ask youto you look at an apple and you just adjust up and down until the apple disappears and you just keep doing that over and over and over and after a while you go cross eyed so I remember one time I was teaching college and I had about I had a room of about ten max and I didn't have one of these display these island displays and and I and I went in and I was goingto calibrate all of them and I started on one and then I did the next one and by the third one I was dizzy it was just like uh I can't so I had to calibrate him like one or two a day because it was just it I'd go cross eyed over it and I'd get all dizzy and stuff so I suggest this is a much easier way to do it so just get a calibrate er the display the monkey that color monkeys great this one's great but calibration is critical so once you have a calibrated screen nothing is worthwhile until you have a calibrated screen okay so it it doesn't make any sense to try and calibrate other things until your screen is calibrated once you know that your monitors calibrated then it's time to start trying to calibrate the exchange between your camera and the computer so that's what we're going to talk about now so the first thing that I want to look at is the difference between a raw and a j peg so I'm going to sort this by file name and you'll see that I here have to have a j peg and a raw can anyone guess which one the j peg is and which one the rise the right one is the j peg the left one is the raw the right one's all crisp and contrast e and a little bit brighter and all that kind of stuff and the left one is kind of drab and dull and softer and most people would look at that and say well I like the j peg better well of course you liked the j peg better because it's crisp in its sharpen it's brighter and its contrast ing but the file itself has no latitude and so remember you're going tohave things blowing out so if we go in the developed module and we look at the raw image so we're just gonna look at the raw image and I'm going to turn on the highlight and shadow warnings so nothing's blowing out there's only a little hint right here in the bottom corner of of shadows getting too dark and if I go to the j peg the whole windows blown out so watch that the really interesting thing is the history and watch the history graham you said watch the very right hand corner of the history ram so this is raw jape eh do you sell out the whole mound of information just dropped off the screen and quite frankly that was a lot of information my camera made critical decisions inside the camera to make the j peg and did a bad job at it because it threw away some pretty detailed information that's a lot of pixels thrown away okay and you'll also notice now now watch the left hand side okay watch the black goes further to the black see that so it actually darkened the blacks as well and that's why it has no latitude because it's to contrast uh the important thing to remember is that a j pegs only eight bits and eight bits means you only have about two and you have two hundred fifty six colors right well if you shoot raw you have sixteen bets and I don't know the exact number but it's like forty or sixty thousand cult there's there's a big difference between the two two hundred fifty six verses thousands upon thousands big deal and so you're always going to get better quality out of this the question is how do you get this toe look like the j peg so what I do then let's bring a camera around here because I take my camera and I import all of the photos into here so I've got the raw on the j peg side by side and I'm going to take my camera and I'm going to go to turn it on and I'm going to go to the image that I'm interested in so let me find that one so this is image number let's get the info on it oh make sure I got to make sure I'm on the right image here yes ok so I'm looking at the image here on my camera and I'm looking at the history ram and I can see that it's blowing out exactly where it's blowing out here but it looks it looks similar on the j peg and here because I'm looking at the j pegs and so light rooms not doing anything to the j peg it's just showing it as it was created so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go to the raw and I can see that the raw is completely different than what I see here on the camera so what I'm going to do then as I'm going to try and mimic inside of light room what I see on my screen okay now the first thing I want to do is I want to make sure that this camera looks like the j peg that I'm seeing on my screen so there's a couple settings that I can do here to match it's the j peg this camera is actually showing me things brighter than they are this is a calibrated monitor so I'm looking at this and I'm seeing here that this is brighter so I'm going to go into the menu and I'm going to go look at the the uh playback settings and I'm gonna look for the the brightness of the playback hold on let me find it where is that wait for it you shouldn't have to do this more than once so question is where did they hide that brightness think they're okay so it's in the it's in the second in my cameras in the second menu of the tools and I go to the brightness and I'm gonna click on it and it shows me the image I'm looking at and a little brightness bar and aiken turn it aiken go into manual hoops and going to manual and aiken brighten it or darken it up so that I'm looking at my camera and I'm looking at my monitor and I'm going to get the appropriate amount of brightness so that they match so there that's better now I can actually trust what I'm seeing on my screen to match the brightness on this screen that way when I'm out in the field this the brightness of this screen is more in tune with the brightness of this screen and what the image will look like the other thing that changes the way you're j peg is gonna look is whether or not you have contrast settings on it things like that so the again you go back into your camera and you're going to look for the j peg settings so those probably in the shooting area c picture style so if I go to picture style in cannon I'm not sure what's called a nikon and I click on it there's a bunch of of settings that I can choose and so I can choose teo like portrait landscape standard auto they have these kind of basic ones and then you can change those and basically what you have is you have the ability to change the contrast the brightness the the the sharpness of the mnc can sharpen an image and you can change the the color on the image a little bit and so what I choose is I choose tohave it neutral which means zero zero zero zero no change whatsoever because I want the camera to do as little as possible to the image the more the camera does to the image the more it's going to look better as a j peg and it's not going to be accurate to what that rhyme and just going to look like however if you're the types like I always want my image to be have a little bit more contrast a little bit mohr saturation I want it sharper all that kind of stuff go for it whatever settings you put in here in the camera are on ly going to affect the j peg the rhyme it doesn't get affected at all the rhyme it is just pure data so that even if you're not shooting j pegs even if you're shooting purely raw what happens is the rockets recorded and then a j peg get spun off to be shown at the back of the screen and whatever settings you have in your picture styles is what the camera does to the j peg and then that j peg gets stored in the raw as the preview and shows it to you here on the back of the screen that's what happens soon as you fire records a raw than it reads the raw makes the adjustments and then puts it back inside the raw as a j peg preview all of that happens right when you take the picture okay so once that's occurred then what you have to do is you have to make if you've chosen to do certain styles to your picture in here you've got gotta then come into your light room and tell it what you've done to it okay so in my case I'm going to do neutral I'm gonna keep him the same ok so I keep mine in zero zero zero zero neutral so that nothing's happening to my j peg other than just recording a j peg and throwing away a bunch of doubt that's all the cameras doing to my j peg now that I have that I can go and look at my j peg and I know that they're similar here now I've made sure that this camera looks similar to that so now I just compare the jpeg that's here to the raw that's here and I've got to make this j peg look like this raw so the first thing I'm gonna do I know that my j paige is getting a little more contrast ng so I'll come to the raw and I'll add some contrast that's the first thing I'll do I just know that's happening the next thing I know that's happening I know that it's getting brighter right so I'll come in and add just a little bit of exposure to my j peg are to my raw so now I'm looking at the j peg on the rock do you see how they're getting closer together now what I don't want to do is screw around with temperature and tent and things like that I want I want if every single time I bring in a j peg it always gets a little darker and always gets a little drab er and a little less sharp those are the things I want to correct so I'm gonna come in and I'm going teo I can either add a little clarity in order to get it sharper see how this is sharper than this is so if I want let's zoom in okay there's there's him and then they're so we can see the difference between the j peg and the raw now notice that the raw image actually has better information than the jaypee these are the same image it's not like I was shaking on the second image but you notice that his eyes not a sharp because it's a j peg folks right I mean that's it it's j pegs are inferior filed types all file types were not created equal j pegs are horrible so it's a little softer here and so what we're going to dio is we're going to create a little contrast on a little bit of extra I don't want to use clarity because I don't necessarily want to use clarity the same on all images so what I'll do is I'll go into the details and I'll just add a little bit of sharpening now in sharpening and we'll talk by the way we talk a lot about light room this kind of stuff on saturday we're gonna go all over every slider you can possibly imagine so be tuned the stay tuned for that but I don't want to increase the amount of sharpening because amount here I'll show you what it does let's go find something smooth watch what happens when you increase the amount see how it creates a like a a pattern it's because it's sharpening the individual pixels don't want to do that so what we're gonna do is we're going to actually come in here and we're gonna focus our we're going to sharpened by taking the detail up ok so we take the detail up and that will give us a nice amount of sharpness on bigger things but not necessarily on the little into see how this hasn't gotten worse so it just kind of increases the sharpness of big items and then we can take the radius and increase that a little bit too and that helps toe to sharpen ups and now we've got a much crisper image than we had before and I can show you the door prince between hears see the difference okay this is before no sharpening sharpening say that you'd especially see it in his eyes like in the lower reflections kind self now we got to go back to so we've got our sharpening done and then I'm thinking that if we go to the tone curve because what's happening see how his skin is getting a little bit brighter there and then it kind of darkens up a little bit so I'm thinking that will take them darks up just a bit and we'll take the blacks down just a bit okay that's good and now the only thing that I'm seeing shifting here besides the fact that in the j peg everything's blown out and in the raw there's only a little bit of blown out detail in the top there um the the other thing I'm seeing is a shift in color just a little bit see how this one's got a little bit more magenta in it and this one's got a little bit more yellow in it okay so at that point you khun decide do I like that extra yellow or do I like the magenta if I like this I think that's more true to skin tone than that one is I think this one's a little pasty looking so I would tend to keep it but if you wanted to shift it then you could come too do you could do two things you can either go to the hs cell that's hugh saturation luminous and you could adjust those so you could take the hue and say well I want all every image that comes in is always a little too magenta so you could take the reds and move them mohr towards the orange and that would fix that so here I'll do before after let me get in there okay so you see that skin tone now watch what before and after is that uh here let me I have to do it more intense so let's just go like this okay watch this is before after you see that difference so we've removed we've taken the reds and magenta tze and shifted them mohr towards the orange and that will take that it's going to be a global thing throughout all your images it's going to just kind of shift those colors that way and that will that will take care of that that j pay too raw shift okay now I don't necessarily think we need to do all that much so I'm going to back it out maybe we'll just do a little bit okay so now that we've done that we have got a very good that they looked pretty good like see the difference so this is j peg raw j peg raw the only difference is now before it went way darker and it changed colors and it wasn't a sharp and all that kind of stuff well now it just goes from being not as good a file toe better file right so j peg bad file good file raw right so now what we do is we come up to our develop menu and we set the default settings and when we do that we're going to say update current settings and now every image that comes in from this camera the raw image will be shifted and adjusted the way we adjusted it now so the exposure will go up a little bit the contrast will go up a little bit the sharpness will be changed and the tone curve will change a little bit and the hs l will be adjusted by plus a on the red in the hue every time so we'll always adjust it that way so that now you'll shoot and no matter what you do it's going to adjust it that way so now as long as you're j peg looks good here you're robb will look the same don't make sense any questions other questions out there why of course there are so a lot of people are talking about um mr graham's still and I ah anna stays had asked when the photos taken which history ma'am do you see in the camera the raw his scram r j peg the j peg it's it's it's it's looking at the j peg and it's giving you information based on that j peg because remember the camera camera actually doesn't ever see the raw it sees the j peg and that's why when we looked at that photo that when we first shot we shot an image and it looked like it was totally blowing out but then when we looked at the actual raw file in the computer it wasn't and the actual amount of blowing out wasn't his bad because it's it's it's it's reading what's gonna happen based on the camera has to read the raw file on then interpret the raw file and the camera always interprets the raw file in a j peg kind of format and so you get a little bit of a warning and that's why you get more uh you get that warning on the front end so you know because the j peg obviously a worse file type and that's what it's viewing now it may be that the cameron knows oh the j pegs not is good so it made it may do I don't make the camera and so I don't know exactly how they how they look at the history graham and what the you know proprietary information on any cameras but in my history are in my experience every time I've looked at a hist a gram I'm seeing it blown out based on the j peg sam cox from loveland colorado's wondering are these default light room settings camera dependent ken light room applied different defaults to images taken on different cameras okay they're good question so if I go to the light room preferences inside the preferences in the preset area there's two options that are available when it comes to the default the first option is do I make it a universal toe all mark three cameras or do I make it on ly to that one serial number if I check the serial number than each mark three that I have can be independent and I would have to calibrate each one so but but and that's helpful if you have a second shooter that also uses the mark three and so your images are a little different than his cause he shoots different or whatever or maybe he used the sharper lenses or use sharp lenses or whatever so you can calibrate to similar models differently based on their serial number or if you want to trust that all mark three's air going to be the same you can just have the default thatyou make completely cross all of the across all of your mark three cameras but if you have a five d or say I a nikon than it it will read that as a completely different camera and you would have to create a new uh uh default preset for that camera so it on ly reads model numbers and then you can you can further hone it down to just the serial numbers but it won't be the dividing line is the model of the camera the other thing that you can do is make the default specific eso settings and that's where it gets real funky so if you want to do default specific to the I s o setting what you would do is set your camera up and shoot one picture just shoot the similar picture same thing like it get a model or a kid or someone to sit in front and take it a picture at every single eso setting and I'm talking fifty one hundred won twenty are one one one one would that be one twenty five one sixty two hundred you know all of them every single one that your camera offers you have to take it at every single one and then you bring all of the men and you adjust them all according to their so that all of them you'll adjust based on just normal stuff but then that they'll all be the same adjustment because they're all going to be the same exposure so you adjust the shutter speed and aperture to match the exposure but then once you've got them all adjusted normally then you go in and decide how much noise reduction do I need it sixteen hundred how much do I need eight hundred how much do I need it for hundred and you adjust them all based on what your preferences and once they get to like sixty four hundred u turn him to black and white and literally if you turn it to black and white once it hits sixty four hundred it will never show it to you in color and I'll just bring it in and black and white you can always go back to color if you want but it'll bring it in and automatically adjust it the way you like and you'll never have to adjust the noise reduction issue because it will already be none on its way in that makes sense so that the idea is that you want light room working for you on the way in as it's importing stuff because if you computers doing it for you that means you're saving time now you don't have to just sliders for every image that's over you know sixty four hundred or whatever so those are two very important specific settings to know about but it is camera model camera model you can't cross those if you want to cross those then what you would do is you would instead of having a default that automatically applies you would just create a preset over here and click it highlight a bunch images click it or when you're importing something if I if I go to import some images in the important dialog box I could do a set of global setting so I can say ok I want all of these to be you know magenta faced tone dampened and that's a preset I have because I know I have a camera that has a little too much magenta and sin tones so I can import everything from that camera with that magenta dampening on the skin tone on the way in and then I don't have to do it but then that would that would go across all cameras being imported and there's probably long answer toa but questions so so which of the options aid do you use do you set them for every single image and you only do this one time you don't have to do it for separate shoots me wouldn't it change it doesn't really change all that much you might find that over time it shifts and changes based on the way shoot in your style and stuff but once you set a typical setting and in the thing is is you make your camera calibration based on typical photos so things that you always shoot so if you always shoot seniors outside then go outside and shoot a senior the same way you shoot it and make sure you get a perfectly normal exposure not an overexposure not an under exposure because in this case we're not trying to to compensate for the issue of um of under exposure we weren't doing that because remember we had um we had the exposure here in the j peg that that's the right exposure and that's the right so we're just matching the exposure of the j peg we're not trying to fix the picture don't try and fix the picture with the camera default you're just trying to match the j peg because the j peg ish what you were shown here so you want to see that same thing when it comes in raw and that means that as long as you get the j peg correct here when you're shooting and you see it right it'll it'll look like you saw so if you shoot things that are quite varied from so you said go out and shoot a senior like you normally do but if you sometimes shoot indoors like I so know shoot food sometimes I shoot huge landscapes outdoors usually a landscapes outdoors so would in that case would it be better to just use a setting like you're talking about rather than across the board tried across the board and I think you'll find that you really don't have to do much sweet and then if you find that all of your landscapes because you like to heighten the blues and whatever like you treat landscape differently then you could just highlight all the landscapes and hit a preset that takes them all to a different level like if you if you like contrast in your landscape but no contrast in your portrait and you doom or portrait's set the default for portrait and then when the landscapes come in just you can you can create a pre set on the way in that says these air landscapes and choose landscape and it will then well it will take your default and then it will add the preset too sweet so the default is the underlying image coming in so that when you make a default light room whatever's coming in that gets applied first whatever's in the default and that matches it to the j peg and then it adds presets on top of that and and adjust um and if there's a preset that goes in and changes and tweaks one of the things that was in your default it'll overwrite the default okay so so most of the time I'm shooting people so I'm gonna do my default for people and yes when I do landscapes I am going to change the clarity I am going to do stuff like that but I can simply highlight a group of them say all of these should be more contrast all these should have blue skies so well you know dark in the blues or something like that thank you yeah but trust me do the camera default calibration here between iran and j peg and you will it will knock your socks off how how much you're saving how much time you're saving by not having to adjust the stuff that you always have to adjust so that's rule number one don't ever do anything that a computer could do for you all right all right so we have now calibrated the camera are the raw image so that the raw looks like the j peg now what happens if you find that your camera is always a little bit it's got a weird color cast to it or it just doesn't seem right and if you go into the develop module and you go to a raw image at the very bottom of the of the the right hand panel there's something called camera calibration camera calibration is an interesting and very strange and elusive and almost scientific place to be it's it's like confusing as it khun b but it's really quite simple your camera has red green and blue sensors in the chip and they record red green and blue light when you come into the camera calibration you get to adjust each one of those settings so that when an image comes in from camera cal from a camera you can then adjust how at what hugh read really is or what hugh greene really is so does the blue shift more green or does it shift more blue so a lot most of the time it's in the it's in the red there's too much magenta or something like that so if you always have to much magenta then you need to take your red and bring the hue up to the right which would make it more yellow see how it now he looks like he's got some john this or whatever but see it's taken the red and it shifted it you can also take the saturation of that red chip and bring it down so you have control over the saturation and the hue of each one of those sensors red blue or green you also have the ability to adjust the shadows differently from the rest of the photo because a lot of times the biggest issue is in the shadows they get a little too magenta or they get a little too green so in the shadows you can then combat that and say okay well I want the shadows to be more green or I want them to be more agenda see that watch his shirt so there's obviously too much magenta there but now oh now there's too much green you can see the green occurring in his hair now see that but by shifting it more towards the green his face looks a little bit better it's not quite as magenta so we have to find that balance and figure out in a typical hk image where is the correct amount of shadow tent because it's in the shadow that the tent becomes really annoying and so you can you can shift back and forth on that so this is what we would call manual calibrating yeah that you're good point well way should use finger cut of that instead of using does use a colored people wear moving that way you were one step ahead so yes so the question is does it make sense to do a manual calibration or should use a color picker right and and so what a dobie has done has given you some kind of standard calibrations and those air up here and those can't these these are supposed to mimic your camera settings so you notice that they say camera faithful landscape neutral portrait standard that's because they're trying to mimic the same things that air in your camera that say that you know the color styles they say the same things in there so they're trying to kind of mini that and adobe standard is a decent one my favorite is cameron neutral I think cameron neutral does a better job at displaying what I'm getting here and so I prefer camera neutral so I'm going to remember we've already set a default for this camera but we can weaken further home the default and I I would always go down here into the camera calibrations and choose what your favorite profile is now in this instance it would behoove you to have a pre set toe add to this if you do a lot of landscape because you're probably going to want to use a different standard calibration for your for your landscapes but you can make that into a pre set so that if you're out in the in the mountains taking landscapes and you come home and there's no people in it and it's just landscapes and raccoons and whatever then you take all those images and on import you just say these air landscape so if the image will come in the default will be applied and then the preset will be applied and the preset will go in and change the calibration from camera neutral to landscape so still you didn't have to do anything because you're you're you're default profile for the camera took care of the bulk of the work matched it to what you would see on the back of the camera and then your preset came in and added whatever tricky stuff you want to do to landscape worked in enhance the blues and the greens and toe add contrast and that kind of thing that makes sense so use these profiles as well however there's one more thing that we can do so you can do it manually or you can choose one of these basic settings that adobe has provided you based on your camera or we recorded that yes so we have this little colored checker and we have to do a couple things to this in order for this to work the first thing that we need is a d n g so we're gonna go back to the grid and we're goingto change this to a d e n g it needs to have a d n g to make this process work so we're going to go up to the library menu and we're going to convert the photo to a d e n g a d n g is still raw so it's all the raw data but we're just going to convert this thing to a d e n g we can delete the original after successful conversion because we don't rest really need the other one on dh we're going to hit okay and it's converting it and it'll change there it is it's a d n g now so now we have this d n g it's all set to go and what we need to do now is to create a camera calibration what's gonna happen is ex writes little plug in is going to go in and read these and find all of the information it knows what this thing looks like it'll read it and then it will create a custom profile based on the light that we had in this situation and so what we'll do is we'll highlight this image and we will right click it will go to export it but instead of exporting we're going to export it using the x right color check her passport so when you installed color check her passport when you buy one of these it comes with a disc you install it and installs this plug in into the export options of light room you turn it to a d n g and then you go to export it and it's turning it's doing its thing waiting waiting it's probably trying to find the checker right now like it's looking for her I don't know what it's doing right now but and that's what it's doing is it's it's comparing what it knows about that that little color checker and it's finding the reds and the blues and the greens and the whites and the greys and it's finding it and they say they're so says the profile has been generated successfully light room must be restarted toe activate the profile so we're just going to quit light room and then we're going to start light room back up now it's gonna name it whatever the photo name wass so it's going to be like image zero one one one so if you want it to be a specific name you just rename your d n g to be like outdoor like if you wanted to do a specific profile for landscape go outdoors on a typical day you know you know the sweet our sweet light our and take the photo take a photo of the passport there named the dmg landscape you know uh lands your landscape or something and then what happens is when you go into the develop module and come down to the camera calibration you have a new option here that's a regular profile whatever that is and when I click on it it changed you see how those shifted hold on let me zoom in on some of these so see the sea the colors watch what happens to him when I when they shift you see how they shifted and now that that's really blue before watch its that's really blue that's not real blue see how it's really muted blue so it knows how to adjust the photo to make all colors exactly what they should be and so now if I if I zoom back out of this guy and I go back to this portrait and I go from camera neutral to the profile see how much better that looks so I go back so there is the original and just by changing the profile see that it's it's it's it's his skin looks great especially if you look ride on a calibrated monitor and I think this the monitor I'm looking at is a little more accurate than a than a big you know tv screen but it's so those people on out tv land should be able to see this really nicely um and you guys can come take a look at this afterwards the difference between the neutral and the profile is intensely better and so if you have to if I could if I could tell you one thing to buy that would make your life easier on post production it would be a passport it would be one of these and it doesn't cost much at all and it once you profile these things e whether you do it on a case by case basis whether you profile it just in general that the amount of work you have to do to combat the weirdness of each and every camera is just insane and so I love being able to just come in and my colors right and all I have to do is adjust contrast and brightness and stuff like that and trick it out with some cool presets that's the best way to work on a photo to having to like go up into the hs cells and and try and deal with this to try and fix some agenda issue with your camera is just so annoying and that's how easy was that so make a lot of these profiles get a color tracker pro I mean passport and then and then make a bunch of profiles make profiles for portrait sessions make profiles for landscape make profiles for our whatever you can do and the thing you can actually dio tu as well it'll allow you to shoot eh like say you want to do outdoor but you want to beam or you don't want to just have photos in shade you khun do take a picture of the passport in shade and then out in sun and you can actually do the two together and it will make a a uh a calibration for between the two of them that's generally works for both so then basically you could have an outdoor and an indoor and you could have a studio and uh you'd have like a hot light studio version and you could have a flash studio version or something like that yeah wait every student allies is going to be different though wise creating a calibration good as their reshoot this guy's different okay that's a great question why why would you calibrate something if every situation is going to be different and I totally get that question but the thing that's most important to understand about photography and about your camera is that your camera is the great equalizer one something comes into your camera your camera is neutralizing it so if you choose uh tungsten light white balancing on your camera your camera has just neutralized that the difference and so what you're doing with a color passport is you're actually helping the camera know what blue is and what green is and so yes it'll be a little bit different between like an outdoor landscape type of suns and shade that will be different than indoor tungsten and uh uh cfl's those are very different light sources and so you do two calibrations one for indoor and one for outdoor but once you kind of once you once you you've calibrated for the general overall situations those situations don't change all that much color of light doesn't change all that much because it literally is kelvin's between this kelvin and that calvin like most lights air between twenty three at most most edison bulbs or between about twenty two and twenty four hundred calvin's and most sunlight is between fifty eight and sixty two hundred kelvin's you know I like in those ranges and so you don't get a lot of variation and light it just it really doesn't vary all that much and so if you can calibrate your system and tell your system in this general lighting condition red looks like this blue looks like that then then your camera gives you a file that is corrected for the because each chip has a little bit of a sk you one way or the other it's a little too magenta is a little too green it's a little too it's like apple or it's like bananas really you know I mean like the banana is perfect at one point but it's two brown the next day and it's too green the day before right it's it bananas are hard to time and so I actually go into the grocery store and I rip all the bananas apart and I choose to that air really green and two that are kind of green and to their perfect and you know so so that they all ripen at the right times I'm sure the grocery store hates it but that's the way I buy bananas so each chip is kind of like a banana you don't know where it is it's some are green summer magenta summer and so what what the the color checker is doing is it's it's neutralizing the color shift in the camera not necessarily in the lighting conditions and so so most lining condition is close enough the same thing that a simple overarching color checker profile will do the trick now if you're going into a situation like today where we had the same lie all the time and I wanted it to be dead on accurate it's easy enough to just shoot one make the profile for the day and and run it and then I've got perfectly perfect for my one situation and it will be dead on accurate but this same profile will also work when I go home in phoenix and put these lights in my house and take a picture of my kids for christmas or something it'll work and it'll be just almost as accurate as it was here you'll still save me the time and that's really what I'm interested in saving the time I'm not I'm I I like quality I love quality I'm a big quality buff but in the end I'm more interested in efficiency than I am in quality so if I can get my quality up to above what my client khun see because there's a point in which the client doesn't even know the difference so I can get above what my client khun sian quality at a lower price in time and effort and money I'm going to choose that even if it's not perfect for every shoot so I don't have to color check every shoot I just have to do it well enough to save me the time and effort of doing a bunch of stuff every single time I'm working on images so usually these work I've got like three profiles that I use at home and they pretty much work in all circumstances occasionally there's one that I'm like but you can always shoot one of these just in case that's the thing it takes ten seconds to shoot this and if your if your color is working fine you don't have to use it just take the picture keep it off to the side don't do anything with it but if you get into the shoot and you're like something's wrong with the color here so sometime something's going wrong just go back to the shot that you took of this and calibrate it so it can be done after the fact as like a oh something's wrong here I'll deal with it all you gotta do is remember to take one picture of this in the life

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Jared Platt Notes and Resources - Dec 2012.pdf
ShuttlePro2Set.zip
WacomIntuos5set.zip

bonus material with enrollment

MaterialsRelease_JaredPlatt.pdf
Jared Platt Free Resources.pdf

Ratings and Reviews

Deise De Oliveira
 

Jared is a great teacher! This course is much better than I imagined because it is not only about fotography, but also about passion. I loved it!

a Creativelive Student
 

Don't you just love it when Photographers, especially successful ones as Jared Platt, throw explanations out w/o any scientific backing to justify them? Jared's explanation of golden Setting Sun is dust and smog in the sky, when the real reason is scattering, the refraction of light by the molecules and objects in the atmosphere, not the smog and stuff much lower. He also defines latitude as a given amount, when it is actually the breadth of light individual camera sensors can record, normally about 5 or 6 stops. Made the rest of what he taught suspect at best. Glad I caught this for $25 rather than the huge first release price.

Anjani Millet
 

I was in the studio for this workshop and it was so, so much more than just about efficiency. Jared is a fantastic photographer and teacher, and makes everything so accesible. He covered Lightroom, presets, lighting equipment,software, music, artisic development, even, dare I say it, the soul of a photographer. I recommend this to anyone needing to spend a lot less time doing things you don't need to personally do, and/or anyone who needs to improve their artistry or technical skills. Do more. Waste less time. Share your work. Oh... and buy this course. :-)

Student Work

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