Welcome to an actual workshop, where you will work, and improve, on real images. Each week we work on a photo from a professional, and compare our results via an 1080HD video.
Each week you can download an unedited RAW photo from a professional. Investigating it, correct it, and improve it.
Correction
You will have a week to place your version in a Dropbox folder shared with me. You can use any software, any tools.
Confrontation
The following week I will produce and publish a private 1080HD video that will confront all versions, yours included.
In Few Words
This Workshop is built around three key aspects. The images, the Panel, and the Confrontation. I spent a great amount of time gathering effective images from real professionals. You’ll join a Panel of colorists, that will be a huge boost to your education, providing a great amount of guidance and inspiration. Finally you will see your corrections confronted, weekly, with others’ this will engage you in doing the best you can and experiment more.
Join The “Panel”
All Workshop’s members will join a Panel of colorists, that will, week in week out, advances our culture and speeds our improvements. Panel’s ideas and techniques can be discussed in a private chat, where you will be very welcomed to politely, but firmly, disagree with me. My role will be to evaluate all versions, trying to find the best one, while explaining my motivations. It is also possible to ask questions about an image, or a tool. Here are some numbers.
7928 Corrections sent
590 Assignment
4850 Days of activity
236:56:56 Hours of videos
Challenge The Bests
Premium and Professional members will have an incredible tool to challenge from day one all of our past winners. I developed a page where you can choose an original, and download it, and locally (it means it stays on your computer) upload your version. Now it will be compared with the best that I collected in years of work.
You can do this with hundreds of images, when you want, how you want. How many times you like! And if you think you overcome the winner do not forget to share your version with me, I will be update the archive, and you will be the new winner to challenge.
Why It Works
The Original
Real images from real professionals, colorist or photographers. We have six different levels of difficulty.
Analysis
We learn to “read” an unedited image, what to correct, and what to improve. And Why.
Correction
We can use whatever tool we like, and ask any kind of question. I will answer in a video.
Versions
We will extend our skills and sense of aesthetics, by comparing our results with other colorists’ ones.
Confrontation
The confrontation will be on several key aspects, plus we will also take a look at the average version.
Video
Each version will be evaluated in the video by me, after it will be possibile to comment in our chat.
How To Join
Yearly subscriptions (two months for free), VAT exemptions, and Gifts are available if you want to know more write me!
Classic
1 weekly original to correct
1080p HD video
1 monthly Milestone
Color Questions
3 extra videos
Panel’s Chat
29$ / month
Premium
Everything in the “Classic” profile, and:
Duels!
Vaults access:
all videos since 2013
all originals since 2013
Codex’s Beta access
50$ / month
Professional
Everything in the “Premium” profile, and:
Conference call:
1 hour of videocall
custom and private
theory or practice?
We’ll choose toghether
100$ / month
Frequently Asked Questions
If you want to ask more, please feel free to contact me.
How much time I will invest?
I work continuously to refine the experience, to make it as efficient as possible. If you are short on time, and want the bare minimum you will be fine with one hour per week, even less. Videos are usually between 15 and 30 minutes. If you want to invest more time, there are many more things you can do, chat, questions, extras. Professional & Premium members also have Duels and the Vaults, this can extend your experience as mush as you wish.
Are there pre-requisites?
This is a learning experience, colorist come here to learn. Of corse starting from scratch can be a mouthful, due to the complexity of Photoshop. But if you already opened Photoshop and Lightroom, you will be fine, especially if you don’t like your results. If you know about RGB, LAB and CMYK, and know about luminosity, saturation and contrast, the videos will be easy to follow. But videos are there especially if you never heard of these. There are several system to support colorist while they’re studying, and you can reach for me anytime.
Is the payment method safe?
There are few cases where you can answer with a loud, satisfying, yes! Color Duels uses Stripe, a strong, modern platform used by massive enterprises. I do not collect any info about your credit card, these details will be handled by Stripe. All prices includes italian IVA (a mandatory VAT, 22%). If you are a business that qualifies it will be removed during checkout. If you want to know more about how I deal with security I published an extra page.
What are the differences between profiles?
I chose to differentiate the profiles on a learning needs base. If you’re looking for a casual experience the Classic profile is for you. If you want to speed things up, the Premium is extremely cost-effective, giving you tens of hours of education each months. Finally, if you need custom training as well, the Professional profile will give you a conference call with me where we will be able to discuss the basis, or specific needs, like workflow tuning, or backups strategies.
Are there any extras?
This job is my passion, and I make a lot of trials and experimentation. Some of these will become extra videos, for example you can find one about photojournalism ethics, with the slides I used in a workshop I taught with Francesco Zizola. Also you can ask all the questions you want, I will reply ASAP in a custom video.
I still have doubts…
No problem! This is way I inserted a free trial to allow you peak inside the Dashboard (the page where I upload originals and videos), without asking for your credit card details. If you want, you can register for 14days, watch some videos, and think about it. It is not possible, yet, to allow you to participate with your version, because we have burst of new users, and I have to keep the level steady.
Want to know more? I published an Help page just for you!
A modern and advance method to read an original, and analyse an image, based on Lightroom (or other RAW processor). In Photoshop we can measure colors, but in Lr we can continuously change all the parameters to see how the image react to these changes. This way we can rapidly collect info not only on the image’s issue, but on its potential as well. We can couple this with the tool “Snapshot”, to create further references to compare.
The biggest problem for users that approach post-production and color correction is not about techniques, or tools, is about image analysis. Readings is a feature of the Online Workshop, is a video where I comprehensively analyse an original un-retouched image, its flaws and potential and how to approach its enhancement.
An absolute genius, and a great friend. Davide has a large and meaningful experience in many high end professional niches. He’s a brilliant coder, and build several Photoshop extensions. He wrote, as well, several books to learn to extend Photoshop. To add insult to injury is an incredibly talented colorist as well.
A “version” is an image that has been corrected by a colorist. In our Workshop a version is produced by every colorist, every week. It has a great value, but it gets multiplied when used in combination with other versions. Even if your working solo, producing more versions of the same original, can help you producing a better result.
An “original” is an unretouched image. Usually in RAW format, it can also be in JPGs as some professionals working in the field have severe time, hardware limitations.
A general understanding of how our visual system works is important for any colorist. The visual system is not limited to our eyes, the brain plays an important role. This combination, and the results they produce, was tweaked during our evolution to serve a purpose. Some of its phenomena can be proficiently used in color correction to our advantage.
The Workshop‘s users are a legitimate Team. In years of practice, work and discoveries we distilled a common language and refined our skills. We inspired each other with smart ideas and unconventional approaches. But most of all we disagreed. Agree with each other is a good thing, but disagreement is even better. The Team corrected hundreds of images for years, and it is always invited to share feedbacks and thoughts.
A core quality, like contrast and brightness, for every colorist. As such, one of the key parameters to evaluate in a corrected version. When we talk about saturation we mean a certain hue‘s intensity. When saturation get higher colors are more vivid, when it approaches zero hues turn to grey. Often words like “vivid” or “strong” are overlooked in color science, but are still valuable to us. Especially when we remember ourselves how much important perception is in our field.
The most important technology that we got when digital imaging switched to digital. Developing a RAW file means first and foremost that we’re not actually modifying that file in any way. We are working on a different text file, or database. This is also why RAWs are called “digital negatives”, because they will stay there untouched. It is the closest stage we can get to raw data from the sensor. There are also downsides, for example each manufacturer chose a different way, and extension, and there are significant variations in different softwares.
A new tool introduced in Camera RAW and Lightroom that allows user to subtract on a layer-based logic. It acts only on local adjustments subtracting the unwanted areas of brushing and filters. It has a great importance in lessening Photoshop usage, and it is the first step towards the end of the Lightroom Photoshop dualism.
An application published by Adobe in 1990 for Mac that allowed primitive (but jaw-dropping back then). Pleasure and pain of any digital photographer, colorist, pre-press manager and hundreds of other professions, from architecture to web design. Once sold as a stand-alone application, or bundled in the Creative Suite, it is today available only via a monthly or yearly subscription. It has always been the most pirated app in the world, and one that was developed without care or vision. So many, and diverse, tools were added during the decades, that an organic and comprehensive study is now impossible.
A RAW developing application published by Adobe since 2007. Lightroom was developed around the photographers but it still requires Photoshop for a complete color correction workflow. It is divided in modules, and can be used to manage catalogues, archives, metadata, editing, post-production and exports. Since the switch to the subscription model Lightroom is part of Creative Cloud.
Our collecting, analyzing and tweaking data received from our senses. We are not capable to make absolute measures, but we are very good at comparing things. visual system and color perception are good topic for colorists to learn to add a layer of complexity to their work.
MVP, or “Most Valuable Player” is a term I took from the N.B.A. (huge fan) that is assigned to the best player on the field. In this Workshop the MVP is the Panel’s member with the most winnings.
A word that represent different things in the color correction world. A quality, a parameter, a channel in Lab, one of the two fundamental elements of a photo (the other is chroma). It is a core concept during the evaluation of a correction. It is a much more appropriate term when describing what was the exposure in a previous stage.
Let’s start from the start! Alessandro Bernardi, or AB (all acronyms in this page are friends, classmates and colleagues). A professional colorist, with a huge experience, he studied oversea with Dan Margulis, and from 2009 managed his classes in Italy. I, and many others, owe him a great debt of gratitude. The education, experience, and networking those classes generated changed many lives, mine included.
My opinion is that it is better to split color correction results in two categories: “corrections” and “interpretations”. Interpretations have a much more complex goal than corrections. They focus more on aesthetics, on subjectivity, their goal is to make a picture (or one of its element) to looks “better”. This can’t be absolute, and we risk, sometimes, to achieve the opposite result. Post-production for fashion photography, portraits and product photography usually are interpretations.
Let’s keep this simple. Hue define the kind of color we’re seeing, not how much is bright or saturated. So a saturated red, and a pale red will have the same hue, and different saturations. While a crimson red, a cardinal and a carmine will have similar hues, and different luminosities. Finally, greens and reds will have different hues. In digital color Hue can be a parameter in a color space, combined with Saturation and Lightness.
Duels is the last tool I developed. It allows you to challenge the Winner of a previous assignemt from a pool of over 300 images. You can comper your own version with the Winner’s, with the Average, and the Original. When you want, how many times you want.
My opinion is that it is better to split color correction results in two categories: “corrections” and “interpretation“. Corrections focus on objectively improving an original. Removing issues like color casts or lack of contrast, and improving saturation. It should be the first step in any job, and it should be the goal of photojournalism or scientific images. This required precision can, sometimes, make things harder, like in multi-images projects.
A core quality for colorists. As with many concepts in disciplines that involve perception it is much easier to observe the changes than to give a definition. If we increase contrast highlights will be brighter and shadows darker, if we reduce it the opposite will happens. Its definition, the relationship with dynamic range and the analogies with other disciplines require much more time and space.
The most important feedback we can have happens when we compare two version of the same image. We’re not able to measure colors with our eyes, but our visual system can compare things very quickly, and we can gain great value in this comparison. What works better, if there is a color casts, paired with tools to read color values we can safely tell the quality of our work.
Professionals in the fields of color correction. It is a quite definite subset of pros, like retoucher, or post-producers. Once (film age) a very prestigious career, with the transition to digital its value was diluted and quickly forgotten. Learning color correction is frequently mistaken with studying Photoshop, or other image processing applications. That couldn’t be more wrong.
Color, limiting this definition in regards of our professions and studies, is our perception of the macroscopic manifestation of physical properties in everything around us. Our visual system is based on perception, and evolved for hundreds of millennia with a purpose: surviving. Studying this phenomena can be rewarding, like in the case of chromatic operation, or adaptation.
Once the the line that divided pros from amateurs this still relevant color method is used less and less day by day. The importance of having four more channels will always be the same, but the more modern RAW tools (and the huge amount of time required to learn Photoshop ‘till CMYK), and the better quality we get from digital cameras, allows for much simpler and faster tools.
One of the fundamental elements that compile a digital image. Channels are usually three (RGB, Lab) or four (CMYK), and they are very valuable in practical color correction as well. They are essentially black and white versions of an image (where black and white values depends on colors), thus are great for masking, or reading an image.
Different sets of calculations that allows for different interactions of two adjacent layers. We can set the blend mode of a layer, adjustment layer or smart object, the result will impact luminosity, color or both. There are as well some primitive logic functions, like “difference”.
Our visual system and our color perception will always be more advanced than a camera. Sure, there will be hardware capable of features we can compete with (it is already like this with night vision), but these usually involve peculiar hardwares and algorithms that do not produce good, nor natural, images. The power our brain has to manipulate colors will probably never be matched by a sensor. This is why many times there is no match in what we see, and what our camera sees, forcing us to operate a balance.
Photography’s original language (although imposed by technical limitations). Still doable, but massively penalized by digital, black and white is actually a very difficult language to recreate. Similarly to the imitation of gold on paper, todays colorists fail to understand a good old-fashion black and white print used many technologies not available anymore. A huge market, not always honest, gravitates around B&W, from grains to apply, to filter to auto-generate corrections. The best approach is still understanding how a color image is created, and to use its channels.
My favourite Photoshop tool is also a long forgotten one. I will write a complete article soon, in the meantime let me say blend-if is the most powerful tool to blend two different layers, allowing logical operations, especially when used in Lab. It is as well a tool that can be used in combination with masks, blend modes and opacity. What used to make Photoshop truly essential, at least until Range Mask came out in Camera RAW, and Lightroom.
