This afternoon I took a couple hours off to hear Greg Gorman discuss color management and workflow, as part of the JVH Digital Festival happening today and Thursday. Actually, I heard him gossip about all his Hollywood celebrity friends that he’s photographed over the years, while showing several decades worth of celebrity portraits. Once that was done with, he had some genuinely interesting things to say about workflow.
Greg’s goal is to produce the most stunning prints that he can. He prefers to work in Prophoto RGB color space, which he says gives the best color gamut in 16 bit, and displays more in the reds and blues than does Adobe RGB. This is in sharp contrast to the Getty Images workshop, where we were urged to work in sRGB in an 8 bit workflow. With Getty the point, essentially, is to strive toward the lowest common denominator. These two philosophies are the antipodes of digital workflow.
A few other great tidbits from Greg. Shoot a grey card in the lighting conditions that are set up for a shoot, and color correct to that. I know this, and I even carry a grey card in my camera bag. But I rarely remember to use it. The new generation of Epson printers can handle an image resolution of 360ppi (the previous ones saw no increase in quality past 240). But the most useful technique was a new way to convert to black and white, using LAB space and shadow selection layers. It’s too geeky to describe here, but he has the procedure well outlined on his website.
Hi Doug,
I tried Mr. Gorman's BW conversion, and found it to be an overly complex route to a rather normal duotone. If that is the goal, it is far easier to simply use the Mode...Duotone or Tritone, and it gives you better control over the result and blending, contrast, etc. I have read about many different ways to convert to black and white (beyond the simple Mode...Grayscale), tried nearly all of them, and found that one technique (Channel Mixer) still works the best in almost all situations:
1. Open any color image
2. Select or make an Adjustment Layer, type: Channel Mixer
3. In the Channel Mixer Dialogue box, check the Monochrome option in the lower left corner
4. Then play with the Red, Green, and Blue sliders to achieve the effect that you want, but make sure that the 3 values together add up to 100.
There are several advantages to this technique: for B/W printers, it is similar to using filters on an enlarger, the technique is done on a separate layer (leaving your original intact), and the effect can be endlessly tweaked for print or web purposes, finally it gives you the most control over the tonal range & yields the truest (as true as digital photography gets) b/w print (in my humble opinion!)
- Chris
Posted by: Chris Junker | June 24, 2005 at 08:19 AM