It doesn’t take long for you to start feeling the limits of your gear. Sure, you can get great results when the light’s good or the subject’s still, but when your kid’s running around in the living room and the light’s bad you’ve just gotta pop up the flash. After a few tries you realize that the built-in flash on your fancy dSLR isn’t a lot better than the one on your old point-n-shoot. Everything still ends up flattened. Blagh. The snowball starts rolling.

Once again you swipe the card — you pick up a nice, fast 50mm lens (a bargain at $120). Now you’ve got a better range, you’re taking shots where you couldn’t before, but guess what? At f/1.8 you’ve got a 2cm depth of field. You’d better hope you can nail the focus just right, or you’re outta luck. Plus, there are times when the light’s just not there, even at f/1.8. Oh dear, the snowball’s rolling faster now.

So you pick up a good flash ($190). But you make the mistake of reading strobist and start thinking about off-camera flash, so the snowball grows by another $60 in RF triggers and diffusers. (We’ll be generous and assume you didn’t get the stands, umbrellas, and gels that you wanted so badly but couldn’t justify to the spousal unit.)

I think you get the picture, but I’d just like to take a moment to enumerate a few more of the items that will contribute to that snowball’s mass. Mind you, I’m using “ghetto-gear” prices here. Buying actual reputable-brand gear means these prices go up, often significantly.

• You’ve gotta have a telephoto lens for birds and trips to the zoo. Something that at least gets out to 200mm. ($250 at least. Probably more like $450.)
• It would be nice to have some teleconverters for that lens to give you even more reach on the cheap. ($60-200)
• Ooh, macro’s fun. Close-up lenses are reasonably cheap ($40) and so are extension tubes ($85).
• Ah yes, the tripod! All the pros say it’s critical to have one, and a good one at that. Why, you’d be a fool to skimp here! ($250. Yes, you’re skimping. You’re poor. Boo hoo.)
• You really need at least a circular polarizing filter (multi-coated, of course) to get those magical cobalt-blue skies. ($75)
• Don’t forget about software! Photoshop is “only” $300 with the educational discount. You might be able to make do with Bibble Pro (great stuff, $120) and Krita ($0, thank God for open-source), but you know you’ll buy PS eventually.
• Another thing, if you care about getting good prints you have to have accurate color during your editing. That means you definitely need a calibrator for your monitors. ($80)
• Oh yeah, those RAW files? They take up space. You’ll be needing more hard drives at $100 each. (Yes, drives. You do make backups, right?)

But do you know what the funny thing is? You still truly believe that once you have all those things, once that snowball has reached some ideal size, it will just stop! Really!

Dear friend, the snowball never stops.

At some point I set it up to take photos in the Adobe RGB color space, which can represent a wider range of colors than the sRGB color space that most consumer digital cameras use and the D50 uses by default. (sRGB is the “lowest common denominator” color space, designed to represent the colors that a cheap-o 1986-era CRT monitor could reproduce.) This is just fine, so long as all I want to do is view my photos on my nice color-managed Mac, but the world is full of color-crippled Windows and Linux apps. (Actually, even the OS X version of Firefox is crippled.) These apps don't know squat about color spaces — they just push the RGB values in the file straight to the monitor, and monitors are set up to act like sRGB devices by default.

To make a long story short, if I simply upload an Adobe RGB photo to my website, 97% of the world (basically anybody who's not using Safari on OS X) will see something totally different than I do, because they'll be treating it like an sRGB photo. They'll see a photo with dull, drab colors. What's needed is to do a conversion to sRGB before uploading.

So I started looking for utilities to do color conversion in bulk at the command line. It was surprisingly hard to find information about this! Most pros use Photoshop for this, and those who aren't pros generally don't have a clue about color spaces. It turns out there are a few options. There is an open-source color management system (CMS) called “Little CMS“ that includes a utility called “jpegicc” for color matching jpeg files. Unfortunately, this program strips all the EXIF tags from the file. There's also the “convert” command from the ImageMagick project, which in newer versions can be linked to Little CMS to enable color conversion. This works much better, preserving all of the EXIF tags from the original file and offering lots of other nifty options as well.

If you're using Panther or newer and don't want to install ImageMagick, there's also the sips “Scriptable Image Processing System” utility included with OS X. The -m flag (which is documented in “sips -h” but not the man page) allows you to convert to a given profile. (Apple calls this “matching” to a profile, which to my ear doesn't suggest the lossy color conversion process.) This keeps many but not all of the EXIF tags from a photo. On my test photo it retained 88 out of 145 EXIF tags found by exiftool. I haven't analyzed the tags it dropped, so you'll have to check it out yourself if you decide to go this route.]]> http://www.n8gray.org/blog/2006/04/27/command-line-color-matching-on-os-x/feed/ 0