This study is based on a transparency I shot in September or October, 1994 to finish a roll of Fujuchrome. As happens with my photography more frequently than I’d care to admit, the extra shot proved worthier than those I’d carefully composed. I sent the transparency and sixty-odd others to Alpha CD Imaging of Menlo Park, California, and received my transparencies and CD in due time. I’ve since abandoned Fujuchrome in favor of Agfachrome, which generally presents fewer saturation and contrast problems, although it can be annoyingly difficult to find. I’ve since purchased a 35 mm scanner that produces higher resolution than ordinary five-level Photo CD scans, but its scans almost invariably require considerably more pampering. If you’re unfamiliar with Photo CD, I recommend you give it a try, although a.) the quality of scans varies from franchise to franchise, and b.) Kodak’s software leaves a good deal to be desired in terms of ease of use.
I always open Photo CD images in Photoshop’s LAB mode, which is both the largest digital color space available and the program’s native space. It’s frequently intimidating to newcomers; rest assured, however, that once you’ve mastered the mental trick of thinking in terms of lightness, red-green, and blue-yellow, you’ll never be entirely satisfied with RGB and CMYK color again.
Here you see the portion of the scan I used for the painting, complete with sharply defined, unnaturally blue shadows and saturation problems in the yellows and reds. I rotated the Photo CD scan to square up the vase and flowers by using Photoshop’s measurement tool to draw a line exactly parallel to the book shelf, then chose Rotate Canvas from the Image menu, then Arbitrary The value offered is automatically picked up from the measurement tool’s rotation calculations, so I simply tapped the enter key and let the program do the work for me. I used the crop tool’s Fixed Target Size option to select the portion of the image that interested me. I could, in fact, have let the crop tool do the rotation for me while sizing and cropping, but I find it easier to separate the functions.
The saturation problems and bracketing shadows make the picture you see unpublishable; since it was to be used as the basis for a painting, however, I didn’t trouble myself to do a thorough, professional job of color correction, which would have required me to coax and force-fit the oversaturated reds and yellows into the significantly smaller CMYK gamut.
I was perfectly content with Photoshop’s Levels function for several years; during the past year and a half, however, I’ve come to rely more heavily on the Curves function, which affords one more precise control over the image’s individual channels. I usually adjust the lightness first, then whichever of the other two channels seems furthest out of alignment with my intentions for the image. When working with flesh tones, I tend to adjust lightness, then the A channel (red-green,) and finally the B (blue-yellow,) because the films and scanners I use generally produce more heavily stressed reds than yellows.
In the case of this image, I roughly color-corrected the entire image at once. If I’d been working on it for paper-based publication, I’d have used Photoshop’s selection tools to isolate portions of the image. I’d have copied them into new layers, then adjusted each layer’s color independently, and fine-tuned each layer’s transparence until I’d fitted the entire image into the CMYK color space and and made it visually pleasing. Finally, I’d have flattened the layers and transposed it into the CMYK mode in accordance with the printer’s recommendations for minimum and maximum ink coverage, dot gain, and the like.