The Direction of Error

I am not caught up on comments. (Been out working.)
The comments on the last two posts were so good I'm considering
feturing a few of them in separate posts. Stay tuned.

I once wrote a post called "Do You Have a Color Cast?" It was about the tendency of many color printmakers (what we use to call "printers," but that word now denotes a machine) to "lean" in one direction of the color wheel when making prints—lean meaning to depart from absolute calibrated neutrality just a tad. Many color printmakers feel a need need to see enough of their favored color cast, and are sensitive to its absence. For example, Ctein leans cyan; I lean red. Viewers might be sensitive to casts of different colors to different degrees, too: for example, most people are sensitive to greenishness, so you have to take care not to lean too far in that direction, but people generally have a high tolerance for yellow. In terms of the old color packs, you might be able to go only two points too green, whereas you could get away with as much as five or even seven points of extra yellow. This is doubtless because humans evolved seeing lots of early- and late-day yellow sunlight, when the angle of the sunlight travels a greater distance through atmosphere and leaches blue out of the light. The human eye likes the look. Many landscapists lean yellow; warmer light seems to have an innate appeal to viewers. As one printmaker I knew used to say, "a little extra yellow never hurts."

Similarly, I think a lot of printmakers and post-processors for screen display have what you might call a characteristic "direction of error." They, or rather we, will have some aspect of the picture or print that we tend to fret or worry about, and thus tend to overdo or "overcook" it as they say. For example, one otherwise very good printmaker I know periodically gets too worried about sharpness. When he's in one of those moods, his prints will be otherwise perfect but perceptibly oversharpened. And, when he's in that mood, his first question to you will be, "do you think it's sharp enough?" So that's his direction of error. A couple of commenters noted that a few of my new pictures look, to them, a little dark. Moose said, "...some of the others are too dark for me. Then again, we know our tastes differ." Maybe, but maybe that's not it, because I'm not sure he's wrong: "too dark" is my direction of error if I'm honest. It's something I have to watch out for. However, one's direction of error is a good thing to know about. Once we know our direction of error, it becomes easier to ask for help from objective third parties. If the question we might want to ask is "is it dark enough?", it probably means we should ask, "is it too dark?"

Mike

P.S. In regard to the color wheel, the "Hue Ranges Map" on this page is useful.

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Featured Comments from:

V.I. Voltz: "When I printed professionally (darkroom days only) I found several things were useful for preventing drift: a set of reference prints to look at, a reflection densitometer to check that things weren’t going too far one way or another, and relatively frequent breaks from work/looking at work. The problem with the latter is that as much as everyone thinks or wishes that professional printing is like Nathalie Lopparelli at work, essentially the work requires you to go as fast as you can all the time. I miss the prints, but not the work."

Mike replies: I recall how shocked I was when I learned that the local professional lab only allowed its custom printermakers a few test strips and two sheets of photo paper per image! That wasn't for a "standard" B&W print; that was for the special custom version you paid extra for. "Going as fast as you can all the time" indeed. In fact I used to count this as one of big advantages of being an amateur: amateurs might not be as skilled or have as much experience, but they had the huge luxury of being able to spend as much time and effort—and paper—as they wished on each image.

Like you, I also used to keep a folder of reference images handy in the darkroom. The funny thing was, even when I wasn't experiencing any difficulties, if I just leafed through the pictures in the folder before the start of a printing session, just letting my eyes take them in, I would print better and experience lower levels of anxiety and/or frustration during the printing session. I never knew how that worked—it was like some kind of magic—but it worked. Similarly, if I put the cue ball exactly on the spot and try to lag it off both end rails and return it exactly to where it started, and do that ten to twenty times, I will shoot better all during that session. Again, it's magic of a sort.

Alan Whiting: "What we're up against here is the fact that the human eye-brain system is excellent at detecting differences, but terrible at establishing absolute values. If you take a piece of nominally white paper and view it by candlelight, fluorescent light, sunlight, and electric-arc light it will look white to you in all situations. However, if you actually measure its color, it's vastly different in each. You adjust. A similar thing happens with brightness. Probably the best that can be done is not to let things get too out of hand."

JOHN B GILLOOLY: "My feeling on this issue is sort of representative of my philosophy across most things. There is a point of diminishing returns on these efforts. Everyone's eyes are seeing a bit differently and monitors are inconsistent across the board. So it would seem that the exhaustive efforts to make it perfect are futile!

"I've decided with the help of a couple buddies that I am an 80% guy. I'm an 80% healthy eater—I try to eat organic foods when I can and avoid wasted sugar intake. I am an 80% exercise fit person—maybe three or four 45-minute workouts per week. Etc, etc, etc.

"I look at my monitor, compare it to the histogram and what my prints look like. If an image looks good on my monitor and I like the print that results, I let the rest go.

"It seems like the last 20% of perfection are a bunch of rabbit holes. Maybe there is one thing in your life that you can truly chase to 100%. But you should probably be careful in choosing one! It comes at the expense of many other things.

"Yes, I could go from 18% body fat to 10, but it would require incredibly strict eating and 15+ hours per week in the gym. Not interested. I could go from a 4–5 handicap golfer who plays recreationally to maybe a 1, but I would be at the golf course six days per week for hours. Why? I'd rather be roaming a city making photographs, getting lots of steps in, stop for a nice lunch with some dark chocolate for dessert, download and edit on a monitor where the images look good! Then enjoy a nice dinner! No rabbit holes. No obsessing over minute details."

Mike replies: When I was darkroom printing, I followed your 80% rule most of the time, but, just as an exercise to keep my chops up, I would occasionally (like, once every six months to two years) print a bunch of negatives as fast as I could, spending as little time as possible on each, and on other occasions I would spend lots of time and effort trying to print one negative as perfectly as I possibly could, in some cases spending hours one day and then more hours the next. I felt that most darkroom workers tended toward one or the other—speed or care—based on their personal style and general psychology, and I felt I could benefit from learning both ways. Both exercises improved my printing.

And by the way, one of the reasons I chose my car was a review that said it handled very well up to 80% of of its maximum performance but started to fall apart as you pushed it to go above 80% and tried to get closer to 100%. I reasoned that I never pushed a car past 80% but wanted it to handle well up to that point. I still have that car after 10 years and still enjoy it.

George Sinos: "Several years ago I taught a photography class at a local community college. I had the same digital photo file printed by six different companies. In addition, I worked with a local lab to have one print made as 'neutral.' There were never any prints that matched. They all had different color casts and saturation. I asked every class which print was the most 'correct' and which was the most preferred. The choices for most 'correct' were all over the map, but most preferred was almost always the most over saturated version. The 'neutral' version was seldom picked."

Mike replies: I used to run lots of those "focus group" type of tests. I would have loved to do a test like yours, but never did. Still, we need to remember that most people aren't experts and haven't learned how to look. Similar to the way that most people in the general public don't have any aptitude for music but are still choosing which music is "best" by listening to it or buying it. (You probably know at least a few people who just don't even listen to music. They have so little aptitude for it that it's not part of their lives.) To give you an example, I used to put up three prints of the same negative in front of my photography classes. I would ask them to describe the main difference between each one. One was printed with a paper/developer combination that looked warmer and more brown on a more off-white base, one was neutral, and one was pretty heavily selenium-toned, giving it "eggplant" blacks on a colder white paper base. The classes of 12–15 kids would usually be mystified, so I'd tell them the difference was color. That mystified them even further—inevitably, several kids would say something like "what are you even talking about? They're all black-and-white! There's no color version!" Just as inevitably, one or two perceptive kids would "get it" at some point and see it on their own. But, curiously, or so I thought, there were usually a few kids in each class who just couldn't see the color differences even when I and the kids who could see it were telling them what to look for.

It was really very interesting.

Ed Hawco: "For years I had the small problem of each eye seeing color differently. One eye saw it 'correctly' (by my interpretation) while the other had a warm, slightly greenish tint. The difference was only perceptible when I would look at a scene or image by alternating eyes.

"About a year ago I had cataract surgery and it changed everything. The surgery involves replacing your eyes’ lenses with new, artificial ones. Not only do I no longer need glasses for distance (and driving), but I now see color the same way through both eyes, and I see it correctly.

"I was shocked at how cool and blue everything looked at first, thinking it was a defect. The eye doc assured me that what I was seeing now was 'real' color for the first time in years, and that my brain would adapt quickly and would stop seeing it as weird. As I like you tell people, 'before surgery my neighbour had a yellow car; now he has a white one.'

"I was worried that I’d have to re-color balance my photographs and maybe even re-print them, but for some reason that doesn’t seem necessary. My photos seem to have the same colors as they always did; it’s real life that has color shifted. I have no explanation for this other than a.) I suppose this shows I’ve never been very particular about color balance (I’m B&W at heart) and b.) the brain really does amazing and unpredictable things with our vision."

Comments

[Stan B.]

I think I sometimes leaned in the "too dark direction" in B&W; unfortunately, I don't know which direction I lean when it comes to color. I've had photos that never quite looked right- then one day I realize... it's the color cast you fool! Something I never had to reckon with for decades in B&W, and probably something I'm never, ever gonna be completely comfortable with since it's something I don't readily recognize all that well...

[David Dyer-Bennet]

I like faces brighter than most people, I've noticed (clearest in B&W work). I constantly see portrait prints vastly darker than I would tolerate. (I tend to place lit "white" skin around value VII in prints.)

[Andrew L]

The inability to get white balance and tint exactly where I want it has been driving me crazy lately... so much so, that I purchased a Pentax K-3 mark III Monochrome!

Not really the reason, since I've been wanting that camera ever since handling it early this year, but it is one of the justifications...

[Doug Vaughn]

Conversations about color cast and color correction make my head explode. I'm colorblind and often know something doesn't look quite right but would have no clue how to fix it. To say something has a cyan color cast doesn't help because my brain can't really define cyan or how to undo it. Now all these articles about color grading... can't even read them as I'm sure I wouldn't understand.

It's unfortunate because I enjoy photographing landscapes and make my best guess, sometimes asking my wife, "does this look OK?" I'm sure she gets tired of that. My solution is to shoot a lot of black and white as my brain comprehends grey tones quite well.

[Eric Rose]

Each of my eyes sees colour differently. One is slightly blue deficient.

[John Camp]

When I looked at your photos a couple of days ago I thought, boy, those are really dark. I've wondered in the past if some people might have psychological attraction to darkness. You know, like Count Dracula. Or, Vincent Van Gogh, who painted dozens of night pictures when most of his compatriots were enchanted by Impressionist color.

[Terry Letton]

I get where you’re coming from. I had cataract surgery during the dearly departed pandemic. Aside from the hassle that entailed there were serious consequences for some of my photography. I had been in the habit of ‘lightly’ toning many of my black and white images. I took great care to make the sepia tone as neutral as possible, not overly red but not overly green either. Turning on the computer after the surgery I was horrified at what I was seeing. Most of the toning was obnoxiously green. I have since gone back and reworked or removed the toning from the raw files of some of the images but I’ll never get to all of them. Funny thing is the peanut gallery never mentioned the green toning.

[MikeK]

I feel that Adobe Camera Raw's auto white balance always goes too warm - or yellow. But perhaps I lean more cyan?

I'd never thought that it might be me that was wrong...

[Paul]

Bias. It exists is all our decisions. Thus the reason to ask the "question" regarding a print. Unless of course you are perfectly satisfied with the end result. Good Article.

[Daniel]

Around the age of 63 I had my left eye corrected for cataract. The doctor used ultrasound to shatter the natural lens of the eye that had developed a cataract, an opaque or cloudy area. The eye's natural lens was then replaced with an artificial intraocular lens implant. I chose one that would give me perfect distant vision. One of the first things I noticed after the procedure was that my new left eye had a blueish cast. It took a while before I realized that my right eye was the one with a yellow cast, the right eye was just clear. A few years later I had the right eye corrected and this time I chose to have it corrected for reading distance. The brain takes both eyes and merges the vision. I never need glasses again. And my color prints are now true color, no longer filtered through old eyes.

[John]

In the UK during the1970s, two schools of Art History existed, depending on whether the projected slide transparencies were Kodachrome or Ektachrome.

[Geoff Wittig]

Everyone has some perceptual color bias. With digital photography you can to some extent quantify this using Photoshop's info palette.

For painters, it's even more of a quagmire. Many will intentionally "push" (or alter) colors for specific artistic or perceptual effects. But even when we're doing our best to accurately reproduce the colors we see, five painters standing side by side working with the same subject will produce five noticeably different pictures in terms of color. I try to render blue skies just as I see them, but I find my painted skies look visibly more turquoise and less ultramarine than most other painters' work.

[MikeR]

I love dusk shots.

Why mess with available darkness?

[Rob de Loe]

This was a very helpful article! You've explained why I like a new profile I'm using so much, and why I didn't like the previous one nearly as much.

The new one leans strongly yellow, while the old one leaned strongly green. I was always fighting the greenness by adding yellow.