Colour shift and resolution issues

Reading through the long DP2M on FM looking for more tips on processing Foveon RAWS, I have very much reinforced the impression that I have long carried that I absolutely lack a good colour perception.

I have worked with printers for many years and have been left baffled by their ability to say if a print or proof is ‘good’ or bad’.  Now, looking at the work some people are doing with the DP2M I’m seeing the same judgements made.  What I am fairly sure of however is that outside of the community of graphics art professionals ( or very keen amateurs) the majority of people who look at a photograph are entirely unaware of ‘colour shifts’ or ‘jpg artifacts’ they simply see the image and react to that.

Similarly with sharpness, this maybe due to the fact that my eyesight is far from perfect combined with the hyperbole that some people use when discussing this subject ‘obviously way over sharpened’ often looks fine to me, but then what do I know…? If a colour shift is really obvious, like on some of my DP2M HDR efforts then OK, I can understand, but some of the comments I see about photographs being 'ruined' by shifts that are so subtle I cannot even detect them no matter how hard I try make me scratch my head.

Now there are a couple of significant issues here which I have found with images from any large high resolution sensor and they are the questions of resizing or down rezzing  and display media.

DP2M files especially, look unbelievable at 100% but reducing the size to fit on any normal sized screen ( I have 13 and 22 inch) reduces the impact that the shear resolution at 100% has. So I’m reading up on down rezzing and it looks like I’ll need two work flows and two files saved, the original so that I can process for printing and a file processed specially for screen display. It’s a learning process for me that DP2M ownership has bought into sharp focus if you’ll forgive the pun.

Also very interesting to read about the use of the fill light slider in SPP, it seems that overuse of this can produce some interesting semi-HDR/Topaz – like effects that people either like or hate, from what I’ve seen I’m going to like it, so watch out for some ‘over processed’ pictures from me very soon….