Mixing for Truth

Oooooah! <thumpa><thumpa><thumpa>

I hadn’t heard much from Rosco in the past few days, as he was squirreled away (if you excuse the expression) in his dark room scratching through a back log of blinkies which he announced he was determine to get processed as soon as possible. 

“What’s up, Roski,” I shouted.

“Woof! Come see!”

So I got up and walked into his photo-lair.

“I just discovered something,” Rosco said. 

“Well, what?”

He pushed a blinkie toward me with his paw.

“See that?”

“Yes...”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Uh... I donno.  It looks pretty nice to me.”

Rosco gave me a blank-disdainful kind of look.

“It’s too greeny” he said definitively, “I have doggie blue-vision, and even I know that grass doesn’t look like that.”

“It does if you’re playing football.”

“?”

“Well, it is sorta like creme de menthe”

Rosco had it.  “Cramp du month? What are you talking about?

I’m agreeing with you, Roski, it’s too bluey-green.  Was this shot in Ireland by any chance?

“Where?”

“Ireland — a very greeny sort of place”

“Never sniffed it.  No.  The blinkie was shot in Midtown.”

“That’s not Loopy Loops is it?” 

“No...it’s Big Canyon Road... where we drove around that evening...”

“Oh yes... I remember”

“Well the grass doesnt’ look all cramp di monthy now does it?”  

"Crehmm" Roski, "say crehm de mint"

"Well does it or not?"

“Uh...no.  I recall it was pretty fresh and lush as it was still Spring and the Big Heat hadn’t yet struck ...”

“Yes,” Rosco, said, "but not that green.   That’s one of the things that really gets to me, especially with digital blinkies.  All this minthy green is a lie.

“Well, but you must admit it looks nice,” I volunteered.

“It might, but it’s not true.”

“But when I work on it, it gets too yellowy, which isn’t true either.”


“So what did you discover?”

Rosco explained that after he worked on manually taking out the purple fringing in the image and adjusted the levels, shadows/highlight just a tad to where he got it more or less in the ball park of what he was sniffing after he decided to “finally” do something about the the creme de menthe effect.

“So what did you do?”

“Well, I pawfully traced out the foreground green and then fiddled very very carefully with hue and saturation, to   tone down the greenies at least a bit. 

“I saved the file and was about to do a “curve check” when I noticed “MIXED CHANNELS”

“You hadn’t seen it before?” 

“Yes I had, but I was putting off discovering what it did.  There was too much other stuff to learn.”

“So?”

“So I opened it up, and saw that it was like selective color but only in RGB not CMYK.”

“And... I started fiddling with it and discovered that it did a much better job of anything yet at getting rid of the minthies.  Look!


I looked.

“Tell me the blinkie on the right isn’t closer to what we actually saw?”

“Yes...” I said, “it most likely is...”

“Most likely?  Definitely!  The trees had shadows but they weren’t really blue either.”

“Well it looks like you just added a warming filter.”

“I did NOT” Rosco said indignantly.

“I tried that ... after... It created a similar look but not quite.  The filter affected the whole photograph.  The mixing did too but in ways that were more ... uh... well channelled or specific.

“What do you mean?”

Roski nudged me over to the screen.  He called up the pre-final image, on the left, without the channel mixing adjustments.  Then he applied a warming filter, and got it as close to the “mixed” final version of the image. 

“Now look closely at the little spaces of dirt.”

I did.

“See? See?  The warming filter oranges those little spaces of dirt between the grass.  The channel mixing version does not!!! The earth is just the color it was.”

It seemed to me that Roski was right. 

“Congratulations Roski,” I said, “your a mixer of truth.”