This article reminded us of the old adage "A camel is a horse designed by committee." It's always a good idea to engage the decision makers as early as possible — at the strategy phase — and encourage them to designate a point person to lead the project to completion, without having a committee micromanage the branding process.
Tiny cars.
More visual fun to enjoy. Photographer, Michael Paul Smith, uses forced perspective to make tiny cars look life-sized within real environments.
So cool.
http://www.demilked.com/elgin-park-miniature-cars-michael-paul-smith/
Why photo color correction is so important and (sometimes) so expensive
The pictures looked great on my screen, why do they look so bad in my brochure?
As a marketing director, you can usually expect to receive JPGs that have been processed as a group by the photographer. All of these files will be in RGB color mode which is a big gamut of color representing 16,777,216 available colors, or all the colors your computer monitor can reproduce.
If you're planning to print the image on a press though, it has to be converted to CMYK which is a pretty small gamut of color representing only about 1,000,000 available colors all made from 4 inks. Check out this link if you realllly want a technical overview.
http://dnacreative.org.uk/blog/adrian-wheeler-homework-2nd-session/
All those bright blues and greens won't be available and someone will have to adjust the image to compensate it to be printed with only Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black transparent inks.
Visual color space
Go see a Van Gogh painting in a museum. The colors are so vibrant they'll melt your eyeballs. Visual color space is every color recognizable by the human eye. Ka-blam, it's beautiful.
RGB color space
You take a photo of the painting. The photo looks pretty close but not exact. You just converted visual color to RGB. RGB is every color available on a computer monitor made of 255 shades of Red, Green and Blue light. Ka-blam, it's still pretty nice.
CMYK color space
Next you convert that image to CMYK and try to print a poster of it and it looks nowhere near as rich as the original. CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. Those are the 4 transparent inks used in 4 color process printing. Because you're trying to make all the colors of the painting out of only 4 inks, you will be disappointed with the results compared to the original. Ka-plooey, it's pretty mediocre.
It's like the idea of Blue and Yellow makes green, but there are only so many greens you can make. There are printing enhancements available like touch plates and spot colors, but we're just talking about standard 4 color process printing.
Check out the link below to see a diagram of color gamuts and see how much smaller CMYK is than RGB.
Control your disappointment
Before printing, someone has to do this CMYK conversion process and it's usually an agency service supervised by an art director. That's the best way. When you convert all those beautiful RGB images to the lackluster CMYK color space, you lose color information right from the start. But you can control it by having a professional manage your color correction and get your images to reproduce the best they can be.
It's usually not as easy as just changing the mode in Photoshop. The art director will work with a retoucher to make corrections to the photo and get it as close as possible to the original. CMYK conversions may also be done by the prepress department at the printer, but it has to be done by somebody. The corrected file is then output to a digital proof and corrected again and again as needed. This can take a good chunk of time to get it right, and of course, time = money.
A photographer friend of mine showed me a catalog he'd shot and said he was embarrassed to show it because the color was so bad. The printing was good, the photos were amazing and the design looked nice too, but the client or the designer had opted not to color correct for CMYK and the images had been converted without adjustment. The color looked flat, grayed out, and just gross. It happens. Don't let it happen to you.
Color correction is super important with product photography and skin tones
Imagine you're an apparel manufacturer and you've just finished shooting your brand's new spring line. You want your printed catalog to match the real color of the product. You also want multiple shots of the same product in different environments, and shot with different lighting, to match each other. It doesn't just magically happen, and requires a lot of skill and experience. Skin tones are really touchy too with small percentages making big shifts in tone that can result in faces looking too red or peachy even.
Make color correction a priority and be glad you did
Be realistic in budgeting to allow for color correction time outside of standard post processing by the photographer or designer. Color correction is a separate and very valuable process. For example, if you tell your agency it's critical that your images match the products and match each other, you make color correction a priority on the front end and give your agency a sense of how important it is to your project's success. Your agency will then be able to better plan for it on the back end, and can give you an idea where your color corrections will fit in the overall project budget.
Your Spring Catalog is gonna rock.
A little food fun.
I have always been a fan of dioramas. Tiny people in tiny houses surrounded by tiny villages or taking part in a tiny battle (I did grow up in the South, so...). I also love food photography, so when I saw this collection of food dioramas, I was super excited.
Take a look at these lovely images, just for fun.
http://www.demilked.com/minimiam-miniature-figures-food-pierre-javelle-akiko-ida/
The stock creative crystal ball
I can't predict whether Sandra, Jennifer or Meryl will win the Oscar this year, but fortunately someone knows what stock images will be the most used for 2014. (Actually, I am betting on Meryl.)
http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2013/12/10-predictions-for-imagery-in-2014/