My experience was a year spent working as a forester. One of our duties was to keep the wood burning stoves supplied. I remember learning that ash got its name from the fact that it burned so well, and willow left perfect charcoal.
As for the axe handle… I was told off by my boss for mashing up the handle by my constant missing. Even now, I am the same with hammers and nails - not nearly as sure with my aim as I should be. On the plus side That was also the time I learned how to replace an axe handle. also the time that
Experienced wood splitter here. All your points are valid. I had to ruin one perfectly good axe handle before I learned how to swing. However, the sim is still a lot of fun.
Dam right. It’s a medium that a reasonably intelligent individual from any time in future/past history could intuitively understand. Let’s not forget that NASA chose a record to store the digital images it sent with Voyager on precisely that assumption.
Unfortunately, we are unlikely ever to see any of Delecroix’s paintings as they were intended to be seen. Fading pigments and other factors make this true for every painting, but doubly true for Delecroix as he used a lot of new pigments that were very unstable.
There is the story of Degas standing weeping with sadness in front of The death of sardenopolis at the way its colors had faded over time.
Guilty as charged. However,... from a certain point of view image editing is all about color. I guess the exception would be Adobes new generation of object selection tools, which are hard to best. DaVinci has such tools but they are more suited to editing movies.
Yes, it would work like that. Moreover, the adjustments concatenate. In other word if a node darkens an image to the point of blackness, the following node can restore the original brightness.
That being said, the new photo editing functionality of DaVinci is not the smoothest. The DaVinci app is a bit of a Frankenstein. The editor is a development laid on top of the original DaVinci color app. The audio page (Fairlight) and the VFX module (Fusion) were purchases which were acquired and 'glued on'. Moving from one to the other can be clunky - though not as bad an experience as Adobe's dynamic links.
Are you referring to Lightroom's masking capability? Indeed, even in Photoshop it is possible to select a color and perform a masked adjustment. Lightroom's selection/masking tools are pretty good and for basic tasks it is fine, but the masking workflow is (IMHO) fundamentally limited. DaVinci's nodes can be stacked on top of each other and the per-hue adjustments are live. Also... I gotta say that the visualization the DV's tools offer is far superior. At a glance I can see the range of hue that have been selected as well as the degree of change they are being subject to.
FYI, In DV it is possible to edit hue to hue, hue to saturation, hue to luminesce, luminesce to saturation, saturation to saturation and saturation to luminesce. There is also the amazing chroma warp, using which near arbitrary color adjustments can be made. Nothing out there comes even close to that capability. No wonder most Hollywood movies are color graded in DV.
Thanks for pointing that out. You are indeed correct. However, from what I can see DaVinci's tools still have the edge. With Capture One the feedback on what hues have been selected is far vaguer than I would like. Moreover, the node-based workflow is far more suitable for complex adjustments.
Repeating a point I made in another comment: in DV it is possible to edit hue to hue, hue to saturation, hue to luminesce, luminesce to saturation, saturation to saturation and saturation to luminesce. There is also the amazing chroma warp, using which near arbitrary color adjustments can be made. Nothing out there comes even close to that capability. No wonder most Hollywood movies are color graded in DV.
I believe that DaVinci’s edge is the excellent masking and node based editing it offers (via the color page) and the insanely powerful hue tools. Neither Lightroom nor Potatoshop has effective hue tools - e.g. selectively change the hue or the saturation of a color except in the most primitive way.
Agreed that the photo editing features are killer. AFAIK no other photo editing app allows the user to selectively desaturate a hue and its ability to adjust scoring to restricted lightness range is world class.
I teach digital art and am also a painter. When I was a student I loved filling sketchbooks with drawings - like a collection of ideas. To a large degree my web bookmarks and screen grab library have taken over this function. That being said, if I want to quickly communicate visual ideas to students or craftsmen I much prefer a paper and pencil. It feels so much more nuanced, comfortable and expressive.
If Mari (texture painting app) and Nuke (vfx compositor) had a baby together it would be the perfect node based photoshop alternative. The brushes of Mari are insanely good and color editing on nuke is a dream.
> Ternary is probably way better at modeling the real world, but the complexity could make code hard to understand. Maybe that can be solved.
Is it not true that the brain process in ternary?
From the point of view of perception, I believe that we process the world in terms of pairwise comparisons. For example, the atomic indivisible of visual processing is figure/ground separation.
A few points on how a painter's intentions do not always align with how we see their work many years later:
Generally, a painting is best viewed and photographed in as close a lighting environment as it was painted. I have seen many paintings 'blasted' by unnaturally bright gallery lights. There is a reason why a gallery lighting designer is a real job. However, in my experience effective gallery lighting designers are as rare as rocking horse shit.
It is true that the paint the artists applied many years ago will often bear little resemblance to that which we now see. This is less true of earth browns and very true of paintings done at the beginning of the pigment revolution, when wonderful colors were produced which were later discovered to be very 'fugitive'. However, the relative relationship between these paints remains more or less intact, and IMHO this is the most important factor in aesthetic evaluation.
Another factor is how a photo flattens such differences as rough vs smooth (and their consequent light reflection properties). In a Titian painting, huge areas are untouched rough red oxide primer on rough canvas, vs the slight gloss of oil paint. Importantly, old masters would often apply their lights as (smooth) thick paint and their dark as thin glazes (or scumbles) above a thin primer (red or green or yellow ochre or whatever). The frisson between these layers gave the darks their depth that they would otherwise have lacked. This is mastery of dynamic range at its finest. Googles art project photos comes close to capturing this. For an example, check out any portrait by Durer in Google art project.