@pascaline @elaterite

🙄
I learned video editing between jobs working for free for a friend of a friend (I was just waiting for my start date), who hired me a year later. We used Photoshop as a video paintbox (early 90s), which let me learn enough to land a job at a design studio a year later, when the first agency lost some large clients and had to lay me off. I’ve never been afraid of manuals, and learned by doing. Our art directors told me what they wanted, and I figured out how to get that.

@pascaline @elaterite

Yup—it's always a trick to balance strong blacks with shadow detail. Sometimes I think I hold back because I'm trying too hard to maintain detail—I'd rather have a little black clipping than white clipping because that's really obvious.

@pascaline @elaterite

Oh, lordy, do I feel that. Thankfully the agency I worked for was run by art directors, not salespeople, and I never had to do that. Clients, on the other hand, have wanted me to create butt-ugly stuff. I’ve been out of design as a day job for almost 25 years now, but those experiences leave a mark. 🙄

@pascaline @elaterite

Bob, curious where elaterite comes from. My sister lived in Liberia for 15 or 20 years, and many of the roads there are made by clearing the vegetation and rolling the underlying red laterite clay. Very distinctive color. Gets into everything. It also turns to mush in the rain—you can spot the southern and northern expats by whose cars are off the side of the road (wet clay is a lot like wet snow).

@pascaline @elaterite

Trying Darktable on my Macbook Pro, and it's definitely for color science geeks. I learned color calibrating monitors and printers and understand color spaces and gamut, but it's going to take a deep dive to learn what the film emulation parameters do. First image I tried was Christmas tree lights to see if I could make something so essentially colorful look good in B&W. Interesting results. Very tweakable. Color mix has an obvious effect.