Cold Eyes
I have been told at work that I have a cold eye. No… Not that I’m **COLD HEARTED**, but rather I have an innate preference for blue hues. This produced an interesting result where the photos I edit tend to bend towards the colder side, with an unmistakably subtle blue tint. According to my colleagues, people usually have a warmer eye. So there is usually the tendency for them for more orangey edits. Well, as it is my profession as a photo editor in a global news agency to color correct photos to accuracy, I have to constantly bear that in mind least I unintentionally enhanced the photos.
I’m new to the job so I still learning how to cope with minimally editing my photos. Yes… I’m an edit-addict. I love to add fancy stuffs to my photos, and I rely a huge deal on “fancy plugins” for Aperture. Yup… My colleagues call them “fancy plugins”. It’s not that plugins are bad or unsavory, but they are an absolutely no-no for news photography. After all, journalism has a strict code of ethics. It’s something I have get used to, and honestly it has gotten me thinking hard about how I process my photos. Are my photos as good as they are, if I were not to utilize my plugins?
I’m a huge fan of Nik Software’s plug-ins. It’s powerful. It enables me to have point to point control over my photos. The photographic filters of Color Efex Pro 3 are magnificent… Of course, with that you also need to have the eye to know how much and what to apply. Photo editing is like applying make-up. It requires the right combination and strength to create the suitable amount of enhancement that is needed to make a photo oomph-worthy. When HD-R first came out, a lot of photo-enthusiasts went crazy with it… The end result was the endless photo-stream of highly saturated, highly textured photos. Not a pretty sight… But like most fads, people don’t realize it until the fad fades.
I’m still getting the hang of my job, learning new things every day… I’ve got a feeling my perception of how much a photo should be edited is changing with each day spent at work. I used to think I edit minimally, because I don’t use Photoshop. But in comparison to what I do at work, my photos here are way more extensively edited. Perhaps I’ll emerge a different photographer out of this experience. In the meanwhile, I’ve got to work on my cold eyes…
This entry was posted on Sunday, August 14th, 2011 at 2:11 am. It is filed under Blog and tagged with color, ethics, photo editing, photography.
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