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Nice delivery through the post yesterday. My work on preparing the stills and video captures from the BBC Production of David Attenborough’s Frozen Planet II series had arrived in book form.

I worked on 171 images from still cameras and 67 video grabs to provide a consistent, natural and ethical set of images suitable for repro.
Having watched the first episode on BBC iPlayer last night (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0cw0nb8) I was pleased to see that the images in the book correlated well with the equally natural grading in the video source.

I watched the program on a recent Sony Bravia TV with HDR (High dynamic range) enabled, the pictures were stunning. Ink on paper offers only a tiny fraction of the dynamic range of HDR so when preparing the files I used my knowledge of the CMYK repro process to ensure that I made the best possible files for the book. You can find out more about the book here: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/439081/frozen-planet-ii-by-white-mark-brownlow-and-elizabeth/9781785946578

I first started work on BBC Wildlife books in 2011 when I worked on the original Frozen Planet book, quite a ride! The problem I solved was to make images from multiple sources more cohesive by correcting colour casts, tone and contrast, noise and sharpness issues on a per picture basis before conversion to CMYK. This resulted in much better and consistant repro than if corrections were done on the printing press. Adjusting images on press nearly always degrades other images on the same sheet and cannot fix colour within colour or sharpness and noise issues at all.

Helping create premium books like this are one of the highlights of my work. I help amateurs and professionals, individuals and corporations. Each time I work I put in the same maximum effort to enable the client to get the most out of their work.

Can I help you? the chances are good, get in touch and lets start the conversation:

stephen@copyrightimage.co.uk

#ethical retouching #grading #colorgrading #colourgrading #stills #videograbs #repro #CMYK

I will be attending the show in Birmingam sometime between the dates 17-20 September 2022 at the NEC.

I will not be exhibiting but rather having a look around to see the latest technologies and guage the atmosphere of the photographic market and see if I can find any changes in how people enjoy and use their photography.

If you are a client attending or exhibiting let me know and I will stop for a chat, if you are not a client but would appreciate a short meeting then let me know also.

You can book tickets to the show here: https://www.photographyshow.com/

It has come to my attention that QNAP nases are under a new Deadbolt ransomware attack. It started on September 3rd and and affected one clients nas. I have taken precautionary measures on all other clients nases since.

Today I came across a QNAP notice (ostensably from yesterday) that pointed the finger to their Photo sharing app causing the vulnerability. I have updated this app on all client nases as part of my maintainance schedule.

You can read more here: https://www.qnap.com/la/security-news/2022/take-immediate-action-to-update-photo-station-to-the-latest-available-version

A new version of Photoshop to download today. Not too busy so installed it to try out. Some useful speed improvements noted on painting masks etc but then came up against flickering images redraws and missing segments of images.
It would appear that Adobe are updating the drawing code to work better with multi core video cards. This is a pretty nice development but it looks to be an early version and Adobe themselves indicate that images may not display correctly.

Whilst they work it out I have gone into preferences (cmd or control K) and selected the Technology Previews tab and ticked the box named “Deactivate Native Canvas”. This fixed the redraw problem for me.

Im using a pretty serious mainstream graphics card (An RTX 3080Ti) so hopefully they will sort this quickly and so allow me to use the card more efficiently in future.

UPDATE: the earlier fix of unticking “Multithreaded compositing” in the Performance tab of Preferences also works but this new method fixes the problem and you can leave Multithreaded compositing ticked for extra performance.

Was a pleasure recently working on the stills (video and photo) for the newly launched Disney Nature production of “Polar Bears”.

One of my specialties is to grade and retouch video grabs in the same ethical way as stills images and there were some lovely images to work on for this project.

Of particular note is to keep the natural tones and definition in polar bear noses, sounds a little strange but its quite common for people to boost contrast and end up with black featureless noses when working on polar bear images. Perhaps a minor point to get picky about (!) but its best to represent nature in its glory rather than some compromised version (Im pleased to say the film colorist also retained natural detail also in the moving images)

You can read about the production here: https://disneyplusoriginals.disney.com/movie/polar-bear

The film is available to Disney+ subscribers to watch now.

(Fun fact: I started working stills for Disney Natures film “Bears” in 2012 (film released in 2014). This was a film about a grizzly bear family in Alaska. In that instance I got a mention in the film credits at the end as “Stills colorist”, not 100% certain but I cannot see any other stills colorists listed in any other film credits!)

(Update, apparently they credited me on their production of “Penguins” also – thanks Disney Nature!)

Im here for all established clients over the coming holiday periods otherwise I will be working Christmas eve with a break till Wednesday 29th December.

Just 1st January 2022 for the New Year period.

Wishing all past, current and future clients a good Christmas and a brilliant New Year.

Stephen

I have been working closely with the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition run by the Natural History Museum for a number of years now but it’s always an exciting moment when the latest book of winning images is delivered!

As always some nice repro in the book and my work on the original images files to convert them with a specialist CMYK workflow has paid off. No surprises in terms of colour or tone from when the images were adjusted for print on my Imaging Workstation using a Fogra certified and calibrated Eizo monitor. The book is available at all good bookshops now and makes an ideal Christmas present for anyone interested in Nature or Photography (or both!).

Custom CMYK conversions are just one of the specialities of my work at Copyrightimage but If you are responsible for delivering premium books for your organisation and had disappointing results in the past with print quality then give me a call and I will help as best I can.