Fashion Yoga

I saw a photo a while back on my friend Mimi's facebook page.  She was doing a cool handstand yoga pose, but dressed like she was going to go out - heels and everything.  She looked great on [iphone] camera, so I asked her if she would like to do a shoot.  Well, she said yes, we did it and here are the results:

QP Card Differences between ICC and DCP Profiles

I've been using the QPcard 203 Book for a few weeks now and have been trying to make it work with Adobe Process 2012.  Unfortunately no matter what I've tried, I couldn't seem to get a DCP profile that was flatter than the stock Adobe Camera Neutral profile for my D800E.  The profile looks OK, and is better than the profiles generated by the Colorchecker Passport, but like I said, still not flatter than the built-in Neutral.

So I tried using the QPcalibration software to create an ICC profile for use in Capture One.  Holy cow, I got a super flat and color accurate image (when using Linear Response Curve) straight away.  Just a little tweak with the skin tone tool, and I got significantly better results than I ever got with DCP profiles in Adobe.

I used Large Gamut, Low Profile Curve, and the High Smoothing settings in QPcalibration.  The QP profile was still very contrasty in Lightroom, even when I dialed the Contrast down by -80.

Here are the results, Lr first, then C1 (the differences are greater on my calibrated editing screen than these small sRGB files will yield, but you can still see the contrast differences in her dress, shoes and face):

So what does this mean?  Maybe the QP Card is only really useful when making ICC profiles for Capture One, and significantly less useful when making DCP profiles for Camera Raw.  That is disappointing as I really want to standardize on Lightroom for raw conversion.  I guess Capture One still wins for best color / contrast / and skin tone.

Mighty Mutts

I've been wanting to shoot some pro bono work of rescue dogs in New York.  When you look at the websites of dog rescue places, and on Petfinder, the photos are so terrible - all you see are crappy cell phone or direct flash shots where the camera is pointed down on the dog.  So when I met a great dog at the dog park a few months ago, and found out he was from Mighty Mutts, I filed that name away in my head.

If you live in New York, you might have seen them in Union Square with the dogs and cats they are fostering for adoption.  This is an amazing all-volunteer no-kill animal rescue organization, run by an equally amazing woman named Michelle.

We had our first shoot on Sunday and here are some of the images.  If you want to rescue any of these dogs here, please feel free to get in touch at http://www.mightymutts.org/ or you can leave me a comment here on the blog.

Thanks for looking,

John