Fair question!
The glaring answer is… “Well you are here, aren’t you?”
Through a long and winding path, I’ve had the pleasure of learning quite a bit about digital colour. But it’s more than just digital colour. It’s a background that starts with an art degree, and that’s important; I’ve always been firmly anchored in digital colour from the side of the poor sop trying to make the work. Plenty of sites, blog posts, research articles, and other things, if they are indeed reliable, are so desperately moored in the colour science numbers side that it ends up feeling quite detached from making the actual works.
This site is specifically aimed at helping out digital image makers, across a broad set of disciplines.
As you’ve likely already discovered, colour is damn f*cking complex. Worse, it’s scary. Even worse than that, if you’ve been earning money off of it, it could be career or prestige suicide to admit that you understand less than zero about it. If that feels familiar, this site is here to state boldly that it’s not your fault.
There is so much absolute crap online about colour that it’s seems almost hopeless. It’s completely unsurprising that the huge quantity of bullsh*t outweighs the few and reliable sources of information. It is completely unsurprising that people fail to find the subject of the medium itself fascinating when it is presented in a heavy, numbers laden approach.
This site was created with the hope that you will be able to gain the confidence with colour and its digital representations to help call out the crap.
This little off-the-beaten-path portion of the internet is an effort to work through all of the details that I got wrong along the way, and in doing so, hopefully help you, the digital creator, out.
I can’t promise to get every single concept framed in such a way that will make sense to you immediately. That’s up to you to let me know that what what I’m typing missed its mark and you find it completely confusing. I can promise, however, to listen and try to do better. I can also promise that if you have a question that I can’t answer, I know enough of the colour wonks out there to get you an authoritative answer. Equally hopefully I manage to keep that memory of being absolutely lost in view so that the answers provided don’t lose you.
So why is there so much crap out there? Sadly, some folks earn livings off of article clicks. video views, and posturing as authorities on subjects so they can peddle some random widget.
This site isn’t about that.
So read on. Hopefully we can fight that deluge of bulls*it with some hard fought understanding.
So what’s the catch? There’s a few payment options:
- Pay it forward. Help someone else, or get them the help from reliable sources. Seriously, if you smell something stinks out there, fight the good fight and help them out.
- Make incredible work that you are confident in with your pixel knowledge. I know what it’s like following dark and arcane software “if this then that” clickholes. Hopefully this series is a step to giving you confidence and control over your digital work so that you can elevate it to new levels. Perhaps over time, you can work toward slapping down the deluge of nonsense out there!
What People Say
Our developers really have no f*cking clue what they are doing, so we rely on the people using our software to be totally confused and not understand anything.
Random Digital Imaging Software Guy
The tone of the site is totally unprofessional.
Linux Dude Who Writes Code
Our users need the colour handling inside the application to be totally sh*t because we have a million lines of existing code and we can’t jeopardize our billion dollar market cap. Luckily our paying users don’t have the confidence to speak up about all of the broken parts.
High End Production Software
The Hitchhiker's Guide to Digital Colour 