AKG
Active Member
The blue shift I understand as people, vendors, and wholesalers generally want colors to pop. But you should be aware that clipping color as shown with red and green is effectively just making up the colors of your coral and should be identified as a misleading sales tactic at best, and theft of your money in exchange for a product that did not arrive as described at worst.
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So, how can you as a hobbyist identify these photos? It's actually quite simple.
1. Download Adobe Lightroom. This is free for all phone users.
2. Take a screenshot of the coral on your your phone, and crop around the coral photo, avoiding text.
3. Go to the cropped photo, click the three dots icon top right, enable the "show histogram" option, and reload the photo.
If you see what I just described above, unfortunately that coral will not look as shown when it arrives at your home, or even under any sort of lighting possible. In this case, the WHOLESALER extrapolated green and red colors in the photo such that some of the original color data has been lost and Photoshop continued filling everything from point A leaving the graph to Point B leaving the graph, which originally had a color saturation of Blue as shown, so giving all of the pixels that filled that semi-circle a solid green hulk value of 255 green, the greenest, most saturated green possible on a computer, and 255 red, the reddest, most saturated red possible on a computer .
No matter who you are, we all stretch the truth a little bit. Honestly, the human eye is able to view more colors than a PC so this makes sense for 99% of people who are not the . Tiff master race Photoshop tryhards who make a living taking beautiful natural photos and have a color calibrator attached to their OLED monitor.
But please. Do not do as shown above by clipping. I beg of you. You are blatantly making up colors and data and misleading people. Maybe you understand you are doing it. Maybe you don't yet. But do yourselves a favor as buyers and look over this valuable information in general before a live sale or making a purchase from anyone online.
A few minutes of due diligence can save you from disappointment.
I hope this PSA can alert people that in general, you should approach the amount of stretch as some level of honesty between yourself and a vendor.
If they are making up colors, what other tactics are they likely doing to save themselves money while roughing you up?
I hereby suggest that we as a community express our concerns over this issue as it is misleading to customers, and vendors, if this is a wholesaler committing this act at this point.
This is not a orange filter. This is not adjusting white balance. This is literally making colors up and destroying data for the sake of sales, and it needs to stop.
I'd rather support you being honest, than doing stuff like this.
Please consider supporting those who do not do this. Please learn to identify those who are doing this via the method ascribed above and from looking at your own, "ideal" reef photos before you edit them. The only people getting burned here are the people being honest and naive, and if we are such a "great community", stop selling these lies to your customers. Some editing is okay, but what is shown above is a blatant lie.
Thank you.
Below are some examples of other histograms that have not be edited and set to appropriate white balances for their lighting conditions, and an example of what a appropriate blue stretch might look like based on a reduction in red intensity.
