… what Sablesword said! Perfectly put 🙂 thank you!

Cheers, Hywel

• This reply was modified 9 years, 2 months ago by  Hywel.

The large pictures are at the resolution they came off the camera.

In the very earliest days, the resolution of pics was limited by the scans you could get done of slide film as it was processed. People had limited size screens, bandwidth of internet connections was very limited, and storage space for the images was expensive.

My first digital camera had 3.1 megapixels: 2160 x 1440 pixels.
At the time, screen resolutions were generally 800 x 600 pixels, maybe 1024 x 768.
So I down-sampled the images to what felt like a good compromise between resolution and file size.

In the following decade, digital SLR sensors rocketed up in resolution by a factor of 10 or more. So a modern Canon dSLR, the equivalent of my original D30, now has more like 20 megapixels: 5472 x 3648 pixels or so.

In the same time, bandwidth has gone up and storage speed has gone down. Screen resolutions have gone up a bit- a more routine screen size would now be 1600 x 1200 or 1920 x 1080 or so. A few high-res screens are getting up to 3840 x 2160 (the new iMac is even higher). But people are also viewing the site on mobiles and tablets whose resolution is still more like 800 x 600 pixels.

So in the modern era, it is worth me putting up full resolution pictures (6496 x 4872 for the Hasselblad) for people with “4K” or “UHD” screens and people who like to zoom in to see every little detail. But the download times are still significant for those, and it is overkill for anyone looking at the site on a mobile phone, so the regular size images (we settled on 1600×1200 pixels) are still right for a lot of people.

In the middle of all these huge technological changes, there was a point where some people had higher resolution screens or the desire to zoom in, or the desire to print out in high resolution for their own enjoyment. But connection speeds and the cost of storage space on the web server had not reached the point where it was a sensible or cost-effective proposition for me to put up ALL the shots from every set in full size and well as regular size.

So as a “treat” or bonus, I put up large versions of a few of the images from each set, the ones I thought were the best and the most striking.

When connection speeds and storage costs reached the stage that putting all the full-size versions up for each set was a sensible proposition, we started doing that.

So it is a historical accident of a point in time where it wasn’t possible to put up the full res versions of everything but people had expressed interest in having them for at least some photos in each set.

If time or money were in greater supply, I’d probably go back over all the old sets and reprocess them to get full-sized versions of all the archive sets done as well. Unfortunately that’s very time consuming and the returns on doing so would probably not be a sensible business proposition. I might do that if I ever retire from shooting new stuff, but until then, the new stuff has to take priority!

Cheers, Hywel.

I think it is more to do with my anal inability to let go of doing the final pass on all the photos myself, to make sure they look the way I want them to look. Although I sometimes let go of the airbrushing part of the job (indeed I have tried farming that out to other people in the past) the final colour correction and look-and-feel pass, the little adjustments to each shot and the overall look applied to the set… I just want to do myself.

Sadly no algorithm or instructions to anyone else can quite get over the “adjust so it looks RIGHT to Hywel’s eyes” process, I don’t think!

Cheers, Hywel

Thanks… I think the process is already automated as far as it can be (I’ve had a BIG incentive to search out efficient workflows, given the volume of photos we shoot each month).

Most of it is automated inside Hasselblad Phocus and Apple Aperture, for the stuff that remains relatively constant over photos in a set. I make the adjustments to things like colour temperature, tone curves, sharpening, vingette, etc. on one “typical” photo from the set then paste over all the others in the set. I then do a quick scan though by eye to match exposure levels and to crop if necessary.

For example closeup shots are almost always a stop underexposed compared with the rest (it’s a function of the way the optics work, despite the nominal constant aperture). Shots from opposite sides of the model might look more consonant with a third of a stop difference, etc.. Again this is all automatable- find one prototype shot and paste the settings onto others.

The airbrushing has to be done shot by shot. Typically I smooth out skin blemishes aiming for the final shot looking like the model on a really good day. So I try not to remove moles and similar distinguishing features but would get rid of bruises, zits and scrapes. I do sometimes remove moles as well but usually only do so if the lighting is causing undue prominence. I try to be fair to one’s visual impression of the model- if the light is making a mole look like a mountain, but you wouldn’t even notice it to meet her in real life, I’ll try to tone it down a little in photos.

I run most photos through a very very light skin smoothing pass as well, using an automated plug-in with the settings turned pretty much down to minimum. This is really just to give a nicer basis for the airbrushing step, and to even out some of the unfairly harsh effect the lack of an anti-aliasing filter on the Hasselblad sensor can have on skin, especially in closeups. I don’t consider this to be cheating because most other cameras do the same effect optically with their low-pass filters, so I’m just reproducing the look in a more controlled fashion in post.

Keywording, selecting previews for sets etc. is all done in Aperture too, as is the final export step which includes all the resizing, adding logos, etc. – all automated already.

Cheers, Hywel.