I was uncertain whether this post should have the title I gave it or “Till Gray Do Us Part”. I’ve chosen the standard formula to echo the Italian version: “Questi, che mai da me non fia diviso”. That is Dante’s Inferno, of course. But, really, I am going to discuss an aspect of Lab which is very well known but, I suspect, sometimes ill-understood. Moreover, I’ve drawn the conclusion that gray couldn’t really part anything, because it only represents equilibrium instead – but before you call 911 I suggest you to read on.

(This article was originally released on marcoolivotto.com on March 9, 2014.)

A few months ago, a new and exciting Photoshop book appeared on the scene. It was written by Russell Brown — yet not that Russell Brown of Adobe fame. Our own man is an Australian photographer whom I (virtually) met while working on the beta-reading of the latest Dan Margulis’ book — Modern Photoshop Color Workflow. Shortly after such task was finished, I and Alessandro Bernardi got an e-mail from Russell and we were asked to become the beta-readers for his own book — which he was just starting to write. We were very glad to help out and therefore had the privilege to be among the first to read and discuss the contents of Paths to Artistic Imaging in Photoshop.

Black-and-white is pleasure and pain for any photographer – even those who don’t actually use it. About six months ago I stumbled into an interesting technique to convert a color image to B&W and wrote an article about it: it was Gorman-Holbert’s method. Such article spawned  two more, one of which further expanded this technique.

Did you know that everytime you write the word Google you’re actually writing a number? I am not talking about the IP address, but if someone at some point hadn’t written it wrong, today we would not be searching Google, but Googol. I don’t know how much of an urban myth the story is, but it seems that the guy instructed to register googol.com spelled it wrong and registered google.com

One man, millions of ideas

Does anyone remember Bertrand Russell? He’s always been one of my heroes because he was not afraid of doubt. Philosopher, logician, author of the Principia Mathematica with Alfred North Whitehead, Nobel Prize for literature at the age of 78: “in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought”. His well-known antinomy known as Russell’s Paradox shook the foundations of mathematics and started ramifications which are maybe not yet fully understood (it is enough to mention the two incompletness theorems stated by Kurt Gödel in order to solve the problem). He died in 1970, aged 97, so he didn’t live long enough to know Photoshop. Yet I think that if he were alive he would have something to say on some preconceptions which cross our field, and he would whip into place several wrong ideas we’ve been living with for too long.

(This article was originally released on marcoolivotto.com on April 13, 2013.)

By uncanny coincidence, it’s been exactly five-years-and-a-half ago, because the day was October 12th, 2007. The place was Foyles, Charing Cross Road, London – maybe the largest bookstore in Europe, and I was with my mother. It was the beginning of a trip delayed for years which I sort of forced her to take before she became too old to enjoy it. I had always wanted her to visit London, and we had left in the morning of the previous day: October 11th, her birthday.

(This article was originally released on marcoolivotto.com on September 9, 2012. It was the first article I wrote in English for that blog.)

So… a new start!

All the original articles in this blog were originally written in Italian, yet I received enough requests to translate them into English that I decided to oblige. I start from this article which, curiously, was the most impromptu article I ever wrote: someone posted something in the CCC – Color Correction Campus group on facebook and when I saw it I went into Auto Write mode. The whole thing was written in less than a couple of hours. If you’re interested in what it is about, read on.

About a month ago, namely on the 6th of August, the vehicle called Curiosity Rover (AKA MSL – Mars Science Laboratory) landed on Mars after a trip of about eight months. Among the scientific equipment it carries, the vehicle sports MastCam, an image capturing system which is actually formed by two cameras able to produce stereoscopic views. Dario Giannobile made a post on the CCC facebook group, pointing to an article which undoubtedly contains a reference to an operation of color correction performed on an image (in color) sent to the Earth by the Curiosity Rover.