Alchemy Color stems from an intense desire to achieve correct reproducibility with digital images. Faithfulness in reproducing reality is a moving target that eludes aesthetic trends as it stands on its own as a measurable, empirical process. My passion for systems of reproduction (audio/video/photo) became a profession 15 years ago. Since then, having a dependable set of tools for color transformations has been hard. Most of the options out there are arbitrary, trendy or plainly wrong. With this in mind I decided to make my own.
“Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed.”
Garry Winogrand
I want to see what my eyes see, not necessarily what the camera internal signal processing or the raw developer decides it’s supposed to look like. If I want to see that thing photographed, I want to minimise the color decisions along the way, hence the importance of calibration. I want to have control over the color look of my images. If I want to see the camera, then camera body emulations come to mind. Maybe I want a Sony camera producing images that look like a Fujifilm JPEG. This is also possible and will come out as a product later this year. The cameras we’re eying right now are: Fujifilm film emulations and Olympus E-400 CCD emulations.
Alchemy Color is the toolset that I wish I had found earlier in my photography career. Now, it’s here!