Guides
The written pieces
Three of them, and they are all arguments rather than instructions.
A rail of thumbnails is very good at one thing and silent about everything else. It shows you what a look did to your photograph in about a second, which is more than any amount of prose can manage — and it cannot tell you why the eight greys disagree with each other, why a grade lands differently on a phone file than on one from a camera, or what to do when the fourth picture in a set will not sit with the other three. Those are the questions these pages take on.
They are meant to be read once and then not needed again. Each one argues a single position, says where that position stops holding, and points at the part of the tool it is about. If you only have time for one, the first is the one that decides whether this site is the right place for what you are trying to do at all.
- A look versus an effectOne question, asked of any filter you are offered, tells you whether it will change the colour of your photograph or rebuild what the photograph is made of — and which tool you actually want follows from the answer.The sorting test, and both answers taken seriously
- Black and white is a channel decisionEight monochrome looks, three numbers apiece, and why dragging saturation to nothing is the one route to grey that makes no decision at all.Channel weights, what each one darkens, and the Mono pack written out
- Making a set of photos matchWhat a single look at a single strength does across a run of frames, which photographs will refuse to cooperate, and where your own judgement has to come back in.The mechanism, the frames that fight it, and the repairs
And back to the instrument
None of this is much use without a photograph open in front of it. Both tool routes take the same file and the same strength control; the difference is only how much of the library the rail starts with.