The written pieces
Six 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
- What the strength slider mixesStrength is a straight line between your photo and the full look, drawn in sRGB; here is the same mix in linear light, on four real colours.The mix, the alternative, and the numbers
- What is inside a .cube fileThe header, the size, the rows red-first, and why grain and vignettes can never travel in a LUT.One real file, read line by line
- The interpolation recordEvery look measured against the exact maths at three table sizes, trilinear against tetrahedral — a dated null result, and why we kept trilinear.The method, the numbers and the decision
- What a filter remover can and cannot undoWhich part of 'remove this filter' can honestly be done, how our remover measures it, and nine test results.Casts, fades and split tones in; smoothing and clipping out
- Why filtered photos get rejectedWhat passport, visa and exam rules say about altered photos, with sources and dates, and what to upload instead.The rules, the reason, and the fix
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.