Daub

I teach 3D modelling and rendering and also drawing and oil painting.

Many time in my traditional media classes I will use the term ambient occlusion (AO) and describe it in exactly the same way as I would to my 3D class. Specifically, I ask them to imagine being surrounded by a sphere of even light. In such a case, where would the shadows be? I follow this by discussing contact shadow (e.g. the dark line between your hands as they are placed together) and core shadow (e.g. the darkness of your nostrils). In 3D rendering, both these classes of shadows are served by the AO pass.

Certainly, I would say that AO is a natural phenomenon, but it is also an effect that can be used to sweeten the naturally flat effect of a raster engine like Eevee.

old school comic artists used gouache for the fact that it was easy to photo reproduce (no reflection) and easy to correct. The comic artist Glen Fabrey still uses gouache. digital artists miss out on a lot of nuance unless they really know what they are doing.

Whoops. Sorry. That last sentence should have been deleted.

My experience was a year spent working as a forester. One of our duties was to keep the wood burning stoves supplied. I remember learning that ash got its name from the fact that it burned so well, and willow left perfect charcoal.

As for the axe handle… I was told off by my boss for mashing up the handle by my constant missing. Even now, I am the same with hammers and nails - not nearly as sure with my aim as I should be. On the plus side That was also the time I learned how to replace an axe handle. also the time that

Experienced wood splitter here. All your points are valid. I had to ruin one perfectly good axe handle before I learned how to swing. However, the sim is still a lot of fun.

> if you're fascinated by things that burn and explode, this book is not for you.

Translation… ‘read me now!’

Been there. Im gonna guess that 90% of HN folk have similar stories to tell.

Unfortunately, we are unlikely ever to see any of Delecroix’s paintings as they were intended to be seen. Fading pigments and other factors make this true for every painting, but doubly true for Delecroix as he used a lot of new pigments that were very unstable.

There is the story of Degas standing weeping with sadness in front of The death of sardenopolis at the way its colors had faded over time.

> You seem to be very focused on color.

Guilty as charged. However,... from a certain point of view image editing is all about color. I guess the exception would be Adobes new generation of object selection tools, which are hard to best. DaVinci has such tools but they are more suited to editing movies.

Yes, it would work like that. Moreover, the adjustments concatenate. In other word if a node darkens an image to the point of blackness, the following node can restore the original brightness.

That being said, the new photo editing functionality of DaVinci is not the smoothest. The DaVinci app is a bit of a Frankenstein. The editor is a development laid on top of the original DaVinci color app. The audio page (Fairlight) and the VFX module (Fusion) were purchases which were acquired and 'glued on'. Moving from one to the other can be clunky - though not as bad an experience as Adobe's dynamic links.

Are you referring to Lightroom's masking capability? Indeed, even in Photoshop it is possible to select a color and perform a masked adjustment. Lightroom's selection/masking tools are pretty good and for basic tasks it is fine, but the masking workflow is (IMHO) fundamentally limited. DaVinci's nodes can be stacked on top of each other and the per-hue adjustments are live. Also... I gotta say that the visualization the DV's tools offer is far superior. At a glance I can see the range of hue that have been selected as well as the degree of change they are being subject to.

FYI, In DV it is possible to edit hue to hue, hue to saturation, hue to luminesce, luminesce to saturation, saturation to saturation and saturation to luminesce. There is also the amazing chroma warp, using which near arbitrary color adjustments can be made. Nothing out there comes even close to that capability. No wonder most Hollywood movies are color graded in DV.

Thanks for pointing that out. You are indeed correct. However, from what I can see DaVinci's tools still have the edge. With Capture One the feedback on what hues have been selected is far vaguer than I would like. Moreover, the node-based workflow is far more suitable for complex adjustments.

Repeating a point I made in another comment: in DV it is possible to edit hue to hue, hue to saturation, hue to luminesce, luminesce to saturation, saturation to saturation and saturation to luminesce. There is also the amazing chroma warp, using which near arbitrary color adjustments can be made. Nothing out there comes even close to that capability. No wonder most Hollywood movies are color graded in DV.

I believe that DaVinci’s edge is the excellent masking and node based editing it offers (via the color page) and the insanely powerful hue tools. Neither Lightroom nor Potatoshop has effective hue tools - e.g. selectively change the hue or the saturation of a color except in the most primitive way.