Reef Raft SPS rant... Let's see real pics of your Reef Raft Pieces....

[albert_dao]

I'm just going to step in here for a sec. This topic really irks me, having seen several of my friends throw out thousands of $$$ over false advertising.

Just to use Bill's examples:



Here I've placed the two images side by side. Let's first hype the contrast and vibrancy by making modeling the levels after the source material. After a ton of tweaking, I end up with this:



At this point, we have an over saturation of white levels, so let's tone that down using the curves adjustments and some other tools. We'll also adjust the blues a little to compensate for the dominance of the reds:



Which gets us to here:



Average color sample for referrence:



For the record - getting from points A to B too no less than 15 adjustments using Levels, Color balance, Saturation, Hue, and multiple channel effects. There were a few instances where I dragged the slider from one end of the bar to the damn near the other end. IMO, I wouldn't be saying anything if I had gotten within 90% accuracy with just the white balance step.

Anyway, that's how I feel about this.

Edit: And the Wolverine (!!!!), don't even get me started on that one.

Edit #2: I'm just going to leave this here in case anyone is still under the illusion that the contextual surroundings of a featured corals are a reliable indicator of photo tampering: