I wanted to point out how easy modern photo and video editing tools make it to boost up the colors of images beyond reality these days. Some phones even do this sort of thing automatically - "vivid color mode" and things like that often just mean set the Saturation to 10000. That really boosts the colors you can see, but if you're trying to show how a coral looks in reality to your eyes they're not the best idea. Cameras can pick up colors that we just can't see with our eyes, and editing makes them visible.
That's saying nothing about folks who purposely mess around with the colors of things to try to make a sale. I think we do a great job of weeding these folks out as a hobby - but they're out there. It's easy to go into an image editor and change just one color to something else - a blue Acropora tort into a purple one, for instance. Or an Acropora with bright green tips into one with bright orange tips. When you get the coral, it'll be "stressed from shipping" and you'll just wonder when it'll color up for you.. never realizing that the original colors you saw never existed anyway.
Here's one of my Acropora, pushed a little bit to show the colors but not really far beyond reality. You can see the coral more or less like this in my tank in person.
And here's the same image but pushed a lot further in editing. I pushed the contrast, saturation, clarity, and sharpened the fine detail some.
It's the same coral, just with the colors pushed a lot more. It's @inktomi's crazy rainbow acro! You can see how people might fall into this trap, who WOULDN'T want their corals to look like this in photos? And that's fine for build threads and such - but not when we're selling frags. It's not honest to show a photo like that and set up the expectation that you could get the coral to look the same in your tank.
And this isn't even getting into changing the colors in the photo. There are people out there who's entire job it is to work on color in images - if that sounds interesting, look into becoming a colorist! Here's the same photo, but a lot more artistically edited. We're nowhere near reality at this point, but would you notice that if I just posted this photo in a thread?
Have you ever seen such a crazy rainbow Acro!?!!?
That's saying nothing about folks who purposely mess around with the colors of things to try to make a sale. I think we do a great job of weeding these folks out as a hobby - but they're out there. It's easy to go into an image editor and change just one color to something else - a blue Acropora tort into a purple one, for instance. Or an Acropora with bright green tips into one with bright orange tips. When you get the coral, it'll be "stressed from shipping" and you'll just wonder when it'll color up for you.. never realizing that the original colors you saw never existed anyway.
Here's one of my Acropora, pushed a little bit to show the colors but not really far beyond reality. You can see the coral more or less like this in my tank in person.
And here's the same image but pushed a lot further in editing. I pushed the contrast, saturation, clarity, and sharpened the fine detail some.
It's the same coral, just with the colors pushed a lot more. It's @inktomi's crazy rainbow acro! You can see how people might fall into this trap, who WOULDN'T want their corals to look like this in photos? And that's fine for build threads and such - but not when we're selling frags. It's not honest to show a photo like that and set up the expectation that you could get the coral to look the same in your tank.
And this isn't even getting into changing the colors in the photo. There are people out there who's entire job it is to work on color in images - if that sounds interesting, look into becoming a colorist! Here's the same photo, but a lot more artistically edited. We're nowhere near reality at this point, but would you notice that if I just posted this photo in a thread?
Have you ever seen such a crazy rainbow Acro!?!!?