ECC Hybrid Watermelon...

[Reef Pets]

I hope that you dont mond me white balancing your photo, its a nice photo. If you do mind just let me know and I will delete it from this thread.
Anyhow, this is just a white balance. I would assume that Jim from ECC done the same thing. The only reason I think this is because his fingers in the photo are white, no blue color to them.
I am posting this photo just to show what white ballance will do to a photo. White ballance takes the blue color created from your lighting out of the photo.
Gary

 

[Sikryd]

What did you do to do that Gary?
That is pretty slick, I like that.
I want to try it on some of my pictures to see if it helps it stay true to life. Taking pictures is a pain in the butt. I only have about 1 in 50 come out good. So I have tried to adjust the brightness and contrast on the ones that don't, but they don't turn out right.

 

[Reef Pets]

I have the cheap version of PhotoShop, Element. I custom set the White ballance on my camera so it gets the same results as seen above without altering it. Anyhow, I just used the auto ballance in Elements and that is the result. Thats probably about what it would look like under 12K with no actinics.

 

[Sikryd]

Okay - I just downloaded it and hit it with Photoshop CS3 - "auto levels" and it came out the same as your adjusted picture.

 

[Ian]

It looks nice and all but the pic I posted is what I see in the tank. You can white balance a photo all you want but that makes it what you see in a pic, not real life...

 

[Reef Pets]

CS-3 is much better than the version that I have. I have never personally used CS-3 but its much more advanced. I mainly just use Elements for cropping being that I do not shoot in RAW.

 

[Reef Pets]

I completely agree. Many times I think it comes down to lighting. With 12K Metal Halides the second picture would be pretty true to its color that you would see.
But, we (hobbyist) like to add blue to our tanks because it makes the lighter colors on coral pop! I like bluer lights myself, it makes most of the colors much more intense. On the other hand, whiter lighting can make many other colors intense.
This is where I think white balance comes into play. Its a happy medium when selling coral because its not too blue but then its not too white. Of course it will always look different from tank to tank due to the lighting difference.
But, thats a different story than what your thread is focused for. Ill try to stay on topic, a little A.D.D. kicking in.....

It looks nice and all but the pic I posted is what I see in the tank. You can white balance a photo all you want but that makes it what you see in a pic, not real life...

 

[Sikryd]

CS-3 is much better than the version that I have. I have never personally used CS-3 but its much more advanced. I mainly just use Elements for cropping being that I do not shoot in RAW.

I got it when I was taking a class in school.
I don't know how to use half the stuff on it though :( Its insane how much stuff it has that I could probably use - like making a border on my pictures and stuff, that unless someone shows you or you have the time to mess around with it, it just goes unused.
I took a class on it, and still only learned the parts that were needed for webdesign and graffics, no photo stuff - which sucks now.

A couple guys told me how to spot photo's that have been saturated and stuff, so I messed with the saturation slider and can see now what photos look like when you do that. :)

 

[Sikryd]

Just to show you how easy it is to adjust things and make things look 10x better than they really are.


Here is the same picture with a little doctoring of
Auto levels
Lightness down
Saturation up
Hue down

 

[Sikryd]

Got any frags of that Ian? ;) lol

 

[Reef Pets]

Yep, it takes baout 5 seconds to completely change the photo into something that its not. There are MANY vendors/sellers that use those 5 seconds to take peoples money.

 

[Ian]

Got any frags of that Ian? ;) lol

Now that it looks that nice, it's double the price :snicker:

 

[Sikryd]

Now that it looks that nice, it's double the price :snicker:

LOL

You don't want to know how many corals I got that were enhanced like that. It is ridiculous.

I don't mind the booger frags if I am not smart enough to ask for a picture of the frag, but down-right fraud is what gets me.

I understand that there is THOUSANDS of dollars in profit, otherwise there wouldn't be 60+ vendors on here and who knows how many on RC - not to mention all of the guys that do it on the side. But there has to be a point where some of these vendors/people are held accountable for the lies and fraud that they are spreading with doctored pictures.
That is exactly what it is btw - FRAUD - in case you were wondering.

When I am paying $200-$300+ for an item, whatever that item may be, better be EXACTLY as the picture shows. This is the ONLY business I now of where companies are getting away with defrauding customers, then blaming it on lighting, tank conditions, ect. Its easy to weasle out that way, unless people stand up and say something about it.
It CAN'T be different in all of our tanks, with all kinds of lighting configurations. It falls back on the doctored picture.
:sure:

 

[amore169]

I'd love to know how the Melting pot and Trops acid trip pictures were taken, cause I have never seen a frag or mini-colony that looked anything close to it.

I have both the Ktar Melting Pot and the Tropicorium Acid Trip and they don't look anything like the pics posted but they are small frags tough, will see what happens when they grow bigger.

 

[Sikryd]

I'd love to know how the Melting pot and Trops acid trip pictures were taken, cause I have never seen a frag or mini-colony that looked anything close to it.

I have both the Ktar Melting Pot and the Tropicorium Acid Trip and they don't look anything like the pics posted but they are small frags tough, will see what happens when they grow bigger.

Like it says on the Juicy corals site - it will look like this when it is 4in or something like that.

I know someone has a 4" one out there by now - if it was that bad butt, they would be posting pictures on all the sites with it.

I'd be more than happy to eat my words. I have no problem admitting when I am wrong. I have the melting pot too, so I would love to have some hope that it will turn out to be decent one day, especially since it cost $400.
IMO there are a lot of really nice chalices out there that are well worth the money, but there are a lot of vendors out there trying to capitalize on the success of those corals and colors with pieces that just aren't all that unless they are macroed and ps'ed.
At least in my not so quiet opinion.

 

[Ian]

I will say that I don't sell without a WYSIWYG picture although I did sell Amore some favias recently, at his request, and I can't recall if I sent him a pic or not...

I can say that he was happy though :D

 

[Sikryd]

I will say that I don't sell without a WYSIWYG picture although I did sell Amore some favias recently, at his request, and I can't recall if I sent him a pic or not...

We've all probably sold stuff without the greatest of photos or did some stuff that could be construed as not the greatest.
I just think it is about time someone starts talking and a discussion is brought up to help lead the hobby away from a huge misleading money making business back to the hobby that it should be.
I understand the business aspect totally, and can agree with $300 an eye corals, $100 1/2" Acros, $50 polyps, if they are sold with a true picture of what it is and what it looks like under normal lighting. If someone is willing to pay it, then it is worth it or more. I did, and still do. I have $15-$20k in corals, and am generally happy with all my purchases. I would have liked to have been given a choice as to what kind of photo I was buying from though.
I was a Corporate Sales Manager in Tokyo, doing 22m in business a year. So I understand all facets of the business from importing, to overhead, ect. ect. ect. - Thats all fine - what isn't is when business's choose to mislead their customers due to greed.
I don't care what company, products, or business that happens in, it is wrong anyway you look at it.

If you can't sustain your business while retaining business practices that are morally right, then you need to rethink your business model.

 

[amore169]

I will say that I don't sell without a WYSIWYG picture although I did sell Amore some favias recently, at his request, and I can't recall if I sent him a pic or not...

I can say that he was happy though :D

Bigian to be honest with u I would buy corals from u anytime without seeing them, ur reputation speaks for itself for people that have been in the hobby for a while. Ur the MAN.

 

[xmjxflipx]

+1 on that amore..........lol 90% of my tyree favias have come from bigian.....

 

[Salt Water Crazy]

The only one i have ever seen that comes close was Juniors pic and piece.

You can come by any time you want viva, and see it in my tank under 14k it looks like JR. pic 100% in my tank. I was one of the guys that it was split with JR. its about 2 inches now and is just getting the blue ish ring on the out side. I also have a frag of it that does not have the color yet it is about 3/4 inch.