Photo-Chop: What You See Is Not What You Get

revhtree

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Have you ever shopped online and purchased a coral that looked extremely bright and full of color only to receive a dulled down version? It has you question whether your tank husbandry is out of whack and makes you second guess your light choice. The truth is that you probably do have the exact coral from the photograph. The lights they use are probably equivalent or less than yours. After all, most businesses try to save money. They also find ways to make money. One of the most successful way to make us drool is with a coral that looks as bright as a bag of Skittles.

4.jpg
obvious photoshop coloring job of some palys

5.jpg
original true to the color photo of the sunnyd paly

The “technique” has been labeled “Photo-Shopping,” though nowadays people just use smartphone photo editing apps.

Benefits of Editing

Better Photos: Personally, I have a heck of a time getting my camera to capture what my eyes see. The blue channel always seems to overpower the white, thus making terrible photos without doing a few things with the lights before snapping the shot…or I can easily take the picture and then adjust the photo afterwards to make the picture look more real.

Finer Detail: With the color no longer drowned out you can see much more deeply into the flesh of fish and coral. Things show up much more clear on the rock and glass as well.

6.jpg

macro image of an encrusting montipora polyps

Better Focus: “Can you I.D. this zoomed out picture of a boatload of stuff?” These kinds of photos are generally not very helpful. With a quick edit you can crop, zoom, and even blur the areas you are not referring to. This helps others determine the focal point of your picture and makes life for everyone much easier.

Problems With Editing

WAY TO GOOD Photos: extreme color manipulation can fool some of the best of us. Most of the time it is to help sell a coral but some people just have fun making pictures. These are cool if you are not using the finished product to trick people into buying something they assume is a color explosion.

7.jpg

super saturated editing

Terrible Quality: Too much editing can take away from the original details. Not only does color change, but so does contrast and even pixelation if zoomed too closely.

Lower The Bar!

With all these Photo-Chopped corals for sale, there comes an equal amount of angry customers, especially when they are paying for nothing more than a digital color morphing and not an actual bright colored coral. This is a form of fibbing. If you are in any way apart of photo enhancing for profit you are hurting more people than you know. A coral enthusiast is more than happy to pay extra for a coral that is REALLY bright, but when one drops a stack of cash and receives the dulled down version it lowers the chance of them returning to your store.

Drop the price a little and do not add extra colors that just aren’t there to begin with. If anything, learn how to do color morphing in a future article! If you can’t wait for that publication you can always check out the forum! We have been physically morphing corals since before “Photo-Chopping” was popular.
 
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droblack

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Nice article regarding an ongoing issue. It is funny how there is so much emphasis on color, and much less on getting a clear or accurate shot. Some of my favorite old coral shots were taken in sunlight, with very little to no processing. Colors do not have to be all that crazy to make a nice shot. Reality can actually be awesome.
 
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Worldwide reefs

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Very good article and issue, hopefully by bringing these issues to peoples attention we can slowly carve a path to a better online shopping experience for everyone!
 

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Unfortunately is seems to have become the norm in the hobby by most vendors and they only reason it continues is because hobbyist buy into it. For example, a hobbyist will post a photo of a certain coral they just purchased and everyone jumps on board saying oohh ahhh when its blatantly obvious the photo is saturated to the point that it's not possible any coral has those colors.
Stop buying into and it will come to an end.
 

bct15

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Seems to be most prevalent in the hyping of zoas and chalices...and then people are like yeah this a true to life pic, I seem them in his tank they look just like that.
 

SeattleReef

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This is an on going concern. I contacted one of the Vedas I bought from that I know does this. No changed occurred. I no longer am a customer.
 

SeattleReef

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This is an on going concern. I contacted one of the Vendors I bought from that I know does this. No change occurred. I no longer am a customer.
 

Velodog2

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I don't have much experience buying from online vendors, but I do visit their sites frequently for the polyp ****. You can tell after a while who "optimizes" their colors and by how much. I enjoy looking at these pics, but would be cautious in purchasing from them. A notable exception that I have actually purchased from is Pacific Aquaculture East. They buck the trend of pricey, named corals and color enhanced pics. As a result their offerings can look kind of dull by comparison and their sales might suffer as a result. But I can say that the stuff I've gotten from them looks EXACTLY like the photos when I get it into my tank, which has a reasonably balanced lighting setup that does not look like windex.
 

Tradewinds

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Good article Rev. I have seen a similar trend at frag swaps, where sellers will place corals under what amounts to a black light, to make the corals pop.
 

that Reef Guy

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Good article Rev. I have seen a similar trend at frag swaps, where sellers will place corals under what amounts to a black light, to make the corals pop.

The other side of the coin is if you do not use Blue Light you will not sell Corals.

For instance all my previous Swaps everyone used Blue Lights except the very last one I went too.

I actually stopped going to the LFS the day I went to my first Swap because I could not believe the amazing Corals I saw.

Now after leaving the very last Swap I went to I was very very disappointed and said it was the worst Swap ever.

But looking back one thing I didn't realize was only one person there was using Blue Lights and guess where all my money went.

Now I know all about Blue lights and I know the Corals there will not look as good in my tank.

But since all the Corals looked bad at the Swap I would not buy them because I knew they would even be worse when I got them home..

My brain is programmed to follow this.

So I actually like the Blue lights as I get more Coral.

Had the Blue LED Light thing never happened I would have never had this problem but it did and it cannot be undone.

I also set up one of my Tanks to be Blue only to mimic the frag swaps (I call the color Frag Swap Blue).

Is it desceptive, yes.

But once you get burned a couple of times you realize that and get over it.

I miss seeing all the sweet corals at swaps and online.

Now I do not even visit alot of the sites because the Corals do not look nice anymore.

So believe it or not I like Frag Swap Blue.

Even if you think it is deceptive it is foolish not to do it because you will loose money from not selling corals.

If you can't beat them join them.
 
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Beradd

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Great article! thank you, as an artist its always frustrating to see people misrepresent anything thru photoshop. "give it to us raw and wriggling"
 

Tradewinds

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...Even if you think it is deceptive it is foolish not to do it because you will loose money from not selling corals.

If you can't beat them join them.

I disagree. My money goes to the honest seller.

It is a slippery slope. Could injecting dye into corals be the next step?
 
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revhtree

revhtree

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I didn't write this article but my take on it is pretty simple.

1. If you're using photoshop and crazy colors to misrepresent corals for sale then it's wrong.

2. If you're using crazy blue colors in your tank because you like how corals look, then rock on! Me too!
 
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revhtree

revhtree

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BTW Please do not bring any names or companies into this. This article is for educational purposes.
 

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I didn't write this article but my take on it is pretty simple.

1. If you're using photoshop and crazy colors to misrepresent corals for sale then it's wrong.

2. If you're using crazy blue colors in your tank because you like how corals look, then rock on! Me too!

I could not agree more. If you use blue lights to and let people know what lights are being used to take photos there is no misrepresentation of whats being sold. Using blue lights that make the coral pop and over saturating is two completely different things. One is honest while the other not so much.
 
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