There is no good coffee.
I have a very platonic notion of coffee.
I enjoy it, although it’s bitter and often hot, sometime sour and more often that not, just foul.
For me, there exists a cup of ‘platonic’ espresso, in which everything is good, no bitterness, no scalding heat, no aftertaste of chlorine, no burnt beans, no old beans, just … you know, coffee.
It is my firm belief that any realisation of this platonic coffee can only take away from the perfect, ideal, platonic version of itself. Brewing a cup of coffee is a process in which you try your very best not to deviate too far away from the logos of coffee.
But recently, as my coffee brewing skills improve, I started enjoying coffee a bit more. May be even a bit too much. I solemnly confess that there were a couple of cups of espresso last week that I even found to be wholly enjoyable. No, no, this won’t do.
Much like the platonic and real coffee, digitised images suffer from a similar problem. That is, there is the ‘perfect image’, which is, obviously, the scene which was photographed by God, then there are ‘realisations’ of the image, which are taken by real cameras. At the very moment we take the picture, there are imperfections. Dynamic ranges are lost, colours and definitions are inaccurate, and so on.
This is entirely excusable. We do not want to blame the coffee farmers for not having the God’s One Coffee Tree. Camera manufacturer are good people, making a lot of money, having an interesting, satisfying job.
However, there is one chronic and inexcusable place in which to introduce further imperfections; and that is the rendering time – i.e., when the digitised image is displayed on the screen. It is akin to going through the trouble of getting the beans all the way from Java (where, as we all know, where God once planted his One Coffee Tree), then not having hot enough to water to brew the coffee.
I mean, imagine: A perfect moment happens somewhere in the universe. This moment is unique in space-time, nothing EVER, ANYWHERE will be exactly the same. It happens once.
Then there is the perfect photographer, who, using his powers of divination, predicted this event, and set up his camera.
When the moment came, he pressed the shutter. The clockwork of metal and plastic and copper and nylon, electrons and spring completes its circle within one one-hundred-and-twentieth of a second. Oh, no, Nikon engineers made a mistake, got past the QA person, it was more like one one-hundred-and-nineteenth of a second. Zeiss engineers, also, made an imperfection on the lens, which smudges lower right hand corner of the image, very slightly, almost unnoticeable. There was one speck of dust on the front element.
But the moment is captured. It has 14-bits per channel. There are three channels. There are more mega-pixels than there are brain cells in the average photoshop user.
The pain begins. Like every other aspect of photography (and coffee) the process is continuous subtraction from the perfection. The art of subtraction leading to its own, less Godly and more human perfection. As the roasting of the beans is the subtraction of the freshness, the cropping subtracts part of the perfection, leads to a more concentrated whole, and so on, and so forth.
And after hours, days, months of hard work and pain and blood and sweat, the product is ready…. and it’s a fucking jpeg.
It can display 256 levels of red.
Jesus Fucking Wept.
What’s funnier? The modern LCDs. You’re lucky if your panel can display more than 100 shades of pure red.
Ok, here’s the technical part of this blog:
1. Invent a file format that contains arbitrary bits per channel of colour (TIFF does that? good. I don’t know).
2. Given that the current generation of graphics can do only 8 bits per channel, but it can do 60 frames per second quite happily, we map the x-bit per channel into 8-bit, but randomise it over time. So when the average is taken over a second, it reproduces the original colour.
3. Add extra room for oscillation to cater for the shitty displays. The net effect will be a still photograph that looks like having motion-picture film-grain.
4. Not sure whether this will actually lead to a better looking image.
.J