Akos Simon
Fashion Photographer
W magazine’s Editor Frank de Jesus in New York once wrote :
Akos is a top beauty photographer based in New York City. Akos’ clean, sensual, and accessible style of photography has graced the pages of Vogue, Elle, and Harper’s Bazaar.
Raised in Switzerland by a Hungarian father and Italian mother, Akos started out studying physics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Introduced to photography by his photographer father, Akos had a chance meeting with Helmut Newton which convinced him to follow his passion. After assisting in Paris for one year, Akos found himself back in Switzerland working for cosmetics giant Nivea. London was to follow, and eventually New York.
Devoting most of his attention to beauty would garner many rewards; Akos has worked with top brands such as L’oreal, Maybelline, Clairol, Wella, Nivea, and Nordstrom. With his artful touch and flair for the sublime, Akos Simon has truly carved a niche for himself in the world of fashion and beauty.
Frank de Jesus
400$ for software and hardware ? Hmmmmm.... i own a Photo spectrometer from GRETAG (...sadly now its called in the USA X-Rite, in Switzerland , where GRETAG is from, GRETAG still exists ,...BTW!!....) i paid up around 5'000 USA dollars. it worked well, ...actually very very well. This here seems to be a joke,.... consider the girls on this picture, .... and their outfit.... unless this is an April 1st joke.... i don't know what is real here,.... but one thing is certain: I WOULD NEVER INVEST A CENT INTO THIS PACKAGE HERE.... X-RITE has definitely gone down the PORN avenue here... Akos SImon
Interesting would be, if you would test different CRi values (higher than 95) on these powerful LED lamps at same settings you did here so very nicely in your studio . .. so it would be consistent all the time. Yours here have a very low CRI color values it seems. Although LED's are seemingly brighter, the tint they have, are impossible to remove in Film editing software .
let me explain :
First: Cri values are technically "NOT" applicable to LED lights, (contrary to common believe), Cri value is solely applicable to Fluorescent Lights for which it was invented, and additionally , such a Cri Number is "NOT" Spectroradiometer measured , but its a mere, rough and only subjective (human person) measurement, guessed by the Human Eye of a Person, (what a farce, right?).
It still would be interesting to see how they perform in your tests here, if you were to test/buy LED lights with a high Cri value of 95 and above. (do they exist yet?)
this video, which is part of a series of videos about LED in Film and Photography , explains it more technically :
https://youtu.be/W0dIIIJjkas
There are newer color values measurements Units around then the old Cri , but sadly not many are talking about this norms yet, and consequently the masses are not using this newer color standards yet neither.
Spectroradiometer ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectroradiometer ) : thats a machine which measures not only the Kelvin values as well as the brightness, but more specifically measures the missing colors as well, in contrast to a better known Photospectrometer, wrongly used here for that matter, and usually only used to calibrate monitors and printing machines, which most think so very wrongly , is the measuring hardware to be using here on LED's.
The results with your Color-meter here miss the point of LED problems, which are those muddy colors, originating from missing in-between colors.
Only a Spectroradiometer ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectroradiometer ) can measure these color amounts in each specific wavelengths.
It would be amazing if you would redo these tests scientifically correct, may be with the help of a Physics Professor from NYU, for example?
Again: why this is so incredibly interesting is, because LED almost always misses colors in-between the colors that a tungsten light would have no problem to create, and the editing & color grading in LED lit video/filmclips, with any of these film softwares out there, is almost impossible, for these clips are missing those colors in-betweens in LED lights, which ends up only creating a muddy color tint , usually not fixable in postproduction yet . A simple more understandable example is this: Imagine you have only a red bulb a blue bulb and a yellow bulb in that studio, now turn these on, and film a persons face. the colors would be horrible, for they are missing in-between colors. There is no software in the world (yet) that can generate in-between colors which would Fix those missing in-between colors that LED lights create.