Ahhh..Where to take this....Did Lee Harper put you up to this??
The PPW has many good points and quite a few flaws; even Dan M has admitted that...remember that PPW was originally designed as a quick and dirty work flow for fast processing of large amounts of images. It is becoming somewhat of a standard for some very good reasons but it also is part of a race to the bottom philosophy; in that speed is used as an excuse for automation; and in most cases quality is suffering. To get over that loss Dan has begun advocating multiple versions that are to blended together to form a "best of" image. Why not do it right the first time?
Some things I have noticed about using the PPW Panel:
In most cases it does go too far but that is intentional. The line of thought seems to be flatten the tonality and open the shadows as far as possible. This leaves room for a later color and contrast "boost". The HK effect comes into play because the supersaturation that occurs in the MFM and color "boost" steps; over saturates the entire image not just the color ranges you want to "boost". The workflow tries to get around this by forcing a selection on you to protect a hue range from the boost but this is in many cases insufficient to protect the areas most effected by the HK effect.
Many of the steps PPW takes are not even necessary if you use CM. There is a whole different approach that will do the job. It is more of a blend of some of the layer techniques from PPW and using CM to for some of the tonal and color adjustments. I have been writing a whole class around this and I will be bringing more information out later this year. <Sorry for the teaser> Most of you have seen all or part of this in the changes in my work flow. The best part of the CM process is that there is no guess work and you make solid choices based on measured values.
Greg
