I’d like to gently suggest that when taking photos of chips—whether for pr0n or for classified ads—we all do each other a favor, and resist the urge to bump up the saturation, heighten the contrast, and overexpose the lighting to make our barrels and racks look juicier.
There are times when I see someone posting pr0n of a type of chip I myself own, and I absolutely can tell that those chips don’t look the way they are represented... Even in minty condition, or after deep cleaning and careful oiling to bring out the color.
Other times, I’ve noticed two unrelated members posting pics of a very specific type of chip. One member’s barrel has outrageously deep base colors and beautifully contrasting secondary spots. But the other’s chips look really blah. It’s obvious this stark difference is not due to condition, or oiling, or camera type, but due to one member going nuts in Photoshop, and the other uploading pics unfiltered.
Since I know some will say, “Why should anyone care?,” I’ll give some reasons below.
One general concern involves misrepresentation of chips for sale or trade. I don’t see this done a lot, but it can happen. The more widespread problem comes when one is trying to research chips you might want to add to a collection.
Say I’m looking for just the right spotted purple THC to use as a 500 chip in a tourney set. I start searching past sales posts, pr0n posts and galleries for media that shows the universe of options. I come across something that looks perfect—with a shade that really pops. (I hate it when a purple 500 chip is too dark, and starts to get confused with black 100s, especially in low light.) But the picture I’m looking at has been filtered so aggressively that I can’t tell what the chips really look like.
There’s a big difference between trying to color-correct your own photos so they look right vs. totally misrepresenting the true appearance of a barrel, rack, or collection—whether to make them look more valuable, or just for one’s own glory.
Look, it can be hard to take a truly natural photograph. All kinds of things can go wrong: A low-quality lens. Overly warm or cold light. Glare. Underexposure. The list is very long; even official color charts from chip manufacturers don’t necessarily represent colors fairly.
Also, to be charitable, people’s monitor settings, tablet settings, phone settings, what have you, can be way off, so they may not even realize how “wrong” their pics are.
And I want to emphasize that I’m not calling out any members in particular, because the point here is not who is doing it, but what is being done. The most aggressive Photoshoppers already know who they are; and the rest of us have surely noticed their filtering habits as well. Meanwhile, almost all of us have made a few edits to chip photos, for one reason or another. To some extent, we’re all part of the problem.
I myself have used my preferred Photoshop alternative (Pixelmator) to make minor corrections to chip pics—such as removing pieces of iint from the felt. There have also been times where I’ve felt my iPhone camera did not properly capture the colors of the chips, so I do some small tweaks to the saturation, contrast, exposure, &c., so that they look more accurately in the photo like they look to me in person.
Some may say that each of us has our own responsibility to obtain samples before making any significant purchase, and it’s our own fault if we rely on someone else’s amateur photographs. But for the community (especially classifieds) to work, we often have to rely on each other’s photographs. So I do think there is a mutual, shared interest among chippers to try to take good photos which accurately depict how our collections or sales really look, not some fantasy version of how they might ideally look.
There are times when I see someone posting pr0n of a type of chip I myself own, and I absolutely can tell that those chips don’t look the way they are represented... Even in minty condition, or after deep cleaning and careful oiling to bring out the color.
Other times, I’ve noticed two unrelated members posting pics of a very specific type of chip. One member’s barrel has outrageously deep base colors and beautifully contrasting secondary spots. But the other’s chips look really blah. It’s obvious this stark difference is not due to condition, or oiling, or camera type, but due to one member going nuts in Photoshop, and the other uploading pics unfiltered.
Since I know some will say, “Why should anyone care?,” I’ll give some reasons below.
One general concern involves misrepresentation of chips for sale or trade. I don’t see this done a lot, but it can happen. The more widespread problem comes when one is trying to research chips you might want to add to a collection.
Say I’m looking for just the right spotted purple THC to use as a 500 chip in a tourney set. I start searching past sales posts, pr0n posts and galleries for media that shows the universe of options. I come across something that looks perfect—with a shade that really pops. (I hate it when a purple 500 chip is too dark, and starts to get confused with black 100s, especially in low light.) But the picture I’m looking at has been filtered so aggressively that I can’t tell what the chips really look like.
There’s a big difference between trying to color-correct your own photos so they look right vs. totally misrepresenting the true appearance of a barrel, rack, or collection—whether to make them look more valuable, or just for one’s own glory.
Look, it can be hard to take a truly natural photograph. All kinds of things can go wrong: A low-quality lens. Overly warm or cold light. Glare. Underexposure. The list is very long; even official color charts from chip manufacturers don’t necessarily represent colors fairly.
Also, to be charitable, people’s monitor settings, tablet settings, phone settings, what have you, can be way off, so they may not even realize how “wrong” their pics are.
And I want to emphasize that I’m not calling out any members in particular, because the point here is not who is doing it, but what is being done. The most aggressive Photoshoppers already know who they are; and the rest of us have surely noticed their filtering habits as well. Meanwhile, almost all of us have made a few edits to chip photos, for one reason or another. To some extent, we’re all part of the problem.
I myself have used my preferred Photoshop alternative (Pixelmator) to make minor corrections to chip pics—such as removing pieces of iint from the felt. There have also been times where I’ve felt my iPhone camera did not properly capture the colors of the chips, so I do some small tweaks to the saturation, contrast, exposure, &c., so that they look more accurately in the photo like they look to me in person.
Some may say that each of us has our own responsibility to obtain samples before making any significant purchase, and it’s our own fault if we rely on someone else’s amateur photographs. But for the community (especially classifieds) to work, we often have to rely on each other’s photographs. So I do think there is a mutual, shared interest among chippers to try to take good photos which accurately depict how our collections or sales really look, not some fantasy version of how they might ideally look.
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