Dan Margulis

George Tscherny 1924-2023

by Dan Margulis November 21, 2023

Last week we lost perhaps the last titan of the early digital era, a man, according to the headline on the New York Times obituary, “whose graphic designs defined an era.” I’m unable to endorse that phrase, because, like all such great artists, George Tscherny had an individual touch that nobody could copy with complete […]

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The 2023 Progress Award

by Dan Margulis October 17, 2023

My retirement was interrupted last month by one of my life’s happier experiences. In Williamsburg, Virginia, I accepted the Progress Award for 2023 from the Photographic Society of America. PSA has been around for 84 years and is likely the most prestigious such organization in our field. They state, “The Progress Award recognizes a person […]

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The Colors of the Pandemic Year 2022

by Dan Margulis December 26, 2021

“HINT: It’s inspired by the natural world’s ability to adapt and regenerate.” That was a major paint manufacturer, announcing that it would shortly name its 2022 Color of the Year. We tend to associate the term Color of the Year with Pantone, but many companies offer competing nominees, trying to predict the trends of the […]

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Books available for educational donation

by Dan Margulis January 7, 2021

Educational and cultural institutions whose students and patrons could make use of my two latest books now have an opportunity to obtain them in quantity at no charge, courtesy of the members of the Applied Color Theory group. This offer is good for January only and involves the books Modern Photoshop Color Workflow and On […]

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Ed Benguiat 1927-2020

by Dan Margulis November 1, 2020

On October 15 we lost the most prolific type designer of the second half of the twentieth century, Ed Benguiat, after 92 years of enjoying life. Having designed hundreds of faces, he was well adapted to any style. Most of his works were in the style of the 70s and 80s, which is not popular […]

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Test Your Correction Skills!

by Dan Margulis September 24, 2020

If you’d like to check out how your color correction skills stack up to those of others, including some top professionals, my online discussion group recently finished a series of case studies in which group members were asked to submit their versions of some images chosen to be at least mildly challenging/interesting. We did one […]

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Chevreul Meets Margulis: Now Available!

by Dan Margulis February 29, 2020

My update of M.E. Chevreul’s classic text On the Law of Simultaneous Contrast of Colors is finally available online. It was printed in late January; members of my discussion group were able to order it direct from the pressroom, which they did in surprising quantity. Our first shipment to Amazon sold out in four hours. […]

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Announcing a Modernized Classic

by Dan Margulis February 5, 2020

This is a pre-announcement of a book that is about to come on the market. You can’t order it for a few days yet, but you need to be on the lookout for the offer, because it’s going to be time-limited. After that, it will be available only on Amazon, which sometimes runs out of […]

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Applied Color Theory Group Finds a New Home

by Dan Margulis November 24, 2019

The Applied Color Theory list, which discusses matters of interest to my students, friends, and colleagues, has been operating since 1999. For almost the past twenty years it has resided at yahoogroups. After many years of deterioration, yahoogroups recently decided it would now become e-mail only, no images allowed. We have therefore moved the group […]

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Unexpected and Unpleasant Surprises (The MIT 5k dataset 9)

by Dan Margulis September 2, 2019

Previous postings evaluating how the Picture Postcard Workflow did compared to the retouching team on the MIT dataset established the obvious, that neither PPW nor any other workflow is the perfect solution every time. The question is, how do identify when PPW shouldn’t be expected to be better? Sometimes the image simply doesn’t have enough potential for […]

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