The most dramatic improvement to my image quality was the discovery that our eyes have 120 million rods for tone, but only 6 million cones for colour. We don’t see the world in colour; we see it primarily through tone, by a massive 20:1 ratio. – A colour photograph is only the natural extension of a black & white workflow, not a different one. – My workflow embraces that biological reality. It challenges popular convention, and the results speak for themselves. Don’t create a colour image first. Create the light, 3D form and spatial distance as a black & white image first, then overlay the colour information last. – This gives your image a solid structural foundation that can’t be beaten. It transforms how you see, think, and create images, and it has a proven, science-based logic underlying it. – It’s why I call my workflow “The 20:1 Tonal System“.

The Science of Perception: I’ve separated the tonal and colour information: the tonal layer carries almost the entire image; the colour is only a thin overlay. Mathematically, colour accounts for only 20.5% of this image. – That’s why a good tonal structure is prioritised before colour.