Learn to see value.
Value studies are simple by design, but complex in nature. Value Lab takes your photo and gives you a carefully chosen set of tools that combine freely to create studies as simple or as deep as your practice demands.
Value Lab Paradigm
Value perception is genuinely complex, with no single right answer. Light and your eye measure "how bright is this?" directly, while file encodings, color profiles, device displays and even the paint you mix all answer this differently. A naive approach to solving this problem introduces bias right into your learned relationships!
The features in this app are very specifically and carefully chosen, and every single aspect has been calculated. The app's controls are the discovered dimensions of a very large problem space, rather than arbitrary settings added without contemplating their true relationship to the problem.
Value Lab also uses custom algorithms that do not exist in other value-seeing tools, which generally use very crude averaging and simplification methodologies.
I hope you enjoy using the app, and reach out if you have a question!
FEEL the Understanding of Shape Design
Histogram Compression
Every photo has a unique thumbprint of tonal values which can be compressed into a series of buckets.
Value Simplification
The final colors in your value study represent a creative mapping to these compressed value buckets.
Shape Simplification
Value masses can be simplified to create beautiful and harmonious composition.