what makes a group successful– goals, skills, personalities, relationship to the material.. relationships to each other..ability to gather information and human resources..
Two simplified distillations: one group succeded, the others didn’t/ haven’t.
Success group:
age, under 35. most in 20s
daily life, job, school: art or closely related field such as conservation
income is widely distributed: from miminum wage to mid-six figure.
committed to succeeding, knowing of other grouping failures.
intensely focused on researching details.
persistent interaction with possible sources, vendors. Establish ties to sales-marketing executives.
willing to exchange effort without claim
driven by art as experimental form of human nature: foundation impulse… very wide range of subjects, topics considered suitable for photography.
Other efforts lack most of the above ‘group’ and aesthetic components. They share financial extremes; they lack trust of other members. Never made the link to build a group buying fund. Not one group had someone to seed the business-to-distrbute and dissolve initiative. They work within a destroyed social trust.
The success group keypoint person even reached out to people on one of the cornerstone film forums only to be rebuffed.
asking googleAI to cite sources of expert information about dye transfer, limiting ‘errself to photrio, demonstrated the decay loop of knowledge. [ the know-how gap extinction ]
are you the party to whom I am speaking ?
Which AI are you using? Gemini is the model; AI Mode (search) is a feature of search relying upon Gemini. Search uses the existing web. By the way, this answer changed since I asked it a week ago. Hmm, go figure– I don’t use Gemini as an app, rather as part of the “browser. ” That stated, the following responses are from google browser based AI interactions. Internally, local to my machines, my name for those notes taken are marked “googAI, or gAI”
I wondered what photrio contributed to darkroom knowledge about processes I knew deeply; so much so that I worked with several people over 15 years of this decade to build out their personal dye transfer practice [OIC].
Q1: according to photrio, who are the top 3 dye transfer experts
R1– According to Photrio community discussions, Ctein, Jim Browning, and Charles Cramer are recognized as top experts in the complex, analog dye transfer printing process . [ not what I expected, but I see how my phrasing led to this answer ]
Over the prior weeks [july ’26], I’ve been questioning various AI engines about loss of knowledge, changes in information transfer modes, differences in group gatherings, reliance of unknown sources of knowledge, etc. — These topics, along with how AI engines are managed. In short, self awareness vs. conversational tactics.
R2 — Estimating the loss of information regarding dye transfer printing since the dawn of the internet era is a fascinating exercise in digital preservation, material scarcity, and the sociology of tacit knowledge. An estimation of this information loss can be structured across three key categories: Tacit Knowledge, Material/Formulation Data, and Digital Bit Rot.
Summary of Estimated Information Status — provided by gAI
Information Category
Estimated Loss Status
Where it Went / Why it Was Lost
Remaining Repositories
Industrial Formulas
🛑 ~90% Lost
Corporate data destruction; obsolete chemical supply chains.
Patent archives; deep corporate vaults.
Tacit “Lab” Skills
⚠️ ~75% Lost
Passing of first-generation masters; closure of commercial labs.
Photrio Forums, surviving master printers.
Basic Processing Workflows
~10% Lost
Well-preserved because standard Kodak instruction manuals were widely digitized.
Jim Browning’s PDF guides, Library of Congress.
R2– cont.. Hobbyist forums like Photrio excel at archiving information, but they are fundamentally incapable of sustaining a complex industrial methodology like dye transfer printing. While forums can preserve instructions, they cannot preserve the underlying materials, infrastructure, or economic scale required to keep the process alive.
Next, I raised the notion that dye transfer began as a process without commercial support… since AI is consistently as polite as an undergraduate summer intern, gAI noted my “insight” supplying followup responses and prompts to me about how I would like to proceed…
Salesmanship perfected… well groomed my son, well groomed.
does knowledge exist without awareness.. does awareness exist without sensation.. without a physical, what exists/ persists.
What you know, more tines than you know, is limited by the circles you keep. So, when something unknown enters the den of static amateurs, see: snobby-hobby] does it rouse… if so, what? Or, is the response a shrugish ‘so what’ The science that color emulsion response measurement changes… at the least, too late in my lab career, it explained the failure points of ‘neutral’ separation systems across emulsion brands… Seems big to me..
The stuff that fills in the lines…

“His account of the development of science held that science enjoys periods of stable growth punctuated by revisionary revolutions. To this thesis, Kuhn added the controversial ‘incommensurability thesis’, that theories from differing periods suffer from certain deep kinds of failure of comparability.” plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/
“The operations and measurements that a scientist undertakes in the laboratory are not “the given” of experience but rather “the collected with difficulty”. They are not what the scientist sees—at least not before his research is well advanced and his attention focused. Rather, they are concrete indices to the content of more elementary perceptions, and as such they are selected for the close scrutiny of normal research only because they promise opportunity for the fruitful elaboration of an accepted paradigm. Far more clearly than the immediate experience from which they in part derive, operations and measurements are paradigm-determined. Science does not deal in all possible laboratory manipulations. Instead, it selects those relevant to the juxtaposition of a paradigm with the immediate experience that that paradigm has partially determined. As a result, scientists with different paradigms engage in different concrete laboratory manipulations.”
possibly a change from subjective to objective definitions of color response .. this is foundational enough that all fields that relied on prior definitions can update their processes of analysis and synthesis of color .
>> Finding a new paradigm
One day, Roxana was researching mathematical models of color perception, when a paper put her on a discovery path that lasted several years, marked by periods of excitement and fear, she says.
I read a 1963 David MacAdam paper and noticed that the phenomenon that he observed (diminishing returns) was in conflict with the Riemannian model. Since that paper was 50 years old, I assumed everyone knew that.
For about a year, I searched for a paper or book that would state the fact explicitly and could not find one. I started to wonder if nobody had noticed the contradiction but thought it was absurd and I was just being too full of myself.
Then one day on my search, I came across the 1979 MacAdam paper (where he writes that there is no reason to question the Riemannian model) and thought: Well, if not even the guy who discovered diminishing returns sees the contradiction, maybe it is indeed true that nobody has…
So, we decided to write the paper. But I totally expected that one of the reviewers or one of the readers would point out the place where the contradiction had been stated, and that we had just not been able to find it. But, well, so far so good…
>> Roxana now believes perceived hue is a “pure and logical phenomenon” without learned classification, cultural bias or personal preference. ….
Roxana’s team found that Schrödinger had stopped short before completing his mission because he used the “neutral axis” as a reference point without defining it. The neutral axis is the central, achromatic line of grays connecting black to white in 3D color space, serving as the foundation for measuring color saturation and hue.
“The 2022 discovery allowed us to define hue, saturation and lightness purely geometrically for the first time,” she says. “That was Schrödinger’s big goal, but it was not possible in a Riemannian space.” RCS..
THE OLD. PRIOR FOUNDATIONS USED TO BUILD
D. B. Judd,Contributions to Color Science(Department of Commerce, National Bureau of Standards, 1979), vol.545.
D. L. MacAdam, Judd’s contributions to color metrics and evaluation of color differences.Color Res. Appl.4, 177–193 (1979).
NOTE: MacAdam was a key researcher on color charts, illiminants, etc.
i’m always surprised, but frequently find that the failures in a hobby space lack curiosity about the subject; and I suspect that they also failed in their work space for the same reason .. they thought they knew more than they did and they were not curious enough to doubt them self .. [hence my calling them vBulls, or snobby-hobbiests
You must be logged in to post a comment.