Reef Raft SPS rant... Let's see real pics of your Reef Raft Pieces....

[Rice Reef]

Bill, thanks for sharing. Comparing your pics to those from RR I can see that they are not quite the same. If RR wishes to market their products with saturated colours the least they can do is to provide more information or have a disclaimer to some extent. It would also be nice to see vendors using their own pics of the same coral rather than to use provided pics from RR. when I am buying a Ferrari I expect it to be the Ferrari like the picture I was sold on. If it looks anything else it is not morally correct advertising. For example... From your website at the time when I made my purchase in the group order in April and May of this year, you used only the pink Floyd pic provided by RR. To be honest, I was not impressed when I received it. It was dull brown and grey looking. When local reefers came by to see the new pieces, many and incl myself thought the pink Floyd was the wolverine. Anyways, I was confident that it would color up and five mths later it is still colouring up and there has been vast improvement from what it looked like five mths ago. What I am trying to say is if I had the chance to see the real pic of it I may not have made the purchase. From the group order I spent close to $400 myself so I do have some expectations, especially when a $10 or $20 dollar frag looks way better.

I have heard through the grapevine and understand how RR gets its colours but to some degree the pics may have some half truths to it. I did an experiment over the last three months to see if it works. I increased my phosphate level from 0'to .03-.04 range and I saw more colours but no where close to that of the pics. I have thought of increasing the phosphate level ( increasing dosage of amino acids) but then I decided not to as I do not want other corals to suffer for the sake of a couple.

I also want to say that the no name RR frags I got from fragbox arrived as they are in the pics taken by March and his group. I paid anywhere between 35-99 dollars for the pieces and I was quite pleased with the purchase. For the Diablo I purchased from fragbox a yr ago, it does not have the colors anywhere close to that in the RR pic. It is still a very nice piece even though it does not have that deep red colouring.

From my overall experience, i would rather buy maricultured pieces from Non RR origination as they look no different than the RR pieces, have way better coloration and fraction of RR prices. I'm sure that RR gets their selection from the same source so why pay $400 for a 1/2 - 3/4 inch frag when I could get 4-6 nice mini colonies.

Anyways, this is just my experience and opinion and is not to stop people from buying RR corals.

[albert_dao]

I'm just going to step in here for a sec. This topic really irks me, having seen several of my friends throw out thousands of $$$ over false advertising.

Just to use Bill's examples:



Here I've placed the two images side by side. Let's first hype the contrast and vibrancy by making modeling the levels after the source material. After a ton of tweaking, I end up with this:



At this point, we have an over saturation of white levels, so let's tone that down using the curves adjustments and some other tools. We'll also adjust the blues a little to compensate for the dominance of the reds:



Which gets us to here:



Average color sample for referrence:



For the record - getting from points A to B too no less than 15 adjustments using Levels, Color balance, Saturation, Hue, and multiple channel effects. There were a few instances where I dragged the slider from one end of the bar to the damn near the other end. IMO, I wouldn't be saying anything if I had gotten within 90% accuracy with just the white balance step.

Anyway, that's how I feel about this.

Edit: And the Wolverine (!!!!), don't even get me started on that one.

Edit #2: I'm just going to leave this here in case anyone is still under the illusion that the contextual surroundings of a featured corals are a reliable indicator of photo tampering:

[albert_dao]

Edit #3: I just noticed I was a bit sloppy with some of the edges on the above sample. I submit, before anyone points that out, that if I was in line to make $250/1" frag, that this would not have been the case. I would have invested more than 5 minutes into this and you would have been none the wiser.

[albert_dao]

F-it. I'm just going to throw all of my credibility out the window by putting out there that if any vendor is interested in hiring someone to assist in the mass deluding and debasing of their clientele, LMK and we'll work something out. i

I WANT IN ON THE $$$ ACTION.

Just make sure you message me here in this thread

<3

[Aquattro]

Thanks for posting that Albert!

[Tn23]

Albert, nice post.
We are going to have to have a talk next week

[albert_dao]

BTW guys, I'm highly motivated here:

[Rice Reef]

Thanks, Albert. I thought I was losin it... i am certain that I am done with all the RR boutique corals. They can use all the make up and lip gloss to make the sps stand-out but they won't be seeing anymore of my money.

Funny... Just crickets here now...