Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1998/04/07
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 07 Apr 1998 08:26:20 +0200, Alan Ball <AlanBall@csi.com> wrote: > I take this opportunity to raise a question that has been bugging me > for some time: the useability of Web technology for the observation of > pictures. > > Looking at your photography site, as much as looking at almost anyone > else's, gives the viewer an opportunity to get a remote, general, idea > of the type of pictures you enjoy taking or the ones that are your > bread and butter. It certainly does NOT give any idea of the qualities > of a lens or of an emulsion. *Any* idea? That's a little strong. Yes, some quality is inevitably lost, as it's lost as well in printing or slide duping. In most cases, a lot of quality is lost. But this needn't be the case. I'd lay most of the blame at the feet of: - crappy hardware and software used by viewers and - excessively low-resolution (vertical, horizontal, and depth/quality) = approximations of scans put up for web consumption with, of course, limitations imposed by: - poor quality scans (less of a problem when people take the trouble to scan directly from a chrome or negative and take the further care such people tend to take; inevitable when somebody slaps a snapshot print down on a flatbed). I would contend that anybody actually interested in viewing images, not squinting at fuzzy, dithered, blotchy, postage-stamp-sized approximations thereof, needs of course to be running in a 24-bit hardware color mode (translation for Mac folk: your vendor thinks precision would harsh your mellow, and thus the Mac synonym for `24-bit' is the happy, fuzzy `millions of colors') preferably at 1280x1024 or greater. And I would further contend that anyone purporting to put an image up for display should, in addition to the 640x480 thumbnails for the computationally challenged, supply a jpeg in the 1280x1K range (1Kx768 as an absolute minimum), with minimally destructive jpeg compression (`quality' setting no less than 75?). A great deal of damage can be done at display time -- why, people running in 8-bit color modes often even seem to think that gifs look better than jpegs, which for them would often be true -- because the quick-and-dirty on-the-fly colormap-compression algorithms built into web browsers are likely do do a worse job than the standalone ones used to create the already-color-compressed gifs. > It can even destroy the subtilities of the > dynamic range of a rich slide or of a hand printed enlargement The key here is `can'. It can be argued (philg does, and I concur) that at its best, electronic display can be have better dynamic range than a print. There's some of the magic of a chrome on the light table. An issue, though, is that working photographers may feel they're `giving away the farm' if they put up images with high enough quality to be enjoyable to look at. They often tend to put up low-res approximations of their images, and deface them with copyright notices in the actual image area, presumably to discourage swiping. Not a pleasing thing to = look at. > To be even more radical: none of the images you show on your site (nor > any of the images I would be able to show on a site of my own) would > render any differently if you had used cheap P&S hardware instead of > Leicas. Or even recent digital cameras (with the million + pixels CCDs)= =2E Overstated. > The only way round this would be to put uncompressed high res TIFF file= s > on line. Unviewable by 99 pct of Web users. Not necessarily. Low-compression, high-spatial-resolution jpegs can look darned good. Perhaps still not-readily-viewable by 99% of the unwashed; but, quite frankly... skrooem. If you care about seeing images on a computer (and you have the kind of disposable income which can allow a Leica habit), you have a high-resolution 24-bit display subsystem. (Okay, gamma is still a b=EAte noir.) Web authors should provide a low-res `approximate picture' path for the unwashed, and a highish-res path for the resolution and bandwith haves. > The only things that survive Web browsing might be the essential ones: > the relevance of the image, the idea or feeling it chooses to convey or= > the documentary value it brings. Well... it could be argued that this might be a *good* thing. But I'd = *rather* have it all. > Maybe Web imaging requires a new way of creating the images, with Web > usage as the main objective even at the shooting stage Doesn't seem to be so. > and attention > concentrated on the strengths and weaknesses of this particular > application: the technology allows the creation of 'living' images, > loaded with 'inner' animation, timed transformation, etc. Oh, ick! Ptui! The last thing I need to be assaulted with is more glitz= y, = annoying, empty all-singing, all-dancing things squirming about my screen= =2E > Anyone care to share his/her thoughts on this ? You asked!