Is this worth a mention?

Having looked at some of the images in the gallery, I see that simple things such as levels are "out". I have "saved as" and opened in PS to check and sure enough, levels are "from camera".

Does saving change levels? If not, then why are forum members putting up images that are not finished?

Some PP is always needed.

This is an observation only and not meant to wind anyone up.

Non forum members look at our site and I feel that we have a duty of care.

Let's show correctly finished results from our cameras.

For those members that are not into PP I can only say that your work, images and efforts deserve to be shown at full value, both in terms of quality and impact.

I stand at fault in that I only shoot jpg. My images would be better from raw yet I would never post a non PP image.

I cannot be the only one here that has noticed this.

Best regards

I have on several occasions pm'd members on their images rather than do a public critique.

Having done some PP on their image, they have always come back with thanks and that an improvement was made.

At the end of the day, it is up to the individual as to what they see fit to post.

It has been mentioned only to raise awareness.

Best regards

Sometimes you can be hyopnotised when editing pics and judge something to be finished/correct when, if you looked at it with fresh eyes, you wouldn't be satisfied.

I've done this many a time. I've edited a shoot and only when I've sat back, relaxed and viewed the slideshow, I've released I've made some mistakes and had to go back and tweak them further.

This can happen with all sort of things from Brightness through contrast to colour balance. You can get used to something and the brain compensates.

For example, I once held a blue lighting gel in front of my eyes while being a passenger on a 3 hour journey. After a while everything was colour balanced. My brain compensated and obviously turned the blue component right down

When I removed the gel, I found I couldn't see blue for about 30 minutes until I readjusted.

Maybe it's better to give yourself some breathing space before uploading pics.

But sometimes, as John says, what's uploaded is what the author prefers. it is art after all. Still worth commenting on the pics though. :0

I think I know what you are getting at Gary. Sometimes the Gallery displays a run of really attractive shots. Sometimes its not a great advert for Pentax! All you can do is offer a bit of polite constructive criticism. I hope that people would do the same for me.

My particular bugbear is excessive cropping. To me it's an absolute cardinal sin to crop to nearly a 100% view in order to make a distant robin fill the frame. Especially when it was shot at ISO3200. Not tweaking the levels is almost as bad though.

a lot of it is down to basic monitor calibration. Many people have LCD monitors with the factory-default settings, which always have WAY too much backlight etc etc. As everyone is viewing in different lighting conditions and with monitors of variable quality, its not always obvious to assume everyone has them set-up the same.

Maybe the easiest thing to do would be to have a simple white-black chart, such as depressing review, on the upload page, together with a link to a "how to set up your monitor" page?


When it comes to fooling the human brain with too much colour... happens to me all the time (occupational hazzard) which is why you always rely on an independent set of eyes sat in a room with constant lighting and calibrated monitors (and even the best modern grade 1's still drift over time and have to be redone but at least its days now, not hours...)

There is a 16 level step wedge on ePHOTOzine at the bottom of gallery pages. A much better one than the dpreview one.

Sounds great, now how about putting it on the upload page on PUF?

My own bugbear with the gallery is that the gallery-resized version often has different colours to the uploaded (click through) version. Anyone know how to avoid that?

The first suggestion is a good one.

The second question suggests there's something amiss with your colour management. The colours of my images are the same whether I upload to EPZ, to the Gallery on PU or post in the forums.

Are you making sure your images are sRGB? If you have an AdobeRGB/sRGB mix then that could be the cause of the problem. Web images must be sRGB.

Most web browsers are colour managed now John. It's on by default in Firefox.

This page shows what your browser is set to.

This page discusses the pros and cons, why when how to embed ICC Profiles in Web graphics.

Is your system ICC Version 4 ready? see this page

What most computer-savvy users forget is that a huge percentage of web users are not so well informed. The basic advice to stick to sRGB will keep things looking fine without any messing about at all.

The worst scenario is fiddling with things without the proper knowledge.

Yeah I only use sRGB. Or at least Aperture and LR3 are set to use sRGB...

Here's an example https://www.pentaxuser.com/photo/user-9122/red-head-23457

You can see from the exif it is in sRGB, but the gallery mid-sized version is much too yellow compared to the version I uploaded.

It looks fine on my monitor, could it be that you have a monitor calibration issue? Or (long shot) that the camera has been inadvertently set to AdobeRGB?

I think if I had a monitor calibration issue both versions would look the same?

I'm sure the camera is (was) set to sRGB.

Yes, I agree, you'd think so. It's very difficult to know for sure without actually being sat in front of your computer!