Presenting Competition Images on the website

[Note: This was PlayPage15. It has been moved into the main web as it contains useful background information]

3rd September 2006 Projected Image (1) session

These are images for the photograpers to look at, mainly to see what will happen to their material when it gets on to the www site. They have been group processed (by aspect) without any changes in digital format except size. (One image had a black background added.) These images are taken (with the consent of the authors) from the digital projection part of the creative image competition. Subsequently much altered and played with. 16 Oct 2006

The authors & titles are drawn directly from the file names, though I have edited a few for consistency. This is a one-off development exercise - the top images should appear in a much tidier format with scores shortly, all being well! [Done later; see main entry.]

E&OE

04 Oct 2006 20:56:32 BobKeene:

04 Oct 2006 21:02:48 BobKeene:

Looking good John. For info, the pages takes about 5 minutes to download on my dialup conn. How long did it take you to get this far ? Is it going to be a realistic task for each comp? Re the competition in general, I felt some of the images were very pixellated (not out of focus). Maybe we need to give more guidance re image resolution/file size for projecting ?

04 Oct 2006 21:16:42 JohnAshford:

Ten minutes last night and maybe an hour and a half tonight. Some of the images were smaller than 400x300 as submitted and so didn't scale - hence the pixellation. Also the highlights in the eyes of the mice have almost disappeared. Five minutes on dial-up sounds like maybe one minute for the top select slice? Find out tomorrow evening, maybe.

I don't propose to do 'the lot' for each comp, just the top eight or maybe ten, which sounds like an hour or just over when I get it organised. [Update 11:44 - It took two hours this time, but I can see ways to reduce the work. Standardisation of the file titles would be the biggest gain!] Photoshop El 4 plus Bridge on the Mac is a useful batch processor when there are groups of similar images, eg mine or David Graham's & some others. Digitals parallel to prints are a bit more difficult - big files, mounts etc.

04 Oct 2006 22:08:41 RodBird:

It took five or ten seconds to load down my broadband link. Looks very nice.

04 Oct 2006 22:23:00 AndrewFindlay:

This page provides a very interesting comparison with what we saw on the projection screen on Tuesday. My first reaction was that my own images (and most others) are very similar on my screen to what I saw at the club. However, some are distinctly different, and careful analysis of my own shows that something has happenned to them between submitting them to the competition and them appearing here. More of that later - first some comments on the visible differences:

Andy Page colour portraits: I think the projected versions had a bit more yellow.

Dave Mundy_Damselfly1: The wheat stalk looks redder on my screen than I remember in the projected image.

David Graham: all three images look 'darker' on my screen. Applying some positive gamma brings the lute player back to what I remember being projected, though the cactus flower looked more saturated when projected and gamma alone did not explain the difference.

Glynn's Etna and Stromboli grave pictures look very much the same on my screen as they did when projected. The Pantheon one is different though: I see less detail in the people than I did at the club, and the coloured bar at the very bottom is much less obvious on my screen. Similarly the columns and portico are more muted here than when projected. Of course this might be an artefact of the background: we saw the projected image against a very dark surround, where the website displays on 18% grey. Yes - that's it - I have just extracted that image onto a black background and it makes a big difference!

John Ashford's apple does not have the over-exposed look that we saw on the projection screen.

All the other images look very much as I remember from Tuesday.

In case it makes a difference, note that I am looking at these images on an IBM laptop PC running Linux. The screen has not been calibrated, but then nor have my eyes or memory!

04 Oct 2006 22:30:26 AndrewFindlay:

Now for the really odd bit: my own monochrome image has changed from what I submitted on Tuesday! The change is small, but the version shown on this page is distinctly lighter than the original. I will add a scaled-down copy of my original at the bottom of this page - if you want to experiment, save both copies to disk and open them in your favourite image editor. Use the eyedropper to select colours from similar areas on each copy - you will find that the version uploaded by John is a few percent lighter than mine.

This suggests that the batch processing used to reduce the size of the images is also doing something else.

05 Oct 2006 06:05:12 JohnAshford:

I have moved the two images side by side. Curious, isn't it. And the [black] side areas on my pictures are unchanged, still the same black as the original.

Afterthought: this couldn't be a JPEG effect could it? My conversion says it does nothing but [open / resize image / save] as to a new folder. More: I have played with jpg versions of both files & can generate a difference of about +/- 1% in the grey saturation for lots of areas (Digital.Colour Meter). This is objectively tiny, but the human eye can evidently detect grey shade differences at this level. Maybe we are trying to push www technology a bit hard to try to line it up with the relatively high-tech if not yet quite tuned club projector?

And thank you for the nice picture of my old haunts; I learned to swim just about there in the Forth & Clyde Canal.

05 Oct 2006 07:59:48 GlynnGrylls:

Re my recent comments about the brightness of images. Looking at these pics from the website on my mac they appear much closer in density to viewing the originals in photoshop, than they did when projected. 'The Pantheon' has a dark background and foreground figures, so that the pointing man almost disappears - which is how I hoped it would look, and the little cherub on 'Stromboli Grave' has more detail with less prominent shadows. I am beginning to suspect this is a mac thing. I love to see what my images look like on a PC or even the clubs laptop. In the meantime is there a chance of someone with a PC taking a look for me? One good check is to look at the bottom of the 'Pantheon' pic, if you can see a soft edged grey band along the bottom edge (within the border) is is too bright.

More comments: with (not the fastest) broadband the page oloads almost instantly, I'd like to see the pictures bigger, or thumbnails with a link to bigger pice - is that too complex?

05 Oct 2006 08:09:07 GlynnGrylls:

Andrew, just read your comments about my pics - looks as if it is a Mac thing. This is a real problem to me as on my mac I cannot see any detail in the background or foreground figures. I suspect that I can only set up the images on my mac to view as I wish and then adjust the levels to suit the clubs PC - but by how much? I'd like the opportunity to produce a set of half a dozen test images and see them projected by the clubs equipment, and on the clubs screen, before the next projected image competition. Mark, if you are reading this, is there any chance of doing that?

05 Oct 2006 08:41:16 JohnAshford:

Glyn. I have added a version of my 'Leaf Miner' pic alongside the one in the basic set. The new image is a simple resize and save-as jpeg level 6 with minimal intervention. Since I can't see any significcant difference I suspect we may be looking at a Mac / PC issue of some sort.

05 Oct 2006 11:14:12 MikeKiely:

Some of this is a bit technical for me, but i do have one comment to make at this stage. I just want to say how delighted I am to see the live page and what a boost this is to content on our website. I look forward to seeing how well it squeezes through a 56k modem!

05 Oct 2006 11:42:42 MarkRussell:

Macs use a gamma of 1.8, PC's normally 2.2, this could explain it.

Glynn when you try the calibration software you can set the gamma. Try it at 1,8 and 2.2. I suspect the 1.8 will be broadly what you see currently on your mac, and the 2.2 will be closer to what the PC's do (and the projector is calibrated to).

05 Oct 2006 12:52:36 JohnAshford:

Mark & Glyn: Tried gamma 2.2 & the Pantheon picture looks much more like what was expected. So do two of mine and I suspect two of Chris Pooley's - all Mac users. The PC source material now looks considerably OTT so its no easy solution to recalibrate the Mac screeen.

05 Oct 2006 14:42:01 AndrewFindlay:

I have put a black background behind the images to give a closer simulation of the projection at the club.

05 Oct 2006 16:30:09 JohnAshford:

The two Falkirk Wheels are still perceptibly different on my Mac screen, though the measured difference in the greys of the panels is trivial. The clearest example is in the bottom left archway.

If you look hard at the two Leaf Miners, they are different as well, though this is masked by the colour range - the main difference is in the degree of over-exposure in the sun reflection. [Thinks . . . . ]

05 Oct 2006 16:40:56 JohnAshford:

Putting a black background on the Competition page makes the images look good - but I've lost most of my added text so I've reverted it. If there is a twicki tweak that gets round this then it deals with Mark's issue of whether the projector will default to black when the image is less than 1400 x 1050. Then our 'portrait' formats would lose their black ears.

The tweak here on the first image is too crude to go with. [Later] A second try is better but I still need the inter-section texts. --Andrew--, is there a switch between black background and the standard grey I could use to set the black ground only within each class?

05 Oct 2006 18:19:46 MarkRussell:

In Hindsight my comments about gamma should be irrelevant in a modern colour managed world. Colour management should automatically take any differences into account. It is only if images do not have embedded colour profiles or profiles are ignored by applications that differences in appearances should occur.

Do all the images have embedded profiles?

(Sorry I have little spare time at the moment to investigate, any I have will be trying to get pictures ready for Tuesday!)

06 Oct 2006 17:30:46 JohnAshford:

One or two 'letter-box' images have got the title detached from the picture, since the file as delivered had been (as requested) black filled to 1400 x 1050. [See, for example, Linda Ball's All at Sea. ] If Mark's idea of default filling on the projector works, we could use the black background like this set and edit the titles like the first two.

I would still need a tweak of some sort to make the section headings visible. What do people think about the legibility / impact of the edited titles on Andrew's frames?

06 Oct 2006 20:44:00 MikeKiely:

Happy to report the live page took 90 seconds to download on a 56k connection. This sounds poor, but with a bit of text to read first, and the upper pictures always appearing first, it is perfectly acceptable. (wouldn't want to wait much longer, though)

07 Oct 2006 06:15:15 JohnAshford:

Twicki tweaked - thank you Andrew. I have set up (dummy) block titles below leaving the individual image text reversed. On the Competition Images page I have black backed a couple of individual images to preserve the titling and I think it looks bitty. I'll revert this bit in a day or so when you have had chance to look at it. [See notes to PP 16 as well though - it has acquired a black ground too!]

Andrew suggests (e-mail) that projected images should be on black backgrounds and prints on the neutral grey when we do www conversion and I am inclined to agree. The real question is whether the titling as shown below is clear enough and whether it can be adapted for the 'annual' competition layouts. As below it is fairly quick and easy to do, and has the advantage that as you edit it you can see what the photographer submittted so you get fewer typos.

08 Oct 2006 20:54:00 JohnAshford:

See also Play Page 16 for a black surround experiment. Not too easy to do in a batch process, but not too bad for a dozen images each time.

10 Oct 2006 08:54:18 MikeKiely:

The black surround may be a bit strong for some tastes. I preferred just the image, plus any border created by the photographer, on top of the 'website grey'. See what others think.

11 Oct 2006 12:15:23 BobKeene:

I think the finished page (not this one) looks great. Nice one John.

13 Oct 2006 15:50:56 MikeKiely:

John I have just looked at the print comp page (on work pc). I think it looks great. It will therefore look even better at home.

14 Oct 2006 13:30:45 ChrisPooley:

I'm just catching up since being without without internet or Email access for about 3 weeks (thank you Sky Broadband!).

I've read the comments to date (well. most of them) and looked at the pictures and am very impressed with the quality and particularly the 'mount' round the print entries. I think this latter makes the prints look much more like the photographer intended. As none of my prints reached the giddy heights of 'highest scorers' and I can't remember what colour the mounts were for the originals I can't comment on the mount colours, though.

On the Mac-v-PC issue, I obviously have an interest. However, on my screen my images, below, and on the finished page, look very much as I did them and the backgrounds appear far less bright than the projected images,particularly the Tenby View. Also Glynn's pictures are much less bright and more like his originals (which I've also seen on my Mac)

Finally, whilst it's probably a 'Sky Broadband on a Saturday afternoon thing' (come back Pipex, all is forgiven), the Competition Images pages took ages to open fully (particularly the prints images), with some pictures taking over a minute to open. As more pictures are added this could become a problem especially for dial up people. I would agree with the suggestion already made, that if possible, we should have thumbnail images which could be clicked on to get the full size image.

14 Oct 2006 13:42:22 ChrisPooley:

Having made the above comments, I've tested the speed of my connection and it's 4.2 megabits/second, so unless it's speeded up since I went into the MCC site first of all, the comments in my final para are valid, but I'd like to hear of other people's experiences.

14 Oct 2006 14:55:45 JohnAshford:

Just checked - I have 15 seconds to download all of the print image page on Zen's slowest broadband link, delivering about (nett) 300kbps.

Adding thumbnails actually increases the total file size, though it may well defer spending the online time at the start. I really didn't like the quality of the thumbnails from this good input material and worried in case people would be so unimpressed they wouldn't go further.

OOPS - If you clear the Safari cache it takes 60 seconds, which is probably more like it for slowish broadband!

I'll see if I can stick some thumbnails on PP 16 but not just yet . . . this project isn't the only thing in my life.

14 Oct 2006 20:15:47 JohnAshford:

Tried PI with a #555555 outline similar to prints but mid-grey (see Falkirk Wheel, Birdwatching, below). This might be a better way to show the projected images against the neutral grey ground (#D2D2D2) and a lot less work than is involved in the black grounds (#000000) I used in the first live run.

The area within the grey ground would then be what the photographer submitted, and if Mark's idea about the projector defaulting to black is right, then we can use a 'max dimension' (width 1400px; height 1050px) criterion and just convert the larger dimension to 450 px whichever and border it.

15 Oct 2006 17:50:42 ChrisPooley:

Point taken about download times, John, but for a non techie like me, what do you mean about clearing Safari's cache?. Tell me on Tuesday if it's complicated.

If the thumb prints don't look good, I agree we should leave them off as it's no problem scrolling down the medium size images.

The mid grey outline looks good, but if the picture already has a background colour like my Step & Woman and Tenby View (and Falkirk Wheel) it can look a bit busy. Bird Watching looks better, but there the grey separates the already black background from the black ground.

15 Oct 2006 17:59:54 ChrisPooley:

Just want to add to my comments and think the download thing was a "Sky Broadband on a Saturday afternoon thing" as the print pictures page downloaded in seconds when I tried it just now, and none of the images 'hung' half opened as they did when I first looked. Panic over!

16 Oct 2006 13:38:55 JohnAshford:

Birdwatching is included to show the photographer deliberately setting background - in this case to get rid of wildly distracting extraneous detail as well as to 'frame' the shot. [This was originally an 'on-the-fly' shot when we were discussing the portraits of photographers for the f4 biography panels.]

02 Nov 2006 23:05:09 MikeKiely:

I now have broadband so am not really the right person to referree download speeds, except to say that I maintain that it is still a great recruitment tool and being modem friendly is impoertant in this regard. Michael