Bluejake

the colour profile thing happened to me only once, and it resolved itself the next time I opened photoshop. I wish I had some advice for you, I'm sorry. it's got to be a setting somewhere.

i think i might be on to the problem- there is an option under advanced color settings that says something like "desaturate monitor by 20%", when i click it, the PSD looks like what i'm seeing in the save for web box. that is, the web output seems to be 20% less saturated than the PSD. i wonder why that is?

closer still- when i changed the monitor color profile back to the default, the save-for-web and PSD versions matched. so apparently, the Adobe 1998 color profile was boosting the color in the PSD, but when the file was saved for web, it was being saved on the default. I'm going to go back now and remaster these images, and see if i can get them to look better.

ah- now these photos look better- at least, they are the way i like them: a little oversaturated, a little overcontrasty. ignore the rest of this if you don't care about photoshop:

before this last month, i processed all photos the same way in photoshop: i simply opened the JPG, enhanced the contrast by 1 to 15, enhanced the saturation by 1 to 20, and sometimes cropped the image. I saved the new image back into the original JPG file, replacing the original information. having learned a little bit more about photoshop, i have now changed my method. instead of saving right to a flat JPG, i save all images to PSD with adjustment layers for any changes, ensuring that the original information is still there. i also learned how to color correct an image using curves- making the white a truer white, and the blacks a truer black, and the grays a good midtone in every image. i thought that was enough- that is, i believed that i didn't have to enhance the contrast and saturation as i was doing before, because the color correction took care of it.

it turns out i was wrong- the colors were looking more saturated because i had set the photoshop 7 color defaults to the wrong setting (adobe 1998, as recommended by the digital photographers guide to photoshop). this might be good for digital guys who print, but for us web folks, it's not good. when i got that straightened out tonight, i realized that under the right color profile, the images were under saturated and under contrasty, just the way they had been appearing in the save-to-web dialogs. that is, they were undersaturated and undercontrasty because i had not applied those correction filters. apparently, color correction using curves really just works on color- it doesn't adjust saturation or contrast, which you still have to do separately.

so from now on, i'm doing a 4 step process on every image: crop to 4x3 dimensions, apply color correction, apply contrast correction, apply saturation correction. that's it. oh, and of course, doing red-eye correction and scratch and noise correction, but only when necessary.

How many people did the obvious thing and gave him a copy of BOA 30?

i was too busy trying to give him 30 bday noogies to notice.

Unlike any photographer who has come before, I believe you have captured the very "essence" of Van Gieson.

so much fucking buzz it's sick. best!

uncle grambo has the rough features of The Raging Bull in his prime. I shivered just being near him!

Who is the pretty girl with the long hair and earrings, with her eyes slightly closed, wearing the grey sweater with a red collar?