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The internet is a soul-devouring monster that I want to stab in the heart with a wooden stake

Sometimes I really just can not stand the internet. And computers. The whole thing is designed to make communication easier (kind of), but it really just invites a whole new slew of issues for artists and designers to get stressed out about. Digital photography and the internet = hell.

I really have no patience whatsoever for completely manual photography. I mean, I really enjoy it from time to time. Using film, developing negatives, printing in the darkroom.... all of it has a really nostalgic, organic feeling to it which is fine. In moderation. A huge problem with the photography curriculum at Pratt is, though, that the emphasis is really directly on old darkroom photography and not digital. I really don't understand this because, at the rate that technology is going and its present state, digital images are just as good if not better than film. Also, just in terms of future careers, I think that having a good knowledge of digital photography is a must.

Anyway. I need to get back on track to my original point. Why my relationship with digital photography is a love/hate one. I prefer digital photography vastly over analog photography and I'd bet that a good amount of students at my school would like to see me hanged just for saying that, but I think I'm entitled to my opinion. It's more immediate, you don't get as messy, and I honestly think that photoshop gives me more control over my images than I could ever get in a darkroom environment.

So. Anyway. Digital photography is all fine and good until it comes to printing or uploading images to the internet. That's when it becomes so irritating that I end up wanting to screw holes into my eyes with a power drill.

The problem really just is that most web browsers and computer monitors are bad. And most people use Windows computers. If we all used Macs and surfed the web on Safari, none of this would be an issue. But alas, this is not the case.

When I take digital photos and edit them in photoshop, I assign a color profile to the image. Most images have color profiles because your camera either assigns one to the image or you convert it using image editing software. Color profiles basically tell your computer and your printer how you want them to "see" color. By using the color profie "Adobe RGB 1988," for example, you're telling the printer that you want to use this kind of red or this kind of green. Without color profiles, you're letting the monitor and the printer kind of just wing it and hope that it turns out alright.

So. Color profiles. They are our friends. Unfortunately, most web browsers don't agree. I don't know what kind of beef web browsers and color profiles have going on, but it seriously needs to stop. According to my research, aside from Safari and Internet Explorer (of all things), most other web browsers are completely un-color managed. This means that when you view an image in the browser, it strips it COMPLETELY of its color profile. This presents a huge problem for people like me who are TOTALLY anal about color correctness and cross-platform compatibility.

Yesterday, I was uploading my latest photoshoot (Matthew's Shoot) to the internet and I noticed that when I viewed the images in a flash slideshow and in Firefox, the reds in all of the images were severely desaturated. In some of the photographs, the model even started to have a green, ghost-like pallor that made him look nutritionally deprived.

I stayed awake into the wee hours of the morning trying to overcome this problem. I tried converting the color profiles, I tried saving the images to the web. All to no avail. I decided to open Firefox and run a cross-browser comparison of my Flickr contacts page. It turned out that it wasn't only my images that were suffering the consequences of being displayed in bad web browsers. All of the images lacked saturation and contrast when viewed in Firefox as opposed to Safari.

Some people may say that I should not let this get to me. That it's impossible to make things look exactly the same from browser to browser let alone computer to computer. But you know what? It shouldn't be. There should be standards. There should be rules for how web browsers and computer monitors function. I want to know that everybody is seeing my images exactly the way that they are supposed to be seen, not some watered down version of them.

Until then, all I can do is suggest that you download Safari (which is now available for Windows users in beta form). Click here

October 15, 2007 at 02:34 PM

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