June 2nd, 2005:

If you enjoy looking at photography online, you owe it to yourself and to the photographers you enjoy to determine proper gamma compensation for your monitor. If you’re a photographer that publishes photographs online, you owe it to yourself and your viewers to perform gamma compensation for your monitor to ensure that what you see is what they will see and that all of your images are edited in a uniform fashion.

I’m not talking about full-on color calibration. While that is surely useful and a good idea if you want to see what you’re going to get when printing, I’m only talking about color balance, and white and black point determination.

Without proper gamma correction, images may appear darker or lighter than the artist intended them to be. This means that, while the photographer may have intended the female figure to be entirely in silhouette, you see traces of facial features. Or that, when the artist intended for you to see the texture in the snow, you see nothing but a big white blob.

Gamma correcting your monitor is SIMPLE. First you need to “set a proper blackpoint”:http://www.aim-dtp.net/aim/calibration/blackpoint/crt_brightness_and_contrast.htm. This step alone will make a huge difference. Secondly you use “this chart”:http://www.normankoren.com/Gamma_black_new.png to determine the proper level of gamma compensation. For most Windows users it’s 2.5, and for most Mac users it’s 1.72 or 2.2. This is because Macs have built in hardware level gamma correction.

Of course, in order to adjust the gamma correction, you need software that does that for you. If you use Linux, xgamma will do the trick. Or, for something a bit easier to deal with try “monica”:http://www.pcbypaul.com/linux/monica.html. Under Windows, you can try “QuickGamma”:http://www.normankoren.com/makingfineprints1A.html#QuickGamma. Regardless of what tool you use, ignore the gamma value that they suggest you calibrate to. There is a lot of confusion regarding what you should be calibrated to. I suggest calibrating to 2.2, which is, supposedly, the proposed standard for sRGB images, which is what things are viewed in over the web.

Yes, there are people that claim that we should calibrate our monitors to achieve a linear gamma. And, there is some truth in this statement. By working in linear gamma space, we’re able to preserve as much of the color space as possible. However, monitors have gone largely uncorrected for some time now. Working in linear mode will mean that you need to introduce a gamma of 2.2 (or 2.5, in some opinions, or 1.72 for macs) into the image or anyone operating outside of linear gamma will have a HORRIBLE image in front of them. Additionally, since all of the fonts, and graphics, and other images on the web have been created with any gamma compensation, and, therefore, anything but your own images will look TERRIBLE to you, and that’s no good either.

Of course, ICC profiles are the REAL way to handle all of this. But, that’s complicated. This is easy.

Just run the program and slide the things around until the chart evens out at 2.2, then go on your merry way. If EVERYONE does this, the web (and computer graphics in general) will look better and better. And, until everyone does, PC users will find OTHER images a little darker than usual, and Mac users will find them a bit lighter than usual. Of course, images edited on “compensated” system will look great to other compensated systems, and just the opposite on those that haven’t bothered to compensate. It’s a small price to pay.

I want a photoblog.

I want a place that I can point my “photography” friends to that centers on nothing but photography. I want an outlet that encourages me to post a new picture every day. I want a place that makes doing so as painless as possible. I want a place that does so in a fashion that encourages feedback and community.

As best as I can tell, I have 5 options

# Use an external service (like “Flickr”:http://flickr.com/). If desired, I can create a page on my site that aggregates the external information and incorporates it more directly into my site to give it all the same look and feel. However, all correspondence will be directed through that external service. I don’t like not owning my own information, and I don’t like relying on another service to be up and stay up. But, I trust “Yahoo!”http://yahoo.com/. And they own Flickr now. And I trusted Flickr before. So it probably wont be a problem. But I don’t get to customize the look and feel of my pages. And, to get the full effect, my readers will have to create accounts ever there, which they might not be willing to do.
# Find pre-written software that suits my needs. I’ve looked a little, with no luck. Suggestions?
# Write my own software. And we all know how long I’ve been working on Inklog to no avail. Partners?
# Trick my current software into making a special page for all “photography” items and continue to post photographs in the fashion that I do today.
# Say “fuck it”.

Options? Suggestions? Comments?

If it isn’t apparent, I’m losing quite a bit of my desire to preserve the history and link structure of this site at all costs. In the beginning, I felt that doing so was very important. I wanted to be found in google. And I wanted to ensure that any link to me would never be broken. These are both noble goals, but the headache that comes with them probably isn’t worth it.

I set up Google AdSense in order to make a small profit from all the google juice I earn by being link friendly. To date, I’ve earned less than $70. Meanwhile, since Google indexes me very well and quite deep, I dish out lots of bandwidth to people I don’t know nor care about. In most cases, the people visiting my site from Google aren’t potential new readers… instead they are bored and stupid and resort to leaving dumb comments that I later spend time deleting. Further more, they refuse to actually read the material they are commenting on so, on those that plea for help I feel guilty for ignoring them and subsequently deleting their comments as opposed to taking the time to respond and simply repeat what has already been said. Further more, I get referrer spam like you wouldn’t believe, even to pages that I have since deleted just to get them to stop spamming me.

I’m still stuck using an *old*, outdated tool to manage this site because I refuse to “upgrade” until the software I would move to (mine, or someone else’s) has at least all of the features that this site does with a clear path to old link retention.

I’m |— THIS —| close to just saying “fuck it” and letting all the things I once regarded as important slip to the bottom of the priority list. Sure, 99% of my readers see my entires first in LiveJournal. But, if my new software doesn’t support LiveJournal syndication right away… so what.

For the most part, people either read my site, respond to me on occasion, and will continue reading no matter how I write or where those words show up or they just read when they feel like it, and really, skim for the most part. And, why should I care if I’m catering to their needs or not?

Part of me wants to turn everything I do over to various free and pay services on the Internet. Then, my site will simply be a collection of information from all of those sources, redirecting you to that information on those sites when requested. I don’t *like* this idea, but I loose control, I lose ownership, and I lose flexibility. But, it sure would make things a lot easier.