Please stop forcibly converting ALL uploads to sRGB!
skibum4
Registered Users Posts: 59 Big grins
Please, please, please stop with the non-sense where you forcibly convert ALL photos to sRGB!
There is ZERO reason to deny your customer the right to post images in the gamut that they wish.
If you want to default to that, fine, but give us a toggle in either the uploader or in gallery settings to allow one to turn this auto-conversion off! Why not? If anything this saves you processing resources not having to waste time converting images that people don't want converted. Who are you to patronize your users and decide that you know best.
Every last browser now can at least handle conversion to sRGB itself, even IE, anyway.
And even if they could not if a user wants certain galleries to use better than sRGB gamut and they don't care that some random person will see it weirdly then you should let them. Why should we suffer just because some person who has no clue what they are doing might peek into some special wide gamut monitor and see the wrong thing?? Why should we not be able to make special wide gamut galleries to share with others who also have wide gamut monitors? Don't patronize your users and decide that you always know what is best. You allow us to customize a million things but than waster resources forcibly converting all images to sRGB, even ones where the user absolutely does NOT want this to occur.
It's very sad that a photo website of all things, which should be at the forefront of insuring proper color if anything, is actively fighting AGAINST wide gamut usage!
And believe me it can make a radical difference for some photos. My shots of intensely deep emerald green crystals turn into muted olive-green on smugmug!! Sunsets, fall foliage, flowers lose richness and details that easily appear in AdobeRGB/ProphotoRGB may not even show up at all in sRGB. Sure not everyone has a wide gamut monitor but more and more do, especially in the photo world and why should not we be able to share photos with each other in ways that let them be seen as they should be seen? Why do we have to suffer to the least common denominator? Why in the world is it photo hosting sites that are locking us into the archaic sRGB standard and not allowing the slow spread of larger gamut images to begin??
Not everyone has a hi-res monitor either. Why not restrict all images to 800x600 then??
This option would hurt no one and actually save you slightly on resources.
This issue has me itching to find a hosting site to replace Smugmug....
There is ZERO reason to deny your customer the right to post images in the gamut that they wish.
If you want to default to that, fine, but give us a toggle in either the uploader or in gallery settings to allow one to turn this auto-conversion off! Why not? If anything this saves you processing resources not having to waste time converting images that people don't want converted. Who are you to patronize your users and decide that you know best.
Every last browser now can at least handle conversion to sRGB itself, even IE, anyway.
And even if they could not if a user wants certain galleries to use better than sRGB gamut and they don't care that some random person will see it weirdly then you should let them. Why should we suffer just because some person who has no clue what they are doing might peek into some special wide gamut monitor and see the wrong thing?? Why should we not be able to make special wide gamut galleries to share with others who also have wide gamut monitors? Don't patronize your users and decide that you always know what is best. You allow us to customize a million things but than waster resources forcibly converting all images to sRGB, even ones where the user absolutely does NOT want this to occur.
It's very sad that a photo website of all things, which should be at the forefront of insuring proper color if anything, is actively fighting AGAINST wide gamut usage!
And believe me it can make a radical difference for some photos. My shots of intensely deep emerald green crystals turn into muted olive-green on smugmug!! Sunsets, fall foliage, flowers lose richness and details that easily appear in AdobeRGB/ProphotoRGB may not even show up at all in sRGB. Sure not everyone has a wide gamut monitor but more and more do, especially in the photo world and why should not we be able to share photos with each other in ways that let them be seen as they should be seen? Why do we have to suffer to the least common denominator? Why in the world is it photo hosting sites that are locking us into the archaic sRGB standard and not allowing the slow spread of larger gamut images to begin??
Not everyone has a hi-res monitor either. Why not restrict all images to 800x600 then??
This option would hurt no one and actually save you slightly on resources.
This issue has me itching to find a hosting site to replace Smugmug....
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Safari, IE9 and recent versions of Firefox are color managed. Chrome, Opera and IE6, IE7 and IE8 are not color managed. Depending upon whose browser statistics you want to believe, somewhere around 35-40% of the browsers in use are still not color managed and would display hideous colors with aRGB or proPhotoRGB images.
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Well IE9 is out now and Chrome has had some support for color management.
And again if someone wanders into some gallery labelled wide gamut and sees a mess well.... WHO CARES! Everyone else you might want to share it with has to suffer because someone, somewhere might not know what they are doing?? How dumbed down does everything have to be in this day and age?? It's not so hard to educate people and pretty sad if something as minor as this is considering beyond reach.
Also don't forget that we are not talking about some ESPN webpage or the like or even some photo-selling gallery for the local little league we are talking about a special photo gallery set up to share wide gamut photos with others. Why on earth does that need to be forcibly banned! Come on!
And why should photo people and photo sites not be pushing to educate people anyway? Instead they are the most head stuck in the sand I've come across. Actively fighting against education!
Heaven forbid a few people stop into my personal wide gamut galleries and see things weirdly and don't bother reading the explanation why, big deal.
http://www.smugmug.com/help/srgb-versus-adobe-rgb-1998
http://www.smugmug.com/help/display-color
http://www.smugmug.com/help/skin-tone
http://www.smugmug.com/help/red-skin-tones
...
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OK, well maybe not so much actively fighting against education -I will take that back- but actively fighting against the spread of wide gamut images on the web, for sure.
EDIT: although on careful reading that link is out of date, since there are plenty of browsers that run under Windows and can do various degrees of color-management. And the big rah-rah at the end about sRGB and the wonderful simplicity of the internet is kind of short-sighted and rather outdated IMO as well.
There is NO reason to deny users the right to make CERTAIN galleries use gamuts other than sRGB. Again nobody is asking that you stop doing conversions for everything, etc. Just give us the option to turn it off when we know we want it off. I really don't care if someone somewhere will see some weird color in one of my special galleries and doesn't bother to read the gallery header explanation. You can use that excuse (that someone will do something wrong) to disallow pretty much anything in life!
And I have seen other people post about this around the web from time to time too.
All it would take is a single toggle button and then the converter to do a single IF statement as to whether to skip the conversion code or not.
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