Cropping, Color Changes and such - just say no
cambler
Registered Users Posts: 277 Major grins
I've spoken to a number of photographers who have all agreed with me that we do not like the ability for customers to re-crop and change the color settings on the photos we sell on Smugmug. Indeed, I signed up for my pro account not even knowing that this was an option for customers.
As a photographer, I crop and color balance every shot the way I intend it. That's what's for sale. Allowing customers to change the color presents a number of issues, none of which are pleasant:
1. They will be buying something other than what I created. This, in itself, is enough.
2. They might completely destroy the color and then show the image to someone else who will (rightly) question my ability as a photographer.
3. They are, legally, creating a derivative work. As copyright holder of my photo, this is both not what I intended nor what I wish to allow. By providing the ability to create this derivative work, I am giving de facto permission for anyone to do so. That's bad. Very bad.
4. It creates confusion among my customers, most of whom are very technically-challenged. They might make a change, be unsatisfied with the results (having not known what they were doing) and then blame me.
Indeed, I'm creating galleries with only a single crop. One gallery for 8x10 crops and one for 5x7 crops. Those galleries only have those sizes available for purchase. That's a start, but it still allows customers to crop those images smaller, causing an unintended blow-up of a section of the image.
Bottom line - I'd like this functionality optional for professionals. I don't need it to be granular at the photo or even gallery level. A simple, single switch to turn it off for my whole site is more than sufficient.
As a photographer, I crop and color balance every shot the way I intend it. That's what's for sale. Allowing customers to change the color presents a number of issues, none of which are pleasant:
1. They will be buying something other than what I created. This, in itself, is enough.
2. They might completely destroy the color and then show the image to someone else who will (rightly) question my ability as a photographer.
3. They are, legally, creating a derivative work. As copyright holder of my photo, this is both not what I intended nor what I wish to allow. By providing the ability to create this derivative work, I am giving de facto permission for anyone to do so. That's bad. Very bad.
4. It creates confusion among my customers, most of whom are very technically-challenged. They might make a change, be unsatisfied with the results (having not known what they were doing) and then blame me.
Indeed, I'm creating galleries with only a single crop. One gallery for 8x10 crops and one for 5x7 crops. Those galleries only have those sizes available for purchase. That's a start, but it still allows customers to crop those images smaller, causing an unintended blow-up of a section of the image.
Bottom line - I'd like this functionality optional for professionals. I don't need it to be granular at the photo or even gallery level. A simple, single switch to turn it off for my whole site is more than sufficient.
Photography: http://www.AmblerPhoto.com
Cheerleading: http://www.CheerPhoto.com
Blog: http://cambler.livejournal.com
Cheerleading: http://www.CheerPhoto.com
Blog: http://cambler.livejournal.com
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onethumb?
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Thanks for bringing this one up guys,
~dp
Ouch, you really know how to hurt a guy... :hang The support staff is running down the halls threatening to light their clothes on fire.
It sounds like you really know what you're doing and have your galleries set up perfectly, but Andy will remember the horrors of having the customer not being able to adjust cropping, when almost 2% of prints were returned for missing body parts.
It wasn't so much a problem with consumers because they don't get very close to their subjects and their cameras have 4:3 ratio images, but it was murder for pro galleries because people tended to order 8x10s from 4x6-ratio images that were shot up close and personal.
One of the things we'd have to think through is how to empower you without having too many pros jump at this. Maybe we'd have to label the option danger, danger, abandon hope all ye who enter in or something.
Well do I remember that Hell hath no fury like a bride who's veil was chopped off.
And if your customers can order gifts, which have all kinds of wacky ratios, it's the nightmare scenario unless the consumer can crop.
Color is another issue because we see so many pros who just nail the colors and don't need the customer to be confused with extra choices. We're working on simplifying the color thing greatly.
All the best,
Baldy
Problem #1: Almost every single Pro using smugmug has their photos poorly color calibrated. I hate to be so blunt, but it's the truth. 99% of photo problems we see are a direct result of bad color process prior to uploading to smugmug. Gorgeous photos - poor Photoshop skills. Who gets the blame? smugmug, every time. I don't know what it is, but people just assume the printer is the problem.
After having a bad order or two, they quickly get religion and start correcting their photos properly. Everything is great at that point, and an option to disable color correction would make a lot of sense. Problem is, how do we tell which Pros are properly color correcting their shots, and which aren't?
Problem #2: You cannot properly crop an image for all (or even most!) standard print sizes, let alone the wide range we have. So if we remove the ability to crop, that means we have to do one of two things: auto-crop for them (and believe me, a computer is much worse at "guessing" where to crop than a human), or fit it to the paper and leave white borders on the long sides.
Of course, this all comes back to smugmug being Easy. The shopping cart has to be drop-dead simple to use and yet, at the same time, produce very few bad orders. This is more our problem than yours, but if removing features causes customer complaints to go through the roof, we can't do it. When they order expensive, Pro-priced prints which have poor color adjustment, and there's no option for them to choose to adjust at printing time, we have a big problem. We'd *love* to make the shopping cart have less options, because that enhances the Easy factor, but we just don't see how we can keep customer satisfaction high without it.
Can't wait to hear your feedback!
Don
99.9% of my customers wouldn't realize they could change the cropping because with 8x10 as the product and the same ratio on the image, they won't see crop marks on the image in the ordering screen.
It's the color that hurts - they way it's presented, it's like they have three options, any one of which is fine based on their tastes, which we know isn't the case.
I'd really like to just disable that screen alltogether, and have it never show up. Indeed, I'm converting my workflow from Adobe1998 to sRGB specifically to ensure that what I upload is what gets printed and delivered.
Don't get me wrong, though. I love you guys
I honestly think the solution is to enable it all by default, but let the options be turned off for PRO users only, after a screen being VERY clear on what they're doing.
Heck, I'd even agree to an option that lets it be turned off only after a pro orders a sample print and clicks a box saying, "I got my sample, the colors are right, and I won't complain, I promise!"
Cropping is clear when you order, right? So if a pro turns it off and doesn't bother to check their ordering flow, they should be smacked around. Again, make a "click to agree" that says, "I know that I'm now 100% responsible for ensuring that my crops are appropriate to the products I'm offering. I realize that if I upload an 8x10 ratio image, but allow 5x7 purchases, I'm hosed. I promise I won't do that."
Make sense?
Cheerleading: http://www.CheerPhoto.com
Blog: http://cambler.livejournal.com
So, to give you a little insight into what's going on with the cart adjustment right now, here's what we currently have in testing. This certainly isn't final, and we may scrap the whole thing. Additionally, we don't have a release timeframe yet. This is all purely us playing with making things better.
- No 2nd page at all. No three thumbnails, etc.
- Instead, on the first page, you'd be able to select "True Color" or "Auto Color" on a per-print basis from a dropdown. No preview, etc.
- Additionally, there's now a "fit" option to remove cropping (and add white borders, as necessary, to fit paper sizes), and the adjust crop button is there on the first page next to each photo.
In a perfect world, we could make the dropdown for color adjustment disappear for Pros who wish to disable it. However, this again returns to my earlier question - how do we tell which Pros are properly adjusting their photos, and which aren't? Again, shocking as that number may sound, 99% of our print returns are from improperly adjusted color correction. Not resolution, not JPEG artifacts, not cropping, but color correction.
Ideas?
Don
As for the cropping issue, It seems that a compromise of sorts would work well here. If the client had the ability to shift the crop left-to-right in a landscape photo, but not adjust the size of a crop, then they would be able to avoid chopping the veil off the bride, and the photog would know that his photo was not being abused.
-winn
Absolutely agreed about that. Simple, simple, simple. I can certainly see your dilema about photos being uploaded with poor color to begin with.
1) Is the color problem usually a problem of the images being in the wrong color space (i.e. not sRGB)? Or is it a different problem entirely? If its people uploading in the wrong color space, send a warning back to the user.
2) Given the large variety of print sizes offered, are there any sizes that are simply rarely ordered? Could things be simplifed any by removing choices that are rarely purchased?
3) What if the cropping tool available to the customer ONLY allowed the customer to decrease one dimension, rather than crop out of the middle? Do you get what I'm getting at, and why it would be a good idea?
4) Lastly, this would be a simplifier except for the pricing delima. For prints, have the customer choose a size, then later choose a paper type. Would make the pull-down list shorter. However, since luster paper is more expensive than glossy and matte I don't see how to make this work.
I think the ordering process has been made MUCH better over the last year. It could still use some improving, but these things are evolutionary after all.
A former sports shooter
Follow me at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bjurasz/
My Etsy store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/mercphoto?ref=hdr_shop_menu
Wish it were that simple, but consumers blame the printer (us) 100% of the time. Not just some of the time - ALL of the time.
Which means there's no real way for the photographer to learn that his color process sucks.
Don
But, and this is a big BUT, the prints will look horrible on a windows machine since windows is not a color corrected environment on its own. So, IE, Firefox, etc... do not display AdobeRGB or AppleRGB properly. This means that your clients will think the prints look terrible on the web page.
Is this correct, Baldy or OneThumb? I think this is a great idea. I would love to see the drop down lists simplified. It would be pretty easy to implement a price range if the photographer chooses to charge more for lustre:
4x6 $8.00 to $9.00
5x7 $12.00 to $13.00
8x10 $20.00
-Winn
The color issues are almost always about skin tone — fair-skinned caucasians too red when shot with Canon cameras and built-in flashes, too blue when shot in the shade, too orange when shot indoors under artificial light, too saturated when adjusted in Photoshop.
We have some good help sections coming out about all these scenarios under the heading "Lessons from a million prints." Far as I can tell, they're not talked about much in books, if at all.
I agree that if 99% of the photographers are uploading things that print for crap because of color issues, that creates a problem. But consider, if most customers don't color correct anyway, they're still going to look bad, right?
My recommendation stands - make it an option to disable it only for pros, and make that disabling subject to a checkbox that says, in essence, "I understand that I'm 100% responsible for color, and here's the list of things that I might be doing wrong and not even know. Further, I agree that it is Smugmug's recommendation that I order a sample print before I disable this option to ensure that my colors are correct. I agree to be the subject of ridicule and public debasement if I screw up. I've eaten my veggies, too."
I want to make it as seamless and easy as I can for my customers. To do that, I'll take the extra work (and the heat if I screw up).
---
On the crop issue, I like your proposals. I'm going to continue to do what I do, though, and have separate 8x10 and 5x7 galleries, with the occasional "different sizes" gallery, and make it such that each image has one and only one product priced and enabled. The ability to disable products that one does not want to sell was in the top-three features that made me pop the $99 without blinking. Again, more work for me, but better overall.
My customers are "Cheer moms." That is, I've recently started photographing cheerleading competitions (it's great - my daughter took up the sport, and the first thing the owner of the gym said to me was, "Oh, you're a photographer, will you shoot our competitions?"). Parents want pictures of their kids, and they honestly don't care of they're slightly blurry or grainy, because that's what they've come to expect from the "sports photography" mills. I want to provide a better product. I take the shots and take the time to correct levels, adjust for drift, crop and resize for the most compelling shot, and the parents have said so. But what they've also said is that even the click-and-buy event photography sites are too complicated for them.
That's my challenge to overcome, and hence my wanting to eliminate as much cruft for the customer as I possibly can. At the end of the day, they'll gladly pay a few bucks extra for a shot that's obviously better than the churn that the event companies put out.
This rambling missive just so that you've got a picture of my motivation here
Cheerleading: http://www.CheerPhoto.com
Blog: http://cambler.livejournal.com
In practice, much to our chagrin
That's why I'm writing a series of lessons from a million prints. What we all see from the popular authors and best-selling books really doesn't line up with why consumers return prints.
Another example is sharpening. We all know oversharpening is nasty and creates halos, etc. Far as I know, we've never seen a returned print from oversharpening. But consumers will send back what I think are gorgeous prints that they bought from pros with the comment that we need to buy better printers because ours produce fuzzy prints. Walgreen's are much sharper.
When I sharpen them and replace their order, they smile while the pro curls in the fetal position.
Hey, I just work here.
My 2c:
This is probably true. I swear color correction is almost a black art. I think the correction facilities should be on by default but if the professional wants it off he must agree to eat the cost of replacement prints + handling if the problem was caused by color calibration issues. I know this is tougher than it sounds but its an idea. When you hit them in the pocket book, it doesn't take long to take corrective action, as you have done for the site.
I very much do not want auto-cropping or white borders, at least for pro accounts. Perhaps when the photo is uploaded, the UI can present the photographer with the choice of either (1) Restrict the print sizes to what can be printed at that size or (2) Choose the cropping ahead of time for all print sizes. If the photographer doesn't specify, they will be auto-cropped.
Let me see if I can quickly nip this one in the bud. Completely regardless of your monitor or printing process, wider gamut DOES NOT equal better color.
All JPEGs have 24bit color (8 bits per color * RGB), and thus, have 16.7M colors available to them.
A wider gamut doesn't mean more colors. Instead, it means bigger gaps between each color. A simple example would be a field of green grass. If all you have is green grass, you might want a very narrow gamut colorspace which focuses on green so that you have use almost all those 16.7M colors in the green space, theoretically. On the other hand, a very wide color space will mean you have less shades of green to work with because it's "spending" those colors in other places, resulting in less precision in the given colors.
sRGB appears to much more closely map to colors found in nature and colors the human eye considers important: skin tones, blue skies, green grass. It doesn't have a few rare colors (the cyan of HP's old logo is often used as an example) which really don't occur in nature.
Regardless of which color space you choose to work in, just remember that wider gamut != better.
Don
This is something you can do right now, today, on smugmug using the propricing tools.
You can custom create a 4x6 and and 8x10 and lock them so the buyer can only buy 4x6 and 8x10 of each one.
Don
Alas, this isn't true, either. It's true for 95% of machines, but Macs actually have their default gamma set to a different setting than the rest of the world.
There's no way to have it both ways, though.
If you're a Mac photographer, set your display settings to match a PCs.
Then, do like Windows users in-the-know do:
- Calibrate your monitor to a good approximation of the test prints. Remember, it'll never look exact for a lot of reasons (reflected vs transmitted light, etc).
- Save another copy of you Original with *NO* ICC profile.
- Edit to your hearts content on this non-color managed profile.
- Double-check all your skin-tone values prior to saving your final revision. See smugmug's help section for color guidance.
- Don't save at Photoshop 12 - it's overkill. Use 9 or 10.
- Upload to smugmug.
- Enjoy pristine, gorgeous prints!
Don
No?
Cheerleading: http://www.CheerPhoto.com
Blog: http://cambler.livejournal.com
Cheerleading: http://www.CheerPhoto.com
Blog: http://cambler.livejournal.com
Just about everything on earth, web browsers and Photoshop included, default to sRGB in the absense of a colorspace.
By saving it without an ICC profile, you're ensuring you don't make a mistake with your profile, and you're not leaning on it for color support.
Don
Gawd this is why I HATE WINDOWS! Andy, please don't sell your Mac!
A former sports shooter
Follow me at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bjurasz/
My Etsy store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/mercphoto?ref=hdr_shop_menu
No, at least, not in my testing. The gamma difference still causes photos to look different between the Mac and Windows.
Since 95% of the population uses Windows, I'd use that as your baseline.
Don
Safari automatically respects the profiles if you have ColorSync set up, but there's a dark side: if the image doesn't have a profile, it assumes you want to use the monitor profile, whatever that is, instead of sRGB. I can only believe that's a mistake. Most Mac monitor profiles have a gamma of 1.8 selected, not the 2.2 of sRGB.
99.9% of images on the web don't have profiles so Safari displays them all incorrectly unless you choose sRGB for your monitor profile, which is not the way your Mac was shipped.
Firebird and Mozilla do not respect color profiles and assume sRGB. There's a note about plans to on Mozilla's site that was last updated in 1998...
Probably it died because companies like CNN and smugmug can't be persuaded to keep the profiles in small images because they're too big and would make their sites appear to be slow.
With Windows it's simple: just upload an sRGB file and everyone sees it as sRGB. How they have their monitors adjusted is another story, but that's true whether they respect ICC profiles or not.
http://photos.mikelanestudios.com/
However, if you re-dowload it and print to something like a high-end inkjet, it might use it.
Your call.