Facebook image changes (August 2011)

Yesterday, Facebook announced changes to their photo handling.  You can read the brief article here.

Essentially, they announced that their photo viewer can now display photos up to 960 pixels, rather than the previous limit of 720 pixels.  Also, the photo viewer interface now has a white background, instead of the black one (which I rather liked, personally).

One particular sentence in the article seemed to cause alarm among photographers - "Photos you've already uploaded to your profile will also be displayed at this higher resolution."  Some of us were worried that this meant they'd be stretching our old 720 images.  I'm happy to assure you that this is not the case.  I assume (and I wish they'd clarified) that it only applies to images that had been uploaded in high resolution ... and I don't know any photographers who are doing that, for obvious image protection reasons.

The other interesting phrase was "and load twice as fast" ... what does this mean, we wondered?  How will they make larger files load faster?  More about this shortly.

Let's discuss the size thing first.  Yes, you can now upload images up to 960x960px, and they will be displayed that big in the photo viewer.

Or will they?  Not necessarily.

Photoshop vignette methods

Vignettes can add a touch of emphasis and "punch" to a photo if used well. In this tutorial, I'll discuss a few simple vignette methods in Photoshop and Elements.

Before I get into the nuts and bolts, I want to start with a couple of important points:

• Be gentle. To my mind, a vignette shouldn't be a prominent feature of a photo - in fact, the casual observer shouldn't be consciously aware that a vignette has been added at all. Its purpose is to subtly draw the viewer's eye to the important features of the photograph.
  
  I think the majority of established photographers would admit, if pressed, that they went through a strong vignette phase which they now regret. It might have been trendy at one stage, and who knows? - it might come back. But right now, I think less is more.
  
  (Disclaimer: I'll be applying stronger-than-usual vignettes in this tutorial, for the sake of emphasis.)
  
  
• Always keep it on its own layer. I know I bang on about layers a lot, and I know that not everyone saves their layered files as fastidiously as I do. But vignettes are awfully dependent on the chosen output size - if you apply your neat vignette to a 2:3 full frame image, then your client orders a 4:5 print (eg 8x10), your vignette might end up looking unbalanced. In that case, you need to be able to modify the vignette layer to suit the new crop.
  
  Plus, of course, you can easily reduce the strength of the vignette layer at a later date, if you find you were a bit too enthusiastic :)

Raw Defaults

Everywhere I turn lately, I seem to be running into this nonsense about "zeroing out the settings" in ACR and LR.

It's completely silly. All you achieve by setting everything to zero is to make your photos look utterly awful. (The benefit, I suppose, is that when you've finished your editing, it looks as though you've made AMAZING improvements.)

Defaults are just defaults. They're a starting point. The truth is, no matter where the sliders are when you start, you still have to move them on a photo-by-photo basis, to get the best results every time.

If, for example, you go to the trouble of changing the default setting for the Brightness slider from 50 (Adobe's default) down to 0, then habitually find yourself moving that slider up to about the 40-60 range every time, then you've wasted your time, haven't you? Wasted it in changing the default in the first place, and wasted it making those big adjustments on each photo.

The truth is, Adobe aren't silly. They've given us pretty darn good defaults. But if you're not happy with them, set your own. Maybe your camera's images look better with the Contrast slider at 10, not 25. Maybe you're a habitual overexposer, so your Exposure slider should start at -0.20. Etc, etc.

But don't zero.

Initial review: X-Rite i1Display Pro monitor calibration device

***IMPORTANT UPDATE :: November 2011 ***
The new version of the software has been released, and it is EXCELLENT.  It addressed all the concerns I outlined in this article.  I have no more hesitation about recommending the i1 Display Pro.  If you're in the market for a good calibrator, this is the one.

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It is with great disappointment that I'm writing this post tonight.  I've been tremendously excited about the arrival of my new i1Display Pro (who doesn't love a new gadget?), but I'm sorry to say it has fallen well short of my expectations.

I've been a happy i1Display2 user for a long time, but I jumped on the upgrade as soon as it was available, because it claims to be the "Next generation i1Profiler software for calibrating and profiling all modern display and projector technologies including LED & Wide Gamut LCDs".

It has been claimed for some time that the i1D2 wasn't well-suited to wide-gamut and/or LED screens.  I can't say those factors were troubling me too much.  I've calibrated plenty of both, with perfectly adequate results.  Yes, it's a bit fiddly with wide-gamut screens if you are using RGB controls, but it's ok with Presets.  And LED?  No problems that I'd observed.

What I'm trying to say, in a clumsy way, is that I didn't really need to upgrade.  But the nerd in me is insatiable, and I knew that before long, lots of people would be asking my opinion about buying the new device.

Here's my opinion - DON'T.  Not yet, anyway.

Buying a wide-gamut screen

You might be considering a wide-gamut option for your next monitor purchase.  There are more and more of them around, at better and better prices.

While it's wonderful to be able to display most of the Adobe RGB colour space (ie more than sRGB), there are three small factors you need to be aware of:

1. You need a calibration device which can handle wide-gamut.  When you're budgeting for your monitor purchase, check to see if your current calibrator is wide-gamut-capable.  If it isn't, you'll need to find some room in your budget for a new device.

2. Once you have a wide-gamut screen, EVERYTHING needs to be colour-managed, because no colours will look right in non-colour-managed apps.  If you're not already a Firefox or Safari web browser, you'll need to make the switch.

3. A wide-gamut screen is capable of showing much more vivid colour than your lab can possibly print.  So you'll need to include soft-proofing in your workflow at times when you have bright colours (clothing/flowers/etc) in your images.

None of these things are big "problems", per se.  I'm certainly not discouraging you from buying wide-gamut.  They're just considerations, that's all.